The Sun
"xenophobic, bloody-minded, ruthless, often reckless, black-humoured and ultimately triumphalist."~ Roy Greenslade, assistant editor of The Sun
The Sun is a tabloid newspaper in the UK owned by Rupert Murdoch. It was founded in 1964 and taken over by Murdoch in 1969. It likes to think it's incredibly important and serious but its history would suggest otherwise.
History[edit | edit source]
Before Murdoch[edit | edit source]
Surprising as it is now, there once was a time when The Sun wasn't owned by Rupert Murdoch. Originally, The Sun was created to replace another newspaper. It came into being in 1964. By 1969 the new paper was losing about £2,000,000 a year. The original owners were looking to sell up.
Book publisher and Labour MP Robert Maxwell, eager to buy a British newspaper, offered to take it off their hands and keep it backing the Labour Party, but admitted there would be redundancies, especially among the printers if he were to take over. Rupert Murdoch had bought the News of the World the previous year, but the presses in the basement of his building in London's Bouverie Street were unused six days a week and he was looking to expand. Murdoch agreed promised fewer redundancies if he acquired the newspaper in a deal he made with the print unions. He assured the original owners that he would publish a "straightforward, honest newspaper" which would continue to support Labour. Under pressure from the unions the original owners rejected Maxwell's offer and Murdoch bought the paper for £800,000.
The New Sun[edit | edit source]
Murdoch stopped printing in Manchester, where The Sun and the paper it replaced had originally been made, in 1969 which put the ageing Bouverie Street presses under extreme pressure as circulation grew. It also pissed off the unions but there wasn't a lot they could do since Murdoch now owned them.
Murdoch and his new editor Larry Lamb immediately set about rebranding the newspaper. They changed it from a middle-brow publication to a tabloid, copying The Mirror in style and even copying their logo. Both Lamb and Murdoch believed a paper's worth could be measured in sales and set about using whatever tactics were necessary to get the paper moving, an ethos which lives on in the paper today. A year after the paper's relaunch, the first Page 3 model appeared.
Throughout this early period The Sun still backed the Labour Party, although now without reservations. In 1974 it backed Ted Heath but said it could support Labour again, depending on the leader.
The Thatcher Years[edit | edit source]
All that changed in 1979 when the paper backed Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party in the general election. In 1981, Kelvin MacKenzie became the editor of The Sun. He committed to taking the newspaper in a new direction, making it "more outrageous, opinionated and irreverent than anything ever produced in Britain". The paper continued to back Thatcher throughout her time as Prime Minister despite how unpopular she became towards the end of her time in office. Initially the paper also backed John Major, believing him to be an arch-Thatcherite who would continue her wondrous work. They were bitterly disappointed.
Falklands[edit | edit source]
The Sun was a big supporter of the Falklands War and backed almost every move Thatcher made. This made them very unpopular with the people actually fighting the war, or who knew people fighting the war, but that didn't bother MacKenzie and his staff - there were plenty of other jingoistic readers out there.
During the Falklands conflict, The Sun did two major things to piss people off; firstly, it claimed to have 'sponsored' a British missile; secondly, it was incredibly gleeful about the sinking of the General Belgrano.
On 1 May 1982, The Sun ran a story under the title "Stick This Up Your Junta: A Sun missile for Galtieri’s gauchos". In the accompanying story, The Sun claimed to have "sponsored" a new bomb the armed forces were going to use to destroy the Argentine forces. This, as it turned out, was complete bollocks and most of the British members of the armed forces actually engaged in conflict found the whole thing incredibly distasteful and disrespectful. Copies of The Sun were burnt across the Falklands fighting zone. Despite this, the paper continued to run the story and followed it up later with confirmation by one of their reported in the field that the bomb had been used and had hit an enemy ship.
On 4 May 1982 The Sun ran a story commemorating the recent torpedoing of the Argentine ship the General Belgrano by running the story under the headline "GOTCHA". When the story first went to print, it was unclear just how many people had died during the operation. Between the first publication and the time to run the second, however, the scale of the loss of life was revealed. Despite Murdoch's protestations, MacKenzie changed the headline for the second print that day in an attempt to minimize and head off criticism aimed at the paper. Again, the members of the armed forces involved in the conflict were disgusted with The Sun and reports came in of crews throwing copies of the paper overboard.
The Sun was heavily criticised for it's jingoistic coverage by most of the other major newspaper. When Private Eye ran a satirical take on the newspaper's handling of the Falkland's conflict with the headline "KILL AN ARGIE, WIN A METRO!" MacKenzie's response was "Why didn't we think of that?"
Miner's Strike[edit | edit source]
To almost nobody's surprise, The Sun came out in favour of Thatcher and the police during the miner's strike.
At one point the paper wanted to put out a frontpage with the headline "Mine Führer" and a photograph of Arthur Scargill with his arm in the air, a pose which made him look as though he was possibly, vaguely, not really but it's The Sun so they didn't really give a damn giving a Nazi salute. The print unions refused to publish it.
Hillsborough[edit | edit source]
On 15 April 1989, Liverpool FC played Nottingham Forest at the FA Cup semi-final in Hillsborough. The Liverpool fans were allocated to the Leppings Lane stand, a stand which only had one exit and entry point and a second letting into another two standing-only stands which was usually locked off.
The match was a very heavily subscribed one and the police let through more people than the stand could handle, resulting in a large amount of overcrowding in the stand. There was a crush of people pushed up against the fence overlooking the field, yet still the police allowed more fans to enter the stand. People began climbing over the barrier in a bid to escape being crushed while others carried people on their shoulders to try and get more space. Shortly after kick off, a crush barrier broke and fans began to fall out on top of each other. The game was stopped after six minutes and fans began ripping up advertising hoardings to use as stretchers as emergency services were arriving. The crush resulted in the deaths of 96 fans and the injury of over 700 more.
On 19 April of the same year, just four days after the disaster, The Sun ran on its front page a story under the title "THE TRUTH". The story which followed laid the blame of the crush on the Liverpool fans themselves, citing interviews with unnamed policemen and a Conservative MP. The story contained such allegations as:
- The majority of the people killed were already drunk
- Fans picked the pockets of dying victims rather than getting help
- Fans urinated on policemen and the dead bodies
- Fans beat up policemen trying to help the dying victims
Subsequent investigations would prove all these allegations to be false. Regardless, at the time, the story caused huge shockwaves across the UK. Football fans - Liverpool fans, in particular - boycotted the newspaper, a practice which continues to this day in many parts of Liverpool. One documentary in 2011 followed a newsagent as he attempted to sell the paper at his corner shop. Not only could he not sell the papers, he could not even give them away for free, instead choosing to burn the papers to avoid the loss of further customers. A pressure group was set up, the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, which sought a national boycott of the paper, but despite a hit in sales, the paper continued to trade.
Additionally, "THE TRUTH" wasn't the intended headline for the piece - MacKenzie wanted to run the story under the title "YOU SCUM". It was only on the orders of Rupert Murdoch that the headline was changed. Later, when giving evidence to a Select Committee in 1993, MacKenzie apologised for the manner in which The Sun handled the story. He subsequently retracted the apology, stating the he was forced to say sorry by Rupert Murdoch but that he didn't believe it himself. "I was not sorry then and I'm not sorry now" he said and has since refused to apologise.
In 2004, The Sun apologised for its treatment of the Hillsborough disaster "without reservation".
Following a two year investigation into the Hillsborough disaster, the inquest concluded that the 96 were unlawfully killed. The families of a number of the 96 have since said that they wish to continue with criminal charges against those who unlawfully killed their family members. Current and former "journalists" at The Sun were doorstopped, including Kelvin MacKenzie who had a go at the journalists and told them to leave him alone. He did not seem to get the irony. Regardless, The Sun did not further apologise, stating that they had already done so in 2004 and so didn't need to do it again. The Sun was one of only two newspaper the day after the inquest to not carry the story on its front page. Although The Times later admitted it was a mistake and changed their front page online and in the evening edition, The Sun refused to do so, thinking that a story about David Cameron using WhatsApp was a far more important story.
1992 General Election[edit | edit source]
You imagine what it's like having your head stuck inside a f*****g light bulb!~ Neil Kinnock
The 1992 general election was not kind to Neil Kinnock, and The Sun was no exception to that. Despite the polls in the run up to the election being incredibly close between Labour and the Conservatives, The Sun continued to back John Major and his party. This left Kinnock with a dislike of Murdoch, MacKenzie and the paper for the rest of his life[1]. Following the Conservative win, The Sun put out a headline claiming that "It Was The Sun Wot Won It", "it" being the general election. The phrase "wot won it" has since entered the British lexicon, most commonly used as a piss-take.
New Labour[edit | edit source]
The Sun had published articles critical of the Labour Party in the run up to the 1997 general election but six weeks before polling day the paper changed its mind and decided to back the Labour Party for the first time in decades. It decided to back Tony Blair rather than the Labour Party, believing that Blair himself was alright but the rest of the party were still a bit leftie for The Sun's taste. Blair was pleased with the change, as he had been attempting to woo Rupert Murdoch for quite some time[2].
Despite this, the love between New Labour and The Sun didn't last long. In November 1998 Matthew Parris, a former reporter at The Sun, outed Peter Mandelson on Newsnight[3]. Massively misjudging public response, The Sun's editor David Yelland demanded to know in a front page editorial whether Britain was governed by a "gay mafia" of a "closed world of men with a mutual self-interest". Three days later the paper apologised in another editorial which said The Sun would never again reveal a person's sexuality unless it could be defended on the grounds of "overwhelming public interest". Unsurprisingly, this promise did not last.
Alastair Campbell accused the paper of racism after it criticised the government's policy on immigration but The Sun didn't care. It continued to publish dehumanising story after dehumanising story, at one point attacking immigrants for eating swans.
Although the paper and New Labour had their differences, The Sun continued to back the Labour Party as long as Tony Blair was leader.
The New Millennium[edit | edit source]
Rebekah Wade became editor of The Sun in 2003. She had previously lobbied her immediate predecessor in the role to stop publishing half-naked women on page 3 of the paper but to no avail. On Rebekah's first day, the paper published a topless model with the same name as her on page 3 just so she would know where she stood.
In 2003, the paper printed a sotry about former world heavyweight boxer Frank Bruno being admitted to hospital. The paper ran the story under the headline "Bonkers Bruno Locked Up", but changed the tone following backlash to the morning editions. Later versions of the paper read "Sad Bruno In Mental Home". In following years, the paper published other inflammatory stories about mental health, including a frontpage splash about 1,200 people killed by people with mental health difficulties.
Other notable stories include the time that the paper published a series of pictures taken from the royal family's personal video archive of the Queen as a young child giving a Nazi salute, criticising Gordon Brown for misspelling a dead soldier's name in a letter to the soldier's mother only for the paper to also misspell the dead soldier's name, and blaming the 2011 Norway attacks committed by Anders Breivik on al-Qaeda.
Political Affiliation[edit | edit source]
'It's The Sun Wot Won It'~ The Sun the morning after the 1992 general election
The Sun likes to back winners. As such, the paper's political affiliation changes frequently. The paper in general also sees no problem in backing an issue one week only to flip-flop and decry it the next. A big supporter of Thatcher during the miner's strike, the paper turned on Michael Hestletine when he wanted to continue the closure of the mines in the 1990s. The incredibly fast U-turn the paper did on Tony Blair and New Labour is another example of the paper's "pragmatic" approach to politics.
In 2009, The Sun switched from backing the Labour Party to supporting the Conservatives during the Labour Party Conference. That day, the leader of the Transport and General Workers' Union got a copy of the paper and sipped it up on stage during a speech declaring "In Liverpool we learnt a long time ago what to do".
Phone Hacking[edit | edit source]
Although News International had claimed that only The News of the World journalists had been involved in phone hacking, in November 2011 a reporter working for The Sun was arrested in relation to phone hacking related offenses. Up to January 2013, 11 current and former employees at the paper had been arrested, including The Sun's crime reporter.
Despite the arrests, no one at The Sun has been found guilty of phone hacking or phone hacking related offenses in a court of law.
The Sun on Sunday[edit | edit source]
The Sun's sister Sunday newspaper The News of the World closed on 10 July 2011. On 5 July 2011, sunonsunday.co.uk, thesunonsunday.co.uk and thesunonsunday.com were all registered by News International Limited. A subsequent paper, unsurprisingly called The Sun on Sunday was released.
Page 3[edit | edit source]
17 November 1970 The Sun published a picture of a topless woman - Stephanie Rahn - on page 3 of the paper. She was called "Birthday Suit Girl" to mark the first anniversary of the relaunched Sun. It took a while but eventually topless women posing on page 3 became a regular feature of the paper as the series of editors believed that sex sells and even if people didn't like the pictures they'd cause enough controversy that the paper would still get talked about.
There was an inevitable and sustained backlash against the page 3 practice. Long before the No More Page 3 campaign a Conservative council in Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire, banned the paper from its public library in the 1970s because of its excessive sexual content. This decision was reversed after a sustained campaign by the newspaper itself lasting 16 months, and the election of a Labour-led council in 1971.
Reports and senior members of staff continued to defend the publication of Page 3 for more than 40 years. In August 2013, The Irish Sun dropped the feature from its paper and there was much speculation in the press that The Sun would follow suit. It was widely reported that the 16 Janurary 2015 edition would be the last edition of the paper to include the feature, however, the page returned to its original format on 22 January that year, claiming the speculation had been just that and that continue to do as it pleased. Despite the assertion, the feature has not returned to the paper and has in effect been dropped.
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ and would put him at odds with future leaders of the Labour Party Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
- ↑ much to Kinnock's annoyance
- ↑ although technically Mandelson had already been outed some years before, no one had really paid that much attention
