It's Easter, the unofficial start to the dilettante's gardening season, and here's a free bag of compost to help you along.
Perhaps a bag of manure would have been more appropriate, for the Mail has been finding ordure everywhere this week.
A diligent series has uncovered how details of almost every aspect of our lives, including what should be confidential information about our finances, families and health, are sold for a few coppers and then used by cold-calling pests.
It's one thing for information supplied in questionnaires to be passed to the spammers and cold callers (two key lessons: never fill in marketing questionnaires and always untick the 'we may pass your details to carefully selected third parties' box), but we don't expect pharmacists and financial services to be trading in our personal information.
So while there was nothing very new in this week's series, well done to the Mail for hammering the message home.
Perhaps a bag of manure would have been more appropriate, for the Mail has been finding ordure everywhere this week.
A diligent series has uncovered how details of almost every aspect of our lives, including what should be confidential information about our finances, families and health, are sold for a few coppers and then used by cold-calling pests.
It's one thing for information supplied in questionnaires to be passed to the spammers and cold callers (two key lessons: never fill in marketing questionnaires and always untick the 'we may pass your details to carefully selected third parties' box), but we don't expect pharmacists and financial services to be trading in our personal information.
So while there was nothing very new in this week's series, well done to the Mail for hammering the message home.
But don't you wish sometimes that the paper could get out of the habit of finding demons and feckless ne'er-do-wells at every turn? Does it always have to play the misanthrope viewing the world through thorn-encrusted spectacles?
Does it have to spit out every message using the lexicon of disgust (the wordle above is a selection of this week's most popular headline words)?
Does it have to spit out every message using the lexicon of disgust (the wordle above is a selection of this week's most popular headline words)?
Take the death of Cynthia Lennon. Several papers chose to run a photograph of John and Cynthia on their front pages, most with the simple fact of her death in Majorca. But for the Mail, it had to be "Dead at 75, wife Lennon treated so cruelly". She doesn't even get a name. She's just a wife. And a victim.
Then there's the obsession with "the Left" - and specifically the Guardian. On Wednesday the Guardian splashed on Liberal Democrat proposals for the media, including the establishment of a "public interest" defence for journalists, along the lines of America's First Amendment - and plans to revisit Press regulation.
Clegg is quoted as saying that current laws are too opaque. "Exactly what is the strength and nature of a public interest defence? I would like to see that clarified in law...The fact that prosecutors are relying on 13th-century laws, that we don't have an up-to-date definition of what a public interest defence is, shows the need for a proper review and a proper reform of the law."
The Mail took exception to this idea, publishing a "thanks, but no thanks" leader the next day. The last thing any true freedom-lover wanted, it wrote, was "self-interested and often self-enriching MPs" deciding what was in the public interest.
Quite right. That should be for juries. Was that what Clegg really meant? It's what he said, but does he really want Parliament to define boundaries of public interest - or simply to create a public interest defence where none exists?
The Mail is in no doubt. It was Clegg's stitch-up, the leader continues, that "led to the disgraceful post-Leveson clampdown on newspapers".
And then, for good measure, the leader puts the boot into the Guardian for having the temerity to run the story.
Then there's the obsession with "the Left" - and specifically the Guardian. On Wednesday the Guardian splashed on Liberal Democrat proposals for the media, including the establishment of a "public interest" defence for journalists, along the lines of America's First Amendment - and plans to revisit Press regulation.
Clegg is quoted as saying that current laws are too opaque. "Exactly what is the strength and nature of a public interest defence? I would like to see that clarified in law...The fact that prosecutors are relying on 13th-century laws, that we don't have an up-to-date definition of what a public interest defence is, shows the need for a proper review and a proper reform of the law."
The Mail took exception to this idea, publishing a "thanks, but no thanks" leader the next day. The last thing any true freedom-lover wanted, it wrote, was "self-interested and often self-enriching MPs" deciding what was in the public interest.
Quite right. That should be for juries. Was that what Clegg really meant? It's what he said, but does he really want Parliament to define boundaries of public interest - or simply to create a public interest defence where none exists?
The Mail is in no doubt. It was Clegg's stitch-up, the leader continues, that "led to the disgraceful post-Leveson clampdown on newspapers".
And then, for good measure, the leader puts the boot into the Guardian for having the temerity to run the story.
How significant his latest idea was floated in the Guardian, whose ability to lose eye-watering sums of money is matched only by its almost psychotic hatred of the commercially viable Press
Psychotic Guardian or paranoid Mail?
Maybe, in a week of scandalous data sales and the start of the general election campaign proper, the most telling piece to be published in the Mail was a tiny story at the foot of page 9 on Tuesday:
Maybe, in a week of scandalous data sales and the start of the general election campaign proper, the most telling piece to be published in the Mail was a tiny story at the foot of page 9 on Tuesday:
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