The Telegraph
The Telegraph, colloquially known as the Torygraph, is a rightwing broadsheet. It is read by, in the words of Hacker, people who believe the country is already run by another country. It used to be the Soviet Union. Now it's "Europe", which to their minds is a monolithic, malevolent entity with tentacles.
History[edit | edit source]
The Daily Telegraph and Courier was founded by Colonel Arthur B Sleigh in June 1855 to print a wanky piece about how he didn't like the Duke of Cambridge. The owner of The Times, Joseph Moses Levy, agreed to print the 4 page rant. The paper cost 2d and it was not a success; in fact, Sleigh couldn't afford to pay the printing bill and so instead gave the company to Levy.
Levy appointed his son to run the paper and relaunched The Telegraph with the slogan "the largest, best, and cheapest newspaper in the world".
First and Second World War[edit | edit source]
In 1908 The Telegraph did a piece with the controversial figure of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. In it, the Kaiser bitched about the English a lot and it did huge damage to Anglo-German relations (which, lets be honest, we pretty fucked at the time anyway).
In 1937 The Telegraph took over The Morning Post which was a traditionally conservative paper. Although the plan was initially to run the two papers together as sister papers, sales were so poor that the papers were merged together. As such, the new title of the paper for a while became The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post and eventually changed to just The Daily Telegraph when it became obvious that the former title was too long and ridiculous. In the 1930s the diplomatic editor of the paper published lots of stuff that came from leaks from the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office and as such members of staff of The Telegraph were monitored by MI5.
Due to bombing raids by the Luftwaffe during the second world war, the paper moved printing further north to Manchester in November 1940. During the war, the telegraph also helped to recruit code-breakers for Bletchly Park - being able to solve a Telegraph crossword in under 12 minutes was considered a valid recruitment test and so the paper was asked to organise a competition. The winner, F H W Hawes of Dagenham, who finished the crossword in under 8 minutes, and anyone who completed the competition were all asked to help join up as code-breakers.
1980's[edit | edit source]
In 1986 the paper was bought by Conrad Black, a Canadian businessman, and was made part of the 'Telegraph Group'. Through various other companies and stock holding options and all those other sorts of wonderful capitalist inventions, the Group also ended up owning other papers such as The Spectator.
00's[edit | edit source]
In 2004 Conrad Black was dismissed as chairman of the group in charge of part-major owning the parent company group of the owner of-
Anyway, he was dismissed from his job in charge of the paper over allegations of financial wrongdoing and the company also sued him. Black wanted to sell his shares in the company to the Barclay Brothers but various groups within groups didn't want it to happen and eventually it had to all be sorted out in court with claim and counter claim. Eventually it was decided that Black couldn't sell his shares until investigations were over, so the Barclay Brothers put in another bid with the company - this time just for The Telegraph and it's Sunday edition rather than the shares.
The brothers got into a bidding war with Richard Desmond, the then owner of The Express. Desmond even went so far as to sell his shares in a number of pornographic enterprises to raise enough money. However, he gave up on the bid when the price his £600,000,000 in March 2004. The company which owned The Daily Mail also gave up a short while later, basically handing the company to the Barclay Brothers.
The Barclay Years[edit | edit source]
The final price the Barclays paid was about £665,000,000 inlate June 2004. In an interview with The Guardian, one of the brothers suggested that they might move the paper away from supporting unconditionally:
"Where the government are right we shall support them"
Despite this, they still backed the Tories in the 2005 general election.
In 2009 The Telegraph was responsible for unveiling the Expenses Scandal, which was a fairly big deal and resulted in a lot of people resigning and/or being kicked out of parliament.
Despite wishing to be a "quality" newspaper, it is not actually necessary to be a journalist or have journalism experience to write for the paper. In June 2014 they paper advertised for a "Head of Interactive Journalism". The job description stated that candidates should "have demonstrable interest in news and journalism (previous newsroom experience is not needed however)".
In the same year the paper came under file from basically everyone for being close to Vladimir Putin and being pro-Kremlin. The paper is allegedly paid £900,000 a year to include a supplement called "Russia Beyond the Headlines", a publication sponsored by the Russian government official newspaper. It allegedly has a similar deal, worth about £750,000, with the Chinese government.
Sister Publications[edit | edit source]
The Sunday Telegraph[edit | edit source]
The Sunday edition of the paper was founded in 1961.
The Young Telegraph[edit | edit source]
This was a weekly section published from 1990 as a 14-page supplement in the paper at the weekend aimed at young people. It featured a mixture of news, features, cartoon strips and product reviews aimed at 8–12-year-olds. It also ran original serialised stories featuring popular brands such as Young Indiana Jones and Maid Marian and Her Merry Men[1]. In 1995, an interactive spin-off called Electronic Young Telegraph was launched on floppy disk. Described as "an interactive computer magazine for children", Electronic Young Telegraph included original content including interactive quizzes, informative features and computer games, as well as entertainment news and reviews. In 1998 it was relaunched on CD to keep up with the times and was re-branded as T:Drive in 1999.
Website[edit | edit source]
Launched on 15 November 1994, the paper also has a website. In 2008 it was the most popular news site, falling to second behind The Guardian in 2009. By December 2010 The Telegraph averages 1.7 million daily hits on it's website, third behind The Guardian at 2.3 million and the nearly 3 million hits a day for The Daily Mail.
In November 2012 the paper launched a subscription service for international readers - 20 articles free each month then nothing unless you pay up. In March 2013 the system was rolled out for people in the UK too.
Scandals[edit | edit source]
It was basically the reason for the expenses scandal.
Other than that, just like any British newspaper, it fucks up from time to time. From being friendly with the Germans in the lead up to the First World War to cozying up the Russia and China, the people in charge of The Telegraph seem to have a great knack for picking the worst possible friends.
In December 2010 reporters posing as constituents filmed then Business Secretary Vince Cable saying that he had "declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we are going to win". This was at the time that Vince was in charge of overseeing Rupert Murdoch's bid to take over BSkyB so the comments were a little bit unhelpful. The "best bits" were chosen and Vince's comments were not used. Unhappy that the line was left out, the reporters leaked the transcript of the tape to Robert Peston who published the comments in full. In May 2011 the Press Complaints Commission upheld a complaint against the paper for the way in which is obtained the information.
In February 2015 the paper's chief political commentator Peter Oborne resigned over the paper's refusal to cover the HSBC scandal properly like all the other media outlets at the time were doing. He claimed that the paper was more concerned with raising advertising money than actually doing its job and resigned in disgust. Even people who don't really like The Telegraph liked Oborne for that.
In 2017, on the day that Article 50 was triggered the paper announced that they had hired Andy Coulson's PR firm to do their PR, with an emphasis on making the paper seem more truthful and authoritative[2].
Politics[edit | edit source]
It's called "The Torygraph" for a reason. Even when it came to Tories vs New Labout in the late 90s'/all of the 00's, the paper was still firmly on the side of the Conservative Party.
As expected, it doesn't much like the Scottish National Party and backed the "No" campaign in the referendum. Alex Salmond branded the paper "extreme" for its views on Scotland and tried to stir up support for independence by bashing the paper. The strategy didn't work.
It was also responsible for forcibly outing DLaws, because he was fiddling his expenses in order to hide his sexuality. Torygraph: not wild about gays.
The paper really doesn't like Europe.
Importance in Fandom[edit | edit source]
It has quite a few political cartoonists, but the most amusing is Matt, who is more of a current affairs cartoonist, but enjoys some level of popularity in fandom for his tendency to dissolve into fic prompts.
