The Only Paper in Britain Both Sides Are Cancelling
Here's a trick no newspaper wants to pull off: in the same week, The Telegraph is being boycotted by the right for being too woke and by the left for being too conservative. The Sunday Sport's spoof front page — vowing never to "go woke and pro-EU" and leaning on its topless-model tradition for the punchline — pulled 50.6K views on X in this week's capture, nearly double its 27.2K the day before (77 replies, 161 reposts, 2,595 likes). Meanwhile, on November 3, the other flank opened fire: "Boycott The Daily Mail. The Times & The Telegraph… Tory propaganda. Don't feed the beast" — 2,894 views and climbing. Two boycotts. One week. Opposite accusations.
So our reviewers did what almost nobody in either comment section did: they checked the scorecard. The Telegraph scores 10/100 — mildly woke on the Buy Woke Free index.
What Our Reviewers Actually Found
A 10/100 is not the profile of a newsroom captured by activist HR. It's a legacy paper with the standard corporate furniture and not much beyond it:
- A formal D&I program with seven identity-based employee networks — Out Loud, embRace, Women in Tech, Able, and others — listed on its corporate site.
- No ESG report.
- No Pride sponsorship.
- No HRC Corporate Equality Index score.
- No U.S. PAC giving and no CEO Action pledge.
Our review team's finding is blunt: the November 2026 cancel wave is about the paper's pro-EU editorial direction under new ownership (Axel Springer), not corporate DEI spending. You can hate that editorial line — plenty of readers on both flanks clearly do — but "politics I dislike" and "woke corporation" are two different charges, and only one of them shows up in the receipts.
The Other Flank: Daily Mail, 20/100
The left-side boycott card that went up November 3 doesn't stop at the Telegraph — it names The Daily Mail and The Times as "Tory propaganda" in the same breath. The Mail's own boycott card from the same wave sits at 4,266 views. Our reviewers scored the Mail 20/100 — mildly woke: it publishes sustainability reporting through parent DMGT and runs identity-based hiring programs — the Stephen Lawrence Programme reserves Daily Mail trainee scholarships for Black, Asian and minority-ethnic candidates. No Pride sponsorship, no CEI score, no U.S. PAC giving found.
In other words: the paper one side calls a sellout and the other calls propaganda is, by the criteria we actually score — ESG reporting, DEI programs, Pride sponsorship, CEI scores, political giving — a 20. The anger is real. The woke receipts are thin.
Viral Anger Is Not a Woke Score
This is the same pattern we flagged with Wetherspoons when its boycott card was doing the rounds at 21K views: a cancel wave aimed at a pub chain whose actual score is 20/100 — mildly woke. The receipts behind that number? An annual report with validated net-zero targets and internal network groups for LGBTQIA+, race and women — internal machinery, not Pride floats, not activism budgets, and no HRC CEI rating.
The lesson keeps repeating. Boycott waves on X are driven by whatever a brand did this week — an editorial line, an ad, a comment from an executive. Woke scores are driven by what a company does all year, every year: the ESG reports it publishes, the DEI programs it funds, the Pride sponsorships it buys, the CEI score it chases. Those are different measurements, and when they disagree, the year-round record is the one worth checking before you cancel.
The Bigger Fight: Does 'Go Woke, Go Broke' Even Work?
Worth naming the elephant in the lane: the biggest card in this whole ecosystem this week isn't a boycott at all — it's a critique of the thesis itself. "'Go woke, go broke' was always incorrect… most people don't make entertainment choices based on politics" pulled 55.7K views, with "Woke isn't even close to dead yet" close behind at 49.7K. The honest answer is the one the Telegraph crossfire demonstrates: viral anger is cheap, bipartisan, and routinely misses. The scorecard exists precisely because the slogan needs a fact-checker — a way to separate the companies that actually built DEI empires from the ones that simply made someone mad on the internet.
Compare That to the Real Thing
For contrast, look at what a genuinely high score looks like. Starbucks sits at 100/100 — extremely woke: perfect HRC Corporate Equality Index scores for 12 years running, dedicated DEI hiring programs, and left-leaning political contributions. When the "boycott is working" cards hit 15.4K views this week, there was at least a scorecard behind the anger. That's the difference between a boycott with receipts and a boycott with a mood.
Both of this week's UK press boycotts are moods. The scorecards — Telegraph 10, Mail 20 — say the fury is about politics, not corporate activism. Want the wider landscape? Browse our news and media brand scores.
Everyone Is Furious. Nobody Checked the Scorecard.
That's the punchline of the whole crossfire. Two boycott armies are marching on the same newsroom from opposite directions, each certain the paper betrayed their side — and the paper's actual woke score is 10/100. If "go woke, go broke" is going to mean anything, it has to be aimed at companies that actually went woke, measured by what they fund, sponsor, and report — not at whichever newspaper made your timeline mad on a Tuesday.
Before you cancel a brand, check its score. We've rated 2,400 of them — and the number is usually more interesting than the ratio.