The Sun vs Merseyside

[guest7]

As many of you will know, The Sun carried a deeply shocking and largely fabricated article following the Hillsborough disaster. As a consequence the paper has (so I hear) suffered a huge loss of sales in Merseyside.

I'd be interested to find out to what extent The Sun really is boycotted in the area. Could you actually buy the paper in most shops if you wanted to?

Cheers
GC

p.s. this topic title isn't to be confused with 'The sun versus Port Talbot'. In that instance the sun is the large fiery orb, not a newspaper, and it lost its battle with Port Talbot's smoky outpourings a long time ago. 
 

[guest27]

Yup - but we now dump our pollutants on Merthyr - taller chimneys

And if we want sunshine we can always nuke Swansea, a sunny bank holiday weekend would call for nuking Swansea, Bridgend and Cardiff - £20,000,000 of improvements in one go.

R

[Mark]

That would be ok as long as there isn't an east wind blowing, don't want the fallout in Llanelli.

[guest7]

From Wikipedia:

"To this day, many people in the Liverpool area refuse to buy The Sun as a matter of principle, and the paper's sales figures within Merseyside have been very poor since the day the original story was printed. As of 2004, the average circulation in Liverpool was still just 12,000 copies a day, 200,000 fewer than before the controversial article was published."

Quite right too
GC

[Steve Lake]

Quite right too
GC

yes indeed......I don't think i've ever bought the Sun, but have 'read' it now and again if it's lying around at work,   and everytime i do, it just confirms what a idiotic rag it is.....
Bit like McDonalds.......I KNOW the burgers are absolutely awful.....but probably once a year i'm strangely drawn into the drive in, where i purchase a bag of 'fries' (quite what is fried heaven knows) and a big mac (hate to think what size a little mac is)......having consumed the aforesaid .....i'm well put off, until i've forgotten quite how grotty they are......I suppose this is some kind of aversion therapy

As far as the Sun is concerned, it's a pity more people didn't boycott it, may have gone out of business then
and that would be some kind of justice

[guest27]

My Dad buys the Sun - he claims it is for the cryptic crossword and the sports reporting.  And you know reading - if that is the word - it, he is either a really sad bloke (could be true) OR it is for the sports reporting and the crossword, mind I am sure you can get better reporting and comparable crossword attached to a half decent load of paper.

Found the Sun reporting offensive at the time, mind I also think Hysal was more to do with the match being held at an inappropriate stadium and incompetence of the Belgian police than it was to do with the Liverpool fans, and feel it is time the families of those who died at Hillsbrough found out what really went wrong and what lessons were learned about policing etc.

I am a great supporter of the British police, but find events like Hillsbrough, various clearing of travellers off sites in the 1980's, the shooting of JCdM after July 11th and the recent events at the G20 demos in London to be challenging and undermining of the respect.  If they screw up - admit it and lean from it, don't try to cover it up.  As for this confiscating of cameras / phones etc for filming the police - that is totally wrong.

Opps sorry GC have turned a serious question about the Sun and their make-it-up-as-you-go-along attitude with a rant.

R

[Steve H]

Not a comment on the Sun, but there was a promo for a R4 programme on Hillsborough yesterday, there was a clip from a mother being interviewed

"We travelled up to the match as normal happy family, sons in the back and lots of chatter. We travelled back alone as a couple"

Looses something in that translation, but conveyed the impact of Hillsborough on normal families which I probabaly hadnt fully appreciated before.

[guest7]

That loses nothing in the translation Steve, can you even begin to imagine it?

I did a bit of a Wiki and 'Net crawl on the subject last night because I realised I only had an imperfect knowledge of the event and its aftermath.

All the testimony of people at the game, on one side of that bloody fence or the other, said the same thing about the Liverpool fans, they behaved as many of us hope we would.

HERE is a good eyewitness account to give an idea of what happened. It's from the Guardian website and it's worth looking at all of their Hillsborough content, it's well-balanced.

I think the actions of the police at the G20 summit give some relevance to an examination of their behaviour at Hillsborough. In both cases, it seems to me, there was an expectation of violence that coloured the event and led to some poor decision making.

As for the Sun, I get to read it at my dad's caff because he only stocks the redtops. The Sun's idea of what constitutes news is sometimes very depressing and always suspect. If you view it as an comic rather than a newspaper then you can accept their nonsense... to a point. I don't have anything against people who choose a redtop to get their 'news', but it annoys me that these rags (and the Daily Mail) set the agenda on some important issues without real regard to balanced impartial reporting.

GC

[guest7]

I am a great supporter of the British police, but find events like (snip) various clearing of travellers off sites in the 1980's,

I used to know a bloke who was at the Battle of the Beanfield. His stories were absolutely awful. Because he was a bit of a crusty I used to doubt some of the details, but subsequent documentaries and reports have confirmed almost everything he told me.

On witness was Lord Cardigan who had no interest in backing the travellers (at that time most of us had a negative opinion of the Peace Convoy and certainly some of them were nasty bits of work). However he was shocked by what he saw and he later testified to seeing a pregnant woman being clubbed, amongst other dreadful acts.

Our police are bloody fantastic and do great work and it would be good to think that a different attitude prevails today.

GC

[Bill Rutter]

I think Steve was talking about the Hicks family. Mr Hicks took his daughters, aged 15 and 19 to Sheffield and watched in horror as the younger daughter was put into an ambulance after seeing the elder daughter laying, still alive, on the pitch. He faced the awful dilemma of having to chose which of his two girls to go to. He "chose" his fifteen year-old. How this decision must have torn him apart then, and haunt him now, even though he was in a horridly hopeless situation (he was to lose both girls). I cannot begin to imagine the anguish in that car journey home with his wife at the wheel.
(If I recall correctly, the police insisted on driving the Hicks' back to where their car was parked. On arrival the Officer stopped and said something like "Right then, here we are-out you get" in a cold and unsympathetic manner)