This article concentrates on one piece of injustice that could so easily have been avoided. That could so easily have been made a little better, if not fixed, in the intervening years. Lies were printed as fact in a British newspaper, and that newspaper has still not made an unconditional apology for what it printed. Its editor of the time has never made an unconditional apology in all of that time.
The headlines and sub-headlines on the front page of The Sun newspaper on the Wednesday following the disaster were as follows:
“The Truth.
Some fans picked pockets of victims
Some fans urinated on the brave cops
Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.”
So just four days after their loved ones had died, four days after they had narrowly escaped death themselves, Liverpool supporters were confronted with those headlines. People actually believed those headlines. Those who were there did not believe the headlines of course, nor did those who knew people who had been there. Unfortunately though a lot of people did believe those headlines; people who were not Liverpool supporters, perhaps supporters of another team or people who did not follow football at all. The headlines sewed seeds in so many people’s minds that the 96 supporters died at the hands of their own kind. All lies, all proven to be lies, yet never put right by that publication.
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/521/billy-bragg-never-buy-the-sun/
http://www.billybragg.co.uk/sun.php
Written by Jim Boardman and submitted with Jim’s approval. (Original linkhttp://www.anfieldroad.com/dont-buy-the-sun/)
A surprising number of people seem unaware of the boycott of The Sun by supporters of Liverpool Football Club. Some don’t seem to know it is boycotted, others don’t know why. Some people rather disturbingly know why the boycott exists but still choose to buy it.
If you choose to continue to buy The Sun after reading this article, and the articles it links to, then you ought to stop calling yourself a Liverpool supporter. Collect any shirts or scarves you have, and hand them in to a charity shop. In fact you can’t really call yourself a football supporter. The lies printed in The Sun that you will read about below were aimed at Liverpool supporters, people from Liverpool, people from the North of England, football supporters of any club. If you fall into any of those categories you certainly shouldn’t be buying, reading, or visiting the website of that newspaper. If you are a decent human being you will be steering clear of it from now on, even if you’ve not done so before.
If you buy the paper regularly already, print off all of this information, and save your money tomorrow. Read these articles instead. If you still want to buy that paper the following day I would be surprised.
The boycott of The Sun goes back to April 1989, over 20 years ago. On April 15th 1989 a disaster took place which resulted in the deaths of ninety-six Liverpool supporters at Hillsborough, the home ground of Sheffield Wednesday, during an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Ninety-six people had their lives crushed out of them. Many more are said to have ended their own lives since as a consequence of that disaster. A lot of injustices came out of that disaster, far too many to list here. For more information visit the Hillsborough Justice Campaign website athttp://www.contrast.org/hillsborough and please try to support them.
This article concentrates on one piece of injustice that could so easily have been avoided. That could so easily have been made a little better, if not fixed, in the intervening years. Lies were printed as fact in a British newspaper, and that newspaper has still not made an unconditional apology for what it printed. Its editor of the time has never made an unconditional apology in all of that time.
The headlines and sub-headlines on the front page of The Sun newspaper on the Wednesday following the disaster were as follows:
“The Truth.
Some fans picked pockets of victims
Some fans urinated on the brave cops
Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.”
So just four days after their loved ones had died, four days after they had narrowly escaped death themselves, Liverpool supporters were confronted with those headlines. People actually believed those headlines. Those who were there did not believe the headlines of course, nor did those who knew people who had been there. Unfortunately though a lot of people did believe those headlines; people who were not Liverpool supporters, perhaps supporters of another team or people who did not follow football at all. The headlines sewed seeds in so many people’s minds that the 96 supporters died at the hands of their own kind. All lies, all proven to be lies, yet never put right by that publication.
For more on the media coverage, visithttp://www.contrast.org/hillsborough/history/media.shtm, Hillsborough Football Disaster: Context and Consequences, http://football.guardian.co.uk and Wikipedia .
The Wikipedia article says: “The story accompanying these headlines claimed that ‘drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims’ and ‘police officers, firemen and ambulance crew were punched, kicked and urinated upon’. A quote, attributed to an unnamed policeman, claimed that a dead girl had been abused and that Liverpool fans ‘were openly urinating on us and the bodies of the dead’.”
Read that last bit again, it really was printed in a national newspaper.
Liverpool legend and the manager of the club at the time Kenny Dalglish was greatly affected by the tragedy. He attended numerous funerals and visited people in hospital, some of whom were in comas; he spent time with those that had lost their loved ones. In his autobiography he talks about the Disaster and recalls the media coverage:
“The press coverage was difficult to comprehend, particularly the publication of pictures which added to people’s distress. There was one photograph of two girls right up against the Leppings Lane fence, their faces pressed into the wire. Nobody knows how they escaped. They used to come to Melwood every day, looking for autographs, and that photograph upset everyone there because we knew them. After seeing that I couldn’t look at the papers again.
When the Sun came out with the story about Liverpool fans being drunk and unruly, underneath a headline ‘The Truth,’ the reaction on Merseyside was one of complete outrage. Newsagents stopped stocking the Sun. People wouldn’t mention its name. They were burning copies of it. Anyone representing the Sun was abused. Sun reporters and photographers would lie, telling people they worked for the Liverpool Post and Echo. There was a lot of harassment of them because of what had been written. The Star had gone a bit strong as well but they apologised the next day. They knew the story had no foundation. Kelvin MacKenzie, the Sun’s editor, even called me up.
“How can we correct the situation?” he said.
“You know that big headline – ‘The Truth’?” I replied. “All you have to do is put ‘We lied’ in the same size. Then you might be all right.”
Mackenzie said: “I cannot do that.”
“Well,” I replied, “I cannot help you then.”
That was it. I put the phone down. Merseysiders were outraged by the Sun. A great many still are.
There is no excuse for buying or reading The Sun. None whatsoever. If you read that newspaper, or worse still you buy that newspaper, after reading this article and those other articles that are linked to, then you are not fit to call yourself a Red. If you support another team, you should still be able to see why that newspaper should be boycotted. No matter what competitions they are running. Regardless of any “exclusives” they claim to have, even if it is the only paper left in the shop. Saying you bought it to get some tokens to help your daughter’s school to buy a new computer is not going to get you off the hook. It’s really simple:
Don’t buy the Sun.
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/392/lies-damn-lies/
Article by John Pilger, and posted with his permission. (Original linkhttp://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/07/pilger-murdoch-sun-mackenzie)
Murdoch’s papers have relentlessly assaulted common truth and decency, but their most successful war has been on journalism itself
I met Eddie Spearritt in the Philharmonic pub, overlooking Liverpool. It was a few years after 96 Liverpool football fans had been crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, on 15 April 1989. Eddie’s son, Adam, aged 14, died in his arms. The “main reason for the disaster”, Lord Justice Taylor subsequently reported, was the “failure” of the police, who had herded fans into a lethal pen.
“As I lay in my hospital bed,” Eddie said, “the hospital staff kept the Sun away from me. It’s bad enough when you lose your 14-year-old son because you’re treating him to a football match. Nothing can be worse than that. But since then I’ve had to defend him against all the rubbish printed by the Sun about everyone there being a hooligan and drinking. There was no hooliganism. During 31 days of Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry, no blame was attributed because of alcohol. Adam never touched it in his life.”
Three days after the disaster, Kelvin MacKenzie, Rupert Murdoch’s “favourite editor”, sat down and designed the Sun front page, scribbling “THE TRUTH” in huge letters. Beneath it, he wrote three subsidiary headlines: “Some fans picked pockets of victims” . . . “Some fans urinated on the brave cops” . . . “Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life”. All of it was false; MacKenzie was banking on anti-Liverpool prejudice.
When sales of the Sun fell by almost 40 per cent on Merseyside, Murdoch ordered his favourite editor to feign penitence. BBC Radio 4 was chosen as his platform. The “sarf London” accent that was integral to MacKenzie’s fake persona as an “ordinary punter” was now a contrite, middle-class voice that fitted Radio 4. “I made a rather serious error,” said MacKenzie, who has since been back on Radio 4 in a very different mood,aggressively claiming that the Sun’s treatment of Hillsborough was merely a “vehicle for others”.
When we met, Eddie Spearritt mentioned MacKenzie and Murdoch with a dignified anger. So did Joan Traynor, who lost two sons, Christopher and Kevin, whose funeral was invaded by MacKenzie’s photographers even though Joan had asked for her family’s privacy to be respected. The picture of her sons’ coffins on the front page of a paper that had lied about the circumstances of their death so deeply upset her that for years she could barely speak about it.
Such relentless inhumanity forms the iceberg beneath the Guardian’s current exposé of Murdoch’s alleged payment of £1m hush money to those whose phones his News of the World reporters have criminally invaded. “A cultural Chernobyl,” is how the German investigative journalist Reiner Luyken, based in London, described Murdoch’s effect on British life. Of course, there is a colourful Fleet Street history of lies, damn lies, but no proprietor ever attained the infectious power of Murdoch’s putrescence. To public truth and decency and freedom, he is as the dunghill
is to the blowfly. The rich and famous can usually defend themselves with expensive libel actions; but most of Murdoch’s victims are people like the Hillsborough parents, who suffer without recourse.
The Murdoch “ethos” was demonstrated right from the beginning of his career, as Richard Neville has documented. In 1964, his Sydney tabloid, the Daily Mirror, published the diary of a 14-year-old schoolgirl under the headline, “WE HAVE SCHOOLGIRL’S ORGY DIARY”. A 13-year-old boy, who was identified, was expelled from the same school. Soon afterwards, he hanged himself from his mother’s clothesline. The “sex diary” was subsequently found to be fake. Soon after Murdoch bought the News of the World in 1971, a strikingly similar episode involving an adolescent diary led to the suicide of a 15-year-old girl. And Murdoch himself said, of the industrial killing of innocent men, women and children in Iraq: “There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now . . .”
His most successful war has been on journalism itself. A leading Murdoch retainer, Andrew Neil, the Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sunday Times, conducted one of his master’s most notorious smear campaigns against ITV (like the BBC, a “monopoly” standing in Murdoch’s way). In 1988, the ITV company Thames Television made Death on the Rock, an investigative documentary that lifted a veil on the British secret state under Margaret Thatcher, describing how an SAS team had murdered four unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar with their hands in the air.
The message was clear: Thatcher was willing to use death squads. The Sunday Times and the Sun, side by side in Murdoch’s razor-wired Wapping fortress, echoed Thatcher’s scurrilous attacks on Thames Television and subjected the principal witness to the murders, Carmen Proetta, to a torrent of lies and personal abuse. She later won £300,000 in libel damages, and a public inquiry vindicated the programme’s accuracy and integrity. This did not prevent Thames, an innovative broadcaster, from losing its licence.
Murdoch’s most obsequious supplicants are politicians, especially New Labour. Having ensured that Murdoch pays minimal tax, and having attended the farewell party of one editor of the Sun, Gordon Brown was recently in full fawn at the wedding of another editor of the same paper. Don Corleone expects nothing less.
The hypocrisy, however, is almost magical. In 1995, Murdoch flew Tony and Cherie Blair first-class to Hayman Island, Australia, where the aspiring war criminal spoke about “the need for a new moral purpose in politics”, which included the lifting of government regulations on the media. Murdoch shook his hand warmly. The next day the Sun commented: “Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life.”
The two are devout Christians, after all.
www.johnpilger.com
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/262/dont-buy-the-sun-and-the-reasons-why/
DON’T BUY THE SUN and the reasons why
Credit to Peter Etherington from OnTheKop (Original linkhttp://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=70519.0)
“Oh no, not this thorny old subject again” I hear you say. Surely it’s been done to death. Everybody knows about the Sun boycott and why we actually refuse to have anything to do with it. Or do they? Unfortunately more and more Liverpool fans are buying the Sun. It’s a hard thing for me personally, and I’m sure thousands of others, to accept but it is a fact. Who are these people breaking the boycott? Well, not to beat about the bush and also not wishing to upset anybody but they are, from what I’ve seen, mostly nouveau fans and OOT’s. I never have had and never will have any problem whatsoever with OOT’s, in fact I have been one of their most vigorous champions but I’m sorry, if you want to break a 16 year long boycott then I suggest you go elsewhere to watch your football. I have seen some Scousers with the Sun too and that is harder to take than nouveaus and OOT’s with it. My idea of dealing with is to burn any copy I see a Liverpool supporter holding. Unfortunately it wouldn’t go down too well to set anything alight in a football stadium or aeroplane so I go for the next best option and tell the people involved exactly what I think of them and their attitude. Do these people know about the boycott? Some of the “talk to them and educate them” brigade seem to think they don’t. Of the last four people I’ve had a go at after seeing them reading the rag I know for a fact that at least two of them did as their “explanation” for reading it was “It was the only British paper they had left.” Well I’d rather read the back of a cornflake packet in Turkish than have anything whatsoever to do with the Sun but the “explanation” intimates yes that they knew about the boycott and the reasons why but they were going to read it anyway. Why do they do this? Surely they know that by having anything to do with the Sun they are sullying the memories of 96 dead football fans, and our fans at that.YES, THAT’S WHAT THE SUN CALLED THE TRUTH! YES, THAT’S WHY I HATE THE SUN WITH A WILL AND A PASSION! YES, THAT’S WHY I’M SO PASSIONATE ABOUT THIS SUBJECT AND WHY I GIVE SHORT SHRIFT TO ANYBODY ASKING ME TO JUST TALK TO BOYCOTT BREAKERS IN A BID TO “EDUCATE” THEM! YES, THAT’S WHY I WILL NEVER TAKE ANY OTHER STANCE ON THE SUBJECT.NOBODY can come up with the ignorance excuse. Please, if you see any Liverpool supporter with a copy of the Sun rip it out of their hands and THEN explain why you’ve done it. If we all do our bit then the word will spread to such an extent that NOBODY will be able to claim ignorance and if they do then read the Sun it’s because they are ignorant (in a “couldn’t give a shit” way) bastards.DON’T BUY THE SUN!
What of the nouveaus, OOT’s and Scousers alike who are supposedly ignorant of the boycott and the reasons why? To me, that’s just a load of old bullshit. As far as I’m concerned there has been enough publicity about the boycott and the reasons why to make even the thickest of thickos aware of it no matter who they are, their age or their geographical location. People must surely be aware of it even if they’ve never attended a match. For those who have attended even one match they must surely have seen thousands of people wearing “Don’t Buy The Sun” stickers produced and distributed by the marvellous people at the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. Don’t they realise why those people are wearing those stickers? Don’t they realise why ordinary Liverpool fans, the HJC and the Hillsborough Family Support Group go to such lengths to urge people to boycott the Sun? Trevor Hicks and his successor as chairman of the HFSG, Phil Hammond, have always said they would never have anything to with the Sun, Mr. Hammond most notably making a positive statement about it during his speech at this year’s Anniversary Memorial Service. Mr. Hammond looked positively embarrassed to even be in the company of Graham Dudman on his much publicised, televised, trumpet blaring fanfare visit to Liverpool to try to get the HFSG to urge people to stop the boycott. Good on the people of the HFSG to come to the right decision, the only decision, and send Dudman on his way home sulking with his tail clamped firmly between his legs. As for the people at the HJC such as Gerry McIver, Sheila White, Ann Williams and Pete Carney and the families connected to the HJC they refused to even see Dudman. Good on them for that too. So if it’s good enough for the HFSG, the HJC and many thousands of ordinary Liverpool fans why is it not good enough for those who break the boycott?
Because of our success in winning the European Cup and the inestimably higher profile it brings the club we will be getting many thousands of nouveaus and a broadening of our fan base. It falls to us, the activists in this boycott, not to give them a chance of using the excuse of ignorance whether it’s true or not. We must hammer home the message that this boycott MUST continue to protect the memory of the 96 and the good name of our supporters accused so disgracefully by the Sun of robbing our own dead and urinating on and assaulting policemen trying to come to the aid of the injured and dying.
I love Liverpool Football Club. I love Liverpool Football Club supporters, their spirit and everything they stand for. I love the wit and the songs. I love the banners. That is why I get so upset at the Sun sullying our name. It’s like a family – if you harm my son you’ve got me to answer to. Liverpool supporters are my sons, brothers, sisters and grandchildren.
Please be pro-active, visit the HJC shop and get as many rolls of “DON’T BUY THE SUN” stickers you can get hold of. Pass a couple of quid or so to the fund for the stickers. Please then give these stickers to as many people as you possibly can at the first few matches, friendlies and League games, next season so that
Let’s not forget either that the boycott is not solely confined to Liverpool supporters. Even a lot of our fiercest rivals (and I mean Everton NOT Manchester United; Everton will always be our fiercest rivals) refuse to buy the Sun because of the lies they told about fellow Scousers, fellow football supporters. A lot of Manchester United fans I know also refuse to buy the Sun for the same reason that they sullied fellow football supporters. The boycott has even spread to Newcastle University where some Reds there were vociferous in their condemnation of the Sun. Good on those lads. Good to on Newcastle supporters I know who refuse to buy the Sun in support of us. Good to on Southampton supporters who asked me what my sticker was all about when I was in the pub near St. Mary’s after the game there this season and vowed never to buy the Sun again in support of us. The same also goes for Portsmouth supporters I’m friendly with. If we can get this kind of support from fans of other clubs why can’t we get it amongst SOME of our own. There is a saying that ignorance is bliss but in this case ignorance is a lie.
Remember that at the time of Hillsborough the people of Merseyside were hated by the government of the time and most of all by its leader, Margaret Thatcher. Remember that we got the tag of being a shower of lazy bastards by the Tory party’s very own Mr. Norman Tebbitt who told us that there were jobs out there, it was just that we were too lazy to go out and get one and we should just get on our bikes and look for work. Well Mr. Tebbitt, a lot of us couldn’t even afford a bike! Remember at the time of Hillsborough that we were slap bang in the middle of 18 years of Tory misrule. Perhaps that’s why the Sun thought they were justified in vilifying Scousers with their terrible lies. Perhaps they thought that as everybody hated Scousers anyway they could get away with their “THE TRUTH” front page lies. Perhaps they thought the government would back them. Remember this was a general attack against Scousers not just the people at Hillsborough. The Sun called us thieves, drunkards and hooligans. Remember about us – Scousers. They said it about you, me, your sister, your Granny, your Dad, your Mum and your mates. They said it about the woman next door and your 15 year old brother who hadn’t even been born then because they said it about US – Scousers, not just one particular set of people.
It matters not whether you’ve been going the match 50 years or 5 minutes – if you want to call yourself a Liverpool supporter
Tags: Don't Buy The Sun
Credit to Em5y from RAWK for this. Original link:http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=23802.0
An argument often put forward with regard to the S*n boycott is ‘the guilty people are no longer part of the paper – why still punish them?’. A lazy argument really – if this is the case, why dont the present incumbents swallow their pride and admit to their dirty history? But the S*n has a long history of kicking people when they are down.
‘the guilty people are no longer part of the paper – why still punish them?’
Be under NO illusions – The S*n is still up to it’s tricks – you never know when it will turn on you.
There are already 96 reasons you should never buy the rag – here are 20 more which show that they have not learnt their lesson. I have included the links from where I found these stories so you may read about the rag and its shameful past in more detail.
1). GOTCHA – The S*n and it’s reporting of the Falklands war.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/falklands/story/0,11707,657850,00.html
MacKenzie happily embraced the legend of “Gotcha”. Indeed, the day after the Belgrano’s sinking, the Sun’s front page, “ALIVE! Hundreds of Argies saved from Atlantic”, played down the fact that 368 men were killed. Later, comparing death to a game of football, MacKenzie produced the headline: “BRITAIN 6 (Georgia, two airstrips, three warplanes), ARGENTINA 0.”
By now, MacKenzie had opened a second front, seizing the chance to fight another war – for circulation – by attacking the Daily Mirror which, alone among the tabloids, adopted an anti-war stance. A Sun leader spoke of “the traitors in our midst”, such as “the timorous, whining Mirror” (and, incidentally, “the pygmy Guardian”). MacKenzie was making an overt attempt to win over the Mirror’s audience by appealing to their sense of patriotism. The Mirror hit back with an editorial headlined “The Harlot of Fleet Street”, which called the Sun “coarse and demented”, a paper which had “fallen from the gutter to the sewer”, and concluded: “The Sun today is to journalism what Dr Joseph Goebbels was to truth.”
Though Petrie later argued that the Sun had supplanted the Mirror as the paper beloved by soldiers and sailors, the paper’s official historian quoted a serviceman who said, “Your headlines often made us feel sick”, and that there were “ritual burnings of the Sun” on the task force vessels.
MacKenzie, convinced that he was properly articulating his readers’ views, was unconcerned. He even laughed off Private Eye’s spoof Sun headline, “KILL AN ARGIE AND WIN A METRO”, joking: “Why didn’t we think of that?”
2). Anything to stay popular…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/15/newsid_3068000/3068749.stm
Five years after its arrival on Fleet Street, the Sun was up for sale partly because of losses dating back to its predecessor, the Herald.
As a broadsheet, the paper was attracting a daily readership of one million.
There were two key players interested in buying: the millionaire Labour MP Robert Maxwell and the right-leaning Australian newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch, who already owned The News of the World.
Mr Murdoch clinched the deal and immediately relaunched the Sun as a tabloid – shortly followed by the introduction of the Page Three girls.
In 1978 The Sun overtook its closest rival The Mirror in the circulation war.
In 1986 Mr Murdoch introduced new print technology and moved the Sun to Wapping.
In 1997 the Sun returned to its Labour roots and backed Tony Blair for Prime Minister.
In 2002 the paper’s circulation was about 3.6 million.
3). Page 3
http://media.guardian.co.uk/thesun/story/0,12950,1122926,00.html
The Sun has launched a scathing personal attack on Labour MP Clare Short, branding her a “killjoy” and “fat and jealous” of its Page 3 girls.
It hit out at the maverick Labour MP after she renewed her attack on Page 3 girls, branding pictures of topless models “degrading pornography”.
Using a montage of Ms Short’s face superimposed on a topless model, it likened her to the back of a bus and and “jokes” that making her into a Page 3 girl would be “mission impossible”.
4.) It’s attitude towards Asylum seekers…
http://media.guardian.co.uk/thesun/story/0,12950,1104109,00.html
The Press Complaints Commission has been branded “disgraceful” after it decided not to force an apology out of the Sun for a story claiming asylum seekers in London had poached and eaten swans.
The Sun published a small clarification in Saturday’s paper over a front page report in July about the disappearance of swans in Beckton, which alleged police had caught asylum seekers with swans which they were preparing to roast.
The newspaper admitted nobody had been arrested over any such offence, but maintained that numerous members of the public had accused eastern European refugees of killing the birds to eat.
5.) Lies…Lies….Lies
http://media.guardian.co.uk/thesun/story/0,12950,1004408,00.html
The Sun today apologised to Kate Adie and paid an undisclosed sum in damages after falsely accusing the veteran war reporter of endangering the prime minister’s life by revealing details of a foreign trip.
Adie agreed an out of court settlement with the Sun over a front page story headlined “Sack Kate Adie – fury at security boob”, in which the newspaper claimed she had revealed top secret details about Tony Blair’s visit to the Middle East.
6). Uncaring about the individual.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/thesun/story/0,12950,931562,00.html
The Sun has apologised for a second time to a man whom it wrongly identified as a child sex offender.
On March 29 the tabloid published a picture of a man over the headline “Face of kid ban pervert”. The adjoining article stated that the photograph was of Christopher Harris, who had been banned from going near children for life after assaulting girls in Great Yarmouth.
However, owing to a mix-up by a picture agency, the photograph was in fact of David Gazley, a man with no connection to any such offences.
7). Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,909837,00.html
The Sun has become embroiled in a row over accuracy after the 14-year-old boy named in today’s front-page story claimed the article was wrong.
George Barlow burst into tears as he denied the newspaper’s claims that he had been “insulted” by Prince Philip.
Under the headline “You old Git, Phil”, the newspaper reported that the gaffe-prone Prince had insulted the teenager while on a visit to his school.
The Sun said the Prince had “sneered” at Mr Barlow, a fan of the royal family who wrote to the Queen to request a visit to his school in Romford, Essex.
“Ah, you’re the one who wrote the letter. So you can write then. Ha, Ha!” The Sun reported the Prince as saying.
8 ). Invasion of privacy.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,903724,00.html
Pressure for the government to tighten controls on the press intensified yesterday when the Sun outed the Labour MP Clive Betts.
Fellow MPs raised the issue of press intrusion at Labour’s weekly parliamentary meeting yesterday morning, attended by the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell. Intrusion is already the subject of an inquiry by the select committee on culture, media and sport, chaired by Gerald Kaufman, a champion of statutory controls.
9). Right wing and racist.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,879372,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/images/0,11312,879370,00.html
Press watchdogs are to investigate the Sun following complaints about a satirical feature on asylum seekers, yardies and drug dealers who, the paper claimed, are flourishing “under New Labour”.
One week into her job as Sun editor, Rebekah Wade provoked accusations of racism with the paper’s controversial reinterpretation of the much-loved children’s characters the Mr Men
10). The culture of the newspaper
http://media.guardian.co.uk/thesun/story/0,12950,1083071,00.html
Rupert Murdoch’s company, News International, paid £500,000 to silence allegations of serious sexual harassment against a former editor of the Sun newspaper, a Labour MP claimed yesterday.
Stuart Higgins was accused of crude and offensive behaviour towards his executive secretary during the time he edited the paper between 1994 and 1998. The Labour MP Clive Soley told parliament that staff on Britain’s biggest-selling daily newspaper had suffered “sexual harassment and bullying”.
11.) Courting controversy to attract readers.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/thesun/story/0,12950,1065603,00.html
Campaigners for children’s rights have severely criticised the Sun’s “Shop a Yob” campaign to name and shame youngsters who are subject to anti-social behaviour orders.
The policy adviser to the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, which represents more than 180 organisations, expressed her concerns about the initiative.
“We’re very worried about it. It smacks a little of lynch mob behaviour,” said Terri Dowty.
As part of Shop a Yob the Sun has published the photographs, names and ages of youngsters who have anti-social behaviour orders against them.
12). Nicole Kidman
http://media.guardian.co.uk/thesun/story/0,12950,1062727,00.html
The Sun has apologised to Nicole Kidman and agreed to pay her libel damages and legal costs over false allegations that she had an adulterous affair with Jude Law.
The allegations, which appeared in the Sun on March 5, caused the Hollywood actress “considerable embarrassment and distress”, her solicitor, Keith Schilling, told Mr Justice Eady at the high court today
13). The Beckham Kidnap Plot.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/medialaw/story/0,11614,973840,00.html
The News of the World exposé of an alleged plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham was based largely on the unsupported testimony of a serial fantasist with a history of mental health problems.
Last week the Crown Prosecution Service announced that all the charges relating to the kidnapping were to be dropped because the main witness, Florim Gashi, 27, was unreliable.
The CPS reached this decision after learning that Gashi had been paid £10,000 by the newspaper. But an Observer investigation has found that much of the evidence provided by Gashi had been fabricated and that other key elements had been engineered to support his version of events.
14). Prize draw blunder.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/thesun/story/0,12950,1050380,00.html
The Sun suspended four journalists after a major error in a money-winning competition left the tabloid liable to pay out more than £1m to readers.
A features executive, two subeditors and a page-builder were suspended over a production error that doubled the number of winners in the Starstuck competition, although not all of those eligible have claimed their prize.
All four, however, were quickly reinstated following an investigation into the mistake, which appears to have occurred while editions of the paper were being changed.
15). Frank Bruno
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,1047966,00.html
The Sun was last night forced into a humiliating about-turn following a storm of protest over a front-page headline that labelled former boxer Frank Bruno “bonkers”, after he was taken to a psychiatric hospital.
In the first edition of the paper the front page splashed with the headline “Bonkers Bruno Locked Up” above a story that labelled him a “nut”, prompting a storm of protest from readers and mental health charities.
Realising it had misjudged the public mood, the Sun’s editor, Rebekah Wade, was forced into a climbdown, changing the headline to read, “Sad Bruno in Mental Health Home”, with the accompanying story labelling him a “hero”.
16). Cheriegate
http://media.guardian.co.uk/marketingandpr/story/0,7494,988753,00.html
The Sun has been found guilty of “one of the most serious forms of physical intrusion into privacy” by watchdogs over taped telephone calls involving the boyfriend of Cherie Blair’s lifestyle guru Carole Caplin.
The press complaints commission said the paper was wrong to have published the transcripts of the conversations between Australian conman Peter Foster and his mother.
17). George Galloway – Traitor.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,928738,00.html
George Galloway MP today branded the Sun newspaper guilty of “cancerous racist pornographic propaganda” after it described him as “an enemy of the state”.
“The Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch; so patriotic that he has been a citizen of three different countries in 15 years, a kind of serial patriotism which is the last refuge of such scoundrels,” Mr Galloway said.
18). A reporters view…Why I quit the Sun.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,7558,925903,00.html
Last week, Katy Weitz resigned as a feature writer on the Sun because of the strength and tone of its support for the war in the Gulf. Here she sets out her motives
19). Racism
http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/story/0,9860,895674,00.html
The Sun newspaper has been banned from Leeds University student union shops in protest against its portrayal of asylum seekers
The motion, proposed by student Rebecca Allen and seconded by Tim Nicholson, was passed yesterday with 121 votes for and 111 against at the university’s annual general meeting.
Ms Allen said the motion had been prompted by “unnecessary racist articles” that had appeared in the paper.
The motion read: “The Sun newspaper is now carrying out a vicious campaign against asylum seekers and the basic human right of asylum in general.”
The newspaper, which sells 3,000 copies a month in union shops, will not be available for one month, or until it drops its “racist campaign”, the motion said.
20). The fire service boycott.
http://www.kirkbytimes.co.uk/news_items/boycott_sun.html
Kirkby Times is more than willing to draw attention to the recent attacks by the Sun Gutter Rag on the Fire Brigade. Not surprisingly, the Sun or SCUM as its known in Merseyside, has decided to approach the strike guns blazing for Blair and as usual employing its well known tactic of attacking any Union which dares to ask for more than 2 0r 3% payrises. The Journalists who work for the Sun, are not only paid more than the Fire Brigade, they have actually deluded themselves that they are some sort of service to society. Its time now for a new generation of Merseysiders and indeed anyone in the UK and beyond to Boycott this Gutter Rag. Through the Internet we can help to destroy the monopoly the mass media hold on passing on information.
The S*n loses millions because of our boycott – but their belief is that over time, younger people will ensure it is all forgotten about. Please visit http://www.contrast.org/hillsborough and educate yourself and others about what happened that day.
Education is the key.
Justice for the 96.
You’ll Never Walk Alone.
Tags: Don't Buy The Sun
This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Don't Buy The Sun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you cantrackback from your own site
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/256/20-more-reasons-to-never-buy-the-sun/
20 more reasons to never buy The Sun
Tags: Don't Buy The Sun, Hillsborough, John Pilger, Lies
96 Reasons to never buy The Sun
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/
This article concentrates on one piece of injustice that could so easily have been avoided. That could so easily have been made a little better, if not fixed, in the intervening years. Lies were printed as fact in a British newspaper, and that newspaper has still not made an unconditional apology for what it printed. Its editor of the time has never made an unconditional apology in all of that time.
The headlines and sub-headlines on the front page of The Sun newspaper on the Wednesday following the disaster were as follows:
“The Truth.
Some fans picked pockets of victims
Some fans urinated on the brave cops
Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.”
So just four days after their loved ones had died, four days after they had narrowly escaped death themselves, Liverpool supporters were confronted with those headlines. People actually believed those headlines. Those who were there did not believe the headlines of course, nor did those who knew people who had been there. Unfortunately though a lot of people did believe those headlines; people who were not Liverpool supporters, perhaps supporters of another team or people who did not follow football at all. The headlines sewed seeds in so many people’s minds that the 96 supporters died at the hands of their own kind. All lies, all proven to be lies, yet never put right by that publication.
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/401/the-truth/
The Truth
The Truth by Nick Harman (OTK) (Original linkhttp://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=170808.msg2823037#msg2823037)
The “Truth” – The background, the actual publication, and evidence
exposing the claims as being false.
Truth –
1. the quality of being true, genuine, actual, or factual
2. something that is true as opposed to false
3. a proven or verified fact or principle
4. faithful reproduction or portrayal
5. honesty, accuracy
The start of the reporting of the ‘untruth’s’ can be traced back to around 4.15pm on Saturday 15th April 1989, when Graham Kelly, the then Chief Executive of the FA, was interviewed by the BBC and he told them that the police had implied (Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield – match commander, who was in charge of his first major match and who gave the order for the gates into the ground to be opened earlier, had told spoken in the police control box that Liverpool fans had rushed the gate) that the gates had been opened unauthorised by the fans, thus causing the tragedy.
Mud had been thrown and a lot of it was to stick…….Stories flashed around the world and many newspapers (that extended way beyond The Sun – most, if not all papers originally condemned Liverpool fans) reported that drunken Liverpool fans were the real cause of the disaster.
I put the dictionary meaning of ‘truth’ at the start of this publication……….please keep referring to the actual meaning of ‘TRUTH’ and you will see a common theme of lies, cover ups, lack of honesty and even less accuracy. The truth – far from it.
On Wednesday 19th April 1989, tabloid reporting reached a new gutter low when The Sun newspaper (with Kelvin MacKenzie the then editor and on his personal instruction) ran the hard hitting front page headline ‘THE TRUTH’.
The newspaper ran three bulleted sub-headings with the following text –
‘Some fans picked pockets of victims’
‘Some fans urinated on the brave cops’
‘Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life’
The story that accompanied these headlines talked of ticket-less drunken fans forcing the gates and attacking rescue workers (police, firemen, ambulance crews, etc). It spoke of the dead and dying being pick-pocketed and being urinated on. A quote, which was attributed to an unnamed policeman (isn’t it funny how they, in the main, remain nameless), claimed that a dead girl had been abused and that Liverpool fans ‘were openly urinating on us and the bodies of the dead’.
The Truth – far from it.
This sensationalism journalism was used at a time when the media circus had already labeled and painted the picture that the city of Liverpool (and its’ people) were rebellious and anarchistic.
Negative images and stereotypes of ‘scousers’ were important elements in debates about complex political-economic issues affecting the city. Much of the national press reporting in the immediate aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster echoed well-worn themes and assumptions.
What better way to fan the flames to the world than to run headlines, only days after the disaster, that virtually said they had killed their own and that those involved were less than innocent victims – a political agenda to further put down the people of Liverpool and to sell more newspapers, without any regard for the grieving families or survivors feelings.
In their history of The Sun (Stick It Up Your Punter), Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie wrote:’As MacKenzie’s layout was seen by more and more people, a collective shudder ran through the office [but] MacKenzie’s dominance was so total there was nobody left in the organisation who could rein him in except Murdoch. [Everyone] seemed paralysed, “looking like rabbits in the headlights”, as one hack described them. The error staring them in the face was too glaring. It obviously wasn’t a silly mistake; nor was it a simple oversight. Nobody really had any comment on it—they just took one look and went away shaking their heads in wonder at the enormity of it. It was a “classic smear”.’
The legacy for those directly affected by the disaster was one where grieving relatives, trying to deal with their loss, were faced with an additional burden of defending the innocence of loved ones, mainly due to these rash, early, sensationalised, headlines. Survivors, many of whom had witnessed profoundly traumatising events and suffered terrible injuries, both physically and mentally (and are still suffering), were themselves subjected to the ‘finger of blame’. Despite the efforts of the all connected with the Hillsborough disaster to counteract the persistent myths relating to blame and causation, misconceptions continued to (and still do) influence debate.
The Sun’s coverage of the Hillsborough Disaster was both extremely inaccurate and damaging for the newspaper. By all accounts it was entirely the doing of the then editor Kelvin McKenzie, the man who coined ‘Gotcha’ to celebrate the deaths of 368 Argentine sailors during the Falklands War.
‘The Truth’ headlines brought out feelings of anger in Merseyside (and beyond) and an immediate ‘boycott’ was successful. Thousands of copies were stolen and burnt, and even to this present day many shopkeepers refuse to stock this comic of a newspaper. The Hillsborough Justice Campaign also organised a national boycott of the ‘paper’, which again hit its sales. Even fifteen years after the Hillsborough disaster, the circulation of The Sun in Liverpool is still believed to be only 12,000 copies a day where previously it was around 200,000.
As stated earlier, it wasn’t just The Sun (in the immediate aftermath of the disaster) that peddled the vicious lies but it was The Sun’s hard hitting headlines and their refusal to back down (a quick apology, etc….) that would stay, rightly, in the minds of many in the region.
Lord Justice Taylor’s official inquiry into the disaster disparaged The Sun’s story and was unequivocal as to the disaster’s cause: ‘The real cause of the Hillsborough disaster [was] overcrowding, the main reason for the disaster was the failure of police control.’
Taylor had clearly laid the blame of the disaster with the police and general organisation (choice of venue, etc…..).
Nowhere did it mention drunken fans pick pocketing the dead or dying.
Nowhere did it mention fans urinating on the emergency workers.
Nowhere did it mention fans beating up a PC who was giving someone the kiss of life.
All the lies The Sun had peddled (which had been allegedly fed to them from un-named police sources) had been proved to be completely un-true……lies, lies and more lies had been used to cover up the real reasons of the disaster, from a panicking police force (amongst others), possibly worrying about their pension funds and early retirements, rather than the truth.
Taylor’s report proved that all these unsupported allegations from anonymous police officers or quotes from the Police Federation, were found to have been distorted or completely fabricated.
MacKenzie tried to explain his newspapers reporting on the disaster (specifically The Truth headlines and report) in 1993 when talking to a House of Commons National Heritage Select Committee.
Trying to wash his hands of any blame for publishing ‘The Truth’ headlines and story (and it’s not the last time) he said “I regret Hillsborough. It was a fundamental mistake. The mistake was I believed what an MP said. It was a Tory MP. If he had not said it and the chief superintendent (David Duckenfield) had not agreed with it, we would not have gone with it.” This explanation (explanation not apology take note) was not accepted by the families and survivors of the disaster.
The Sun itself attempted a rather, to say the least, pathetic attempt at an apology. The apology was so called issued ‘without reservation’ saying it had ‘committed the most terrible mistake in its history’. This was issued on the 7th July 2004, over 15 years (yes, 15 years) since the tragedy and was also in response to criticism aimed towards Wayne Rooney, who had sold his life story to the rag. The so called apology was again widely not accepted.
So was ‘The Truth’ really the truth (or intended to be anything like the truth) ?
Truth –
1. the quality of being true, genuine, actual, or factual
2. something that is true as opposed to false
3. a proven or verified fact or principle
4. faithful reproduction or portrayal
5. honesty, accuracy
The answer to all 5 points above, in relation to the ‘The Truth’ headlines of The Sun would unanimously be false. The truth – far from it. ‘The Truth’ was based on un-named sources, who, from minutes after the disaster, tried to cover up the real truth, to enable them to clear their guilty consciences.
I will end with an extract from Kenny Dalglish’s autobiography:
Kelvin MacKenzie, the Sun’s editor, even called me up.
“How can we correct the situation?” he said.
“You know that big headline – ‘The Truth’?” I replied. “All you have to do is put ‘We lied’ in the same size. Then you might be all right.”
Mackenzie said: “I cannot do that.”
“Well,” I replied, “I cannot help you then.”
That was it. I put the phone down. Merseysiders were outraged by the Sun. A great many still are’.
After reading this, if you were in any doubt before, there is absolutely no excuse to buy or even read The Sun newspaper, Liverpool fan or not. Please continue to educate people of ‘The Truth’.
Tags: Don't Buy The Sun, Hillsborough
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/285/an-excerpt-from-kenny-dalglishs-autobiography/
An excerpt from Kenny Dalglish’s Autobiography
Taken from ‘Dalglish: My Autobiography,’ Published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. For educational purposes only. (Original linkhttp://www.contrast.org/hillsborough/history/dalglish.shtm)
The press coverage was difficult to comprehend, particularly the publication of pictures which added to people’s distress. There was one photograph of two girls right up against the Leppings Lane fence, their faces pressed into the wire. Nobody knows how they escaped. They used to come to Melwood every day, looking for autographs, and that photograph upset everyone there because we knew them. After seeing that I couldn’t look at the papers again.
I was invited to Walton jail where the prisoners were having a service for Hillsborough. Before I went in, the governor asked me to give them words of reassurance. The inmates were very upset by what they had read. It was a creepy experience. There was silence apart from the clinking of keys, the rattle of doors sliding back. I went into the chapel and the inmates were sitting there, with hardly a murmur from anybody. Then they clapped me in. It was really appreciative applause but unnerving as well. I remembered the governor’s words and told them not to be upset by what they had read in the papers, because it wasn’t true.
The Sun’s allegations were disgraceful and completely groundless. Ticketless fans try to get into every game. Any well-supported club playing in a semi-final is going to attract ticketless fans. If handled properly, as they had been at Hillsborough a year earlier, ticketless supporters do not present a problem.
The shameful allegations intensified the anger amidst the trauma. We spent the week consoling the bereaved and attending funerals. On the Saturday we held a service at Anfield. At six minutes past three there was a minute’s silence across the country. Then everyone at Anfield sang ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ We tied scarves between Anfield and Goodison. We just wanted to show the unity existing on Merseyside. The following day, there was a final service on the pitch. It was really quiet, just the wind rustling the scarves tied to the crossbar. When somebody shouted out ‘We all loved you,’ we all broke down.
Tags: Don't Buy The Sun, Hillsborough
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/289/an-excerpt-from-brian-reades-43-years-with-the-same-bird/
An excerpt from Brian Reade’s “43 Years with the Same Bird”
Taken from Brian Reade’s book, ’43 Years with the Same Bird,’ and posted with Brian’s permission.
And then, on Wednesday, the shit hit the fans. It was the single costliest miscalculation by a newspaper this country has seen, and it pushed the people of Liverpool over the edge. Under the headline THE TRUTH the Sun cleared its front page to tell the world: ‘Some fans picked pockets of victims; Some fans urinated on the brave cops; Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.’ The words that accompanied it claimed that ‘drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims’ and ‘police officers, firemen and ambulance crew were punched, kicked and urinated upon’. One anonymous copper was quoted as saying that a dead girl had been abused, while fans ‘were openly urinating on us and the bodies of the dead.’
The Sun’s editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, had willingly bought the Police Federation lies, dressed them up, and sold them on in a typically sensationalist style designed to steal the moral high-ground and sell papers. There was only one Truth. And it was the Sunwot pronounced it. And anyone who thought differently could stick it up their junta.
It was war. Scousers, regardless of their football leanings, were apoplectic. To accuse them of killing their own was bad enough, but to state as fact that they picked the pockets of their own as they were dying was a call to arms. A paper that was already regarded by many on Merseyside as loathsome due to its rabid Thatcherite stance, Loadsamoney tone and obsession with tits and bums, was now seen as the spawn of the devil. It had slandered an entire people. And it would pay.
Overnight thousands of copies were stolen and destroyed. There were public burnings. Delivery men refused to touch it, shopkeepers refused to stock it. From selling 200,000 copies a day on Merseyside it plunged to a couple of thousand. Nineteen years on that figure hovers around 12,000, and humiliations are still handed out when copies are spotted being read in public.
The Sunhas tried many times to win back Scousers, and failed dismally, mainly because each attempt at rapprochement was viewed as a cynical ploy to win back lost readers. When Kelvin MacKenzie revealed in November 2006 that he only apologized at the time because the paper’s owner Rupert Murdoch ordered him to, it showed that Scousers had been right to boycott it all along.
I admire them deeply for sticking to their guns. For once a community showed the solidarity can deeply hurt a business which is trying to hurt you. But be in no doubt, ‘The Truth’ front page was really all about one man. MacKenzie.
They were decent journalists working on the Sun in 1989 who were as appalled at the front pages as any Liverpudlian. In their book Stick It Up Your Punter(an account of MacKenzie’s time at the Sun), Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie described what happened that night:
’As MacKenzie’s layout was seen by more and more people, a collective shudder ran through the office [but] MacKenzie’s dominance was so total there was nobody left in the organisation who could rein him in except Murdoch. [Everyone] seemed paralysed, ‘looking like rabbits in the headlights’, as one hack described them. The error staring them in the face was too glaring. It obviously wasn’t a silly mistake; nor was it a simple oversight. Nobody really had any comment on it—they just took one look and went away shaking their heads in wonder at the enormity of it. It was a ‘classic smear’.
The reality is that every national newspaper had the story fed to it, but only MacKenzie chose to run it in the manner he did. A couple of others carried the claims as part of a report, and immediately retracted them when it was clear how false and offensive they were.
But MacKenzie revelled in it. He had a tale that fitted neatly with his prejudices. It was Our Boys in Blue, the same brave lads who stood up to the scumbag miners, who were now standing up to scumbag Scousers. It was his patriotic duty to back them, regardless of The Truth. For years afterwards the hurt it caused, not simply to theSun’s circulation, was incalculable.
Back then almost four million people were buying the Sun, meaning 12 million people were reading it, the majority of whom were probably believing all that they read. Despite Lord Justice Taylor’s report denouncing the report as lies, Liverpool fans have literally had to fight against the slur over the years. I’ve had at least three brawls with people who have argued that there was clearly no smoke without fire. That our police would not tell a paper such a story, nor would a paper publish it, if there were no truth in it.
All down to the owner of one twisted mind, one gargantuan ego, who to this day is convinced tanked-up, ticketless Liverpool fans caused the deaths and is proud to admit, ‘I was not sorry then and I’m not sorry now.’
When MacKenzie eventually suffers the same fate as the ninety-six, there is a line in Elvis Costello’s ‘Man Out Of Time’ which should be chiselledon his headstone: ‘He’s got a mind like a sewer and a heart like a fridge.’
Tags: Don't Buy The Sun, Hillsborough
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/420/dont-buy-the-sun-blimp-photos/
‘Don’t Buy The Sun’ Blimp Photos
Credit to Propaganda-Photo for the photographs (http://www.photoshelter.com/c/propaganda/gallery/100206-Dont-Buy-The-Sun/G0000s6B6nNR.pXQ/)
Also:
http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/432/the-city-that-eclipsed-the-sun/
The city that eclipsed the Sun
A piece written by David Smith from The Observer, 11th July 2004.
Fifteen years after the Hillsborough disaster, Liverpool still can’t forgive the newspaper that piled insult on injury. So can it forgive Wayne Rooney for taking the Murdoch shilling? David Smith reports
It’s 10pm in the Western Approaches pub and Stevie Gay, who often drinks here with Wayne Rooney’s dad, is holding court. Suddenly he puts his pint of Carling on the table and turns serious, the smile fading from his lips. ‘I was at Hillsborough. I saw them dragging people up by their scarves, trying to save them,’ he says, mimicking the action with his hands. ‘They were bringing them up the barriers and getting them on the pitch. I heard a scream: “This lad is dead.” It was a horrible sight. All the dead bodies.’
Gay, 49, also remembers the newspaper headline that cuts as deep as ever in Liverpool and, more than 15 years after English football’s worst disaster, still asks questions about the city’s sense of identity in relation to the rest of Britain. ‘The Sun said they were robbing the dead. It was all lies. If anyone was looking through people’s pockets, it was for their IDs. The Sun is scum and nobody in this pub buys it.’
The Western Approaches – in drug- and crime-plagued Croxteth in inner-city Liverpool – was once Wayne Rooney’s local and is still frequented by his father, siblings and cousins. On the cream-painted walls is a framed team photo of the Croxteth amateur boxing squad, naming its secretary as Richie Rooney. Tonight another young Rooney, who in blue T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms is the image of his famous cousin, is standing near the jukebox, watching darts. When an Observer reporter enters the room the laughter dies. There is a hostile silence. ‘Gettout!’ shouts someone. Journalists are not welcome here.
And some are less welcome than others. Those from the Sun must still answer for the sins of their predecessors. In April 1989, four days after 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death on the terraces at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, Britain’s bestselling daily ran the front page headline ‘The Truth’. Below it were three subheadings: ‘Some fans picked pockets of victims’; ‘Some fans urinated on the brave cops’; ‘Some fans beat up PCs giving the kiss of life’. All were lies. The Taylor Inquiry after the disaster found that fans had responded quicker than the emergency services, performing several acts of heroism.
Copies of the Sun were burnt in the city’s streets and many newsagents refused to sell it. It has still not fully recovered: while the paper sells 3.3 million copies nationwide, it shifts only 12,000 in Liverpool. One rival publication calculated that, given an average cover price of 20p over 15 years, editor Kelvin MacKenzie’s catastrophic misjudgment has cost owner Rupert Murdoch around £55 million in lost circulation.
Enter Wayne Rooney, superstar of Everton and hero of England’s recent Euro 2004 campaign. The 18-year-old’s decision to sell his life story – ‘world exclusive’ revelations that he and his fiancée love each other, watch EastEnders and have a dog called Fiz – for £250,000 to the Sun and its sister paper, the News of the World , was guaranteed to test his folk hero status like nothing else. As in 1992, when Liverpool manager Graeme Souness took the paper’s shilling, radio phone-ins were jammed. Fans wrote letters or emails saying they were ‘sickened’. Red-blue rivalries on the field were irrelevant: Everton and Liverpool fans are united in hatred of the Sun.
Leading the condemnation of the deal is Jimmy McGovern, writer of the TV drama documentary Hillsborough. He said last night: ‘Footballers today are on massive wages because 96 fans died at Hillsborough and Lord Justice Taylor had to drag the game into the modern era. Footballers should never forget it. Local lads especially. Locally born footballers have an enormous responsibilty to the Hillsborough dead. That is hard, I know. They are only young men. But, tough, they have it. So for Wayne Rooney to sell his story to the Sun is a disgrace.’
For men like Stevie Gay, who lost friends at Hillsborough and used to take young Wayne to watch boxing, there is a potential conflict of loyalties. But he had no doubt where the responsibility lies. ‘He’s been badly advised, and his agent has made a few quid. Wayne has proved himself to the world, and no one should blame him.’
Others in The Western Approaches shared a fierce allegiance to Rooney that is matched only by their revulsion towards the Sun. John McCormick, 64, a retired labourer, said: ‘The Sun is a disgrace. I won’t have it in the house. It doesn’t matter how often they apologise because it’s too late. I will never forgive the Sun. I can imagine Wayne Rooney’s family are upset. If I was his dad I’d have given him a smack. But he was only three years old at the time of Hillsborough. He’s been misdirected by his agent and should get rid of him.’
Rooney’s agent is Paul Stretford, the millionaire founder and chief executive of the Proactive Sports Group. Stretford is understood to have been aware of the anti-Sun sentiments on Merseyside but advised Rooney to sign the deal anyway, without Everton’s knowledge. What Stretford hadn’t bargained for was last Wednesday’s Sun , which in response to local complaints issued a full-page apology for ‘the most terrible mistake in its history’, and claimed on its front page that Rooney had been ‘hurt by a hate campaign’ against him.
Stretford was incensed that it implied Rooney backed the apology, and rushed out a statement: ‘Proactive, Wayne and his fiancée Colleen believe that the Sun ‘s repeated apologies for its terrible mistakes in its reporting of the Hillsborough disaster are entirely a matter for that newspaper. We all wish to make it clear that the sentiments expressed in the Sun were the views of that newspaper alone and we were not asked to, nor did we, endorse them.’
The Sun’s mea culpa appeared to have backfired by turning a local story into a national one. The apparent self-flagellation was condemned as a cynical ploy because it also managed to accuse the Liverpool Post and Echo newspapers, owned by the rival Trinity Mirror group, of stirring anger towards Rooney for commercial gain. ‘Bollocks,’ said Jon Brown, deputy editor of the Echo. ‘For the Sun to accuse anyone of stoking things up is deeply ironic. There has been no pressure, overtly or subtly. It was a cheap shot and the staff here were furious. Fifteen years ago the Sun published something without thinking about it. They did the same this week. They turned into it more of an issue than we ever did. I’m sure there are people at the Sun now regretting prodding a stick into a hornets’ nest.’
He added: ‘The Sun’s coverage of Hillsborough still has ramifications today in the vilification of Scousers, of an entire culture and community. It blackened the reputation of the city and it has still not recovered. If you go anywhere in the world Liverpool has a great reputation. If you go anywhere in England, it’s different. The Sun has repeated the mass slander this week by saying Rooney is the victim of a hate campaign. There is no hate campaign. The Sun suggested there were mobs of vicious Liverpudlians gunning for Rooney and his girlfriend. The word “hate” is ridiculous. People here are proud of what he’s achieved. You could ask a thousand people here if they hate Wayne Rooney and you wouldn’t get a single yes.’
Pride, insularity, self-pity and living in the past have all become part of the lexicon applied to Scousers by outsiders. Liverpool is in the throes of a dramatic transformation and will be European City of Culture in 2008. But confrontations such as last week’s crystallise its uneasy relationship with the rest of the country. Alan Bleasdale, the writer of TV dramas including Boys from the Black Stuff, said: ‘There is radical change in this city. The only time we look back is when people pick our scabs and the wounds bleed. How often have you heard Scousers sentimentally wallowing in the past? Only in recent days in response to events elsewhere in the country.’
Phil Hammond, who lost his 14-year-old son Philip at Hillsborough, said: ‘There are a few papers prejudiced against Liverpool. The Daily Mail printed a picture from the internet of Wayne Rooney doing a cartwheel and lots of stolen things falling out of his pockets, with the joke being: “You can take the lad out of Liverpool but you can’t take Liverpool out of the lad.” ‘
Rogan Taylor, who was chairman of the Football Supporters’ Association at the time of Hillsborough, said: ‘The people of Liverpool are not soft. Like Jews, Poles, blacks and others who keep getting whacked, they know who they are and who their enemies are. Liverpool is like the Poland of England.
‘You should see it in the context of 150 years of prejudice from the ruling Protestant class towards the Irish Catholic settlers. The opinion columns of the Mail and Express today could easily be transported from the Times in 1845, asking questions like: “What kind of people are they? They like drinking and dancing and telling stories – what do these people think life is?” You could see the same subtext post-Hillsborough. “Why don’t people take responsibility for themselves? Their culture is different from ours.” The Sun splash pushed it to the limit at the end of a troubled decade.’
He added: ‘Our memory is elephantine. Accusing people of robbing the dead is as close to unforgivable as you can get. If Murdoch and MacKenzie came to apologise, that would be interesting. But we haven’t seen them, have we?’
A spokeswoman for Murdoch said: ‘I am sure he completely agrees with the statements in the Sun.’ Kelvin MacKenzie, now head of the TalkSport radio station, refused to comment last week. But in 1993 he told the Commons national heritage committee: ‘I regret Hillsborough. It was a fundamental mistake. The mistake was I believed what an MP said. It was a Tory MP. If he had not said it and the chief superintendent had not agreed with it, we would not have gone with it.’
To the ongoing resentment of the Hillsborough families, neither MacKenzie nor the Sun has disclosed the identity of the source. The paper last week put assistant editor Graham Dudman on a round of radio phone-ins, in which he insisted the 1989 staff were no longer employed and pointed out that current editor Rebekah Wade was a 20-year-old student at the time. But Bleasdale said: ‘The hierarchy of the Sun is different but the owner is the same, the philosophy is the same and the contempt is the same. To use a football analogy, it’s just a transfer of players. You should try to forget but you should never forgive.’
Derek Hatton, the Liverpool council deputy leader-turned-radio presenter, said: ‘I sat next to Rebekah Wade at a party for Max Clifford’s birthday a few months ago and we were talking about Hillsborough. She didn’t know that much about it, and why should she? Wayne Rooney at 18 ought to know more about it because there isn’t a footballing kid of 18 in Liverpool who doesn’t know exactly what happened at Hillsborough. I get a bit pissed off with people defending him. I’m the biggest fan of Wayne as a footballing genius but he has to bear some sort of responsibility.’
There are clearly some who agree. Those leaving Liverpool’s Anfield ground on Friday morning were confronted by the giant words ‘ROONEY SCUMBAG’ daubed in white paint on the wall of a house opposite.
The war of words
Disaster
Liverpool fans are pulled from the crush that killed 96 at the Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield in April 1989.
Accusation
The Sun front page of 19 April 1989 claims fans dishonoured the city’s dead. The source for the story has never been revealed.
Kiss and sell
Wayne Rooney sold his ‘world exclusive’ story to the Sun, telling of his love for fiancée Colleen McLoughlin.
Apology
The Sun devotes an entire page on Wednesday to saying sorry over Hillsborough… but upsets Liverpool all over again in the process.
Tags: Boycott, Don't Buy The Sun, Liverpool
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