I know having a go at the Daily Mail is like shooting fish in a barrel, but its coverage of new parenting qualifications for pregnant teenagers and young parents has really irked me. Obviously the paper is up in arms, and obviously it cites "family campaigners" frothing about the accreditations encouraging underage sex but only directly quotes Norman Wells, who can be relied on for just such a quote.
What really annoys me though is the online version of the story which has shoe-horned three mentions of Vicky Pollard and a picture into the coverage, thus perpetuating the idea that young parents are feckless, illiterate scroungers. None of this is in the paper so I'm not sure what's going on but I suspect the Mail is after valuable search engine traffic - many more people search for "Vicky Pollard" on Google than search for "young parent" or "teenage mum".
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