Monday, February 21, 2011

Disgusting reporting from the SUN...who claim their reporting has' changed' but it would seem not for three year old Madeleine, still used for her money making qualities.

The Hillsborough disaster and its aftermath


The controversial Hillsborough edition
At the end of the decade, The Sun's coverage of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in Sheffield on 15 April 1989, in which 96 people died as a result of their injuries, proved to be, as the paper later admitted, the "most terrible" blunder in its history.[28]
Under a front page headline "The Truth", the paper claimed that some fans picked the pockets of crushed victims, that others urinated on members of the emergency services as they tried to help and that some even assaulted a Police Constable "whilst he was administering the kiss of life to a patient."[29] Despite the headline, written by Kelvin MacKenzie, the story was based on allegations either by unnamed and unattributable sources, or hearsay accounts of what named individuals had said – a fact made clear to MacKenzie by Harry Arnold, the reporter who wrote the story. Although the disaster occurred before TV cameras and a mass of sports reporters, no evidence was produced to substantiate The Sun's allegations. The front page caused outrage in Liverpool, where the paper lost more than three-quarters of its estimated 55,000 daily sales and still sells poorly more than twenty years later (around 12,000).[30] It is unavailable in many parts of the city, as many news agents refuse to stock it.[31][32] It was revealed in a documentary called "Alexei Sayle's Liverpool", aired in September 2008, that many Liverpudlians will not even take the newspaper for free, and those who do may simply burn or tear it up, even though this was almost 20 years after the incident.[33]

On 7 July 2004, in response to verbal attacks in Liverpool on Wayne Rooney, just before his transfer from Everton to Manchester United, who had sold his life story to The Sun, the paper devoted a full-page editorial to an apology for the "awful error" of its Hillsborough coverage and argued that Rooney (who was still only three years old at the time of Hillsborough) should not be punished for its "past sins".

 In January 2005, The Sun's managing editor Graham Dudman admitting the Hillsborough coverage was "the worst mistake in our history", added: "What we did was a terrible mistake. It was a terrible, insensitive, horrible article, with a dreadful headline; but what we'd also say is: we have apologised for it, and the entire senior team here now is completely different from the team that put the paper out in 1989".[34]