Horse Dope Sensation

January 27, 2016 11:44 AM

Tits, boobs & Kelvin Mackenzie. A partial history of The Sun newspaper, starting from its launch in 1964 as a left-leaning broadsheet.

Bonus: Hurrah for the Blackshirts - a short history of The Daily Mail (never once left-leaning).

posted by jontyjago (8 comments total)

Though it's covered extensively in the article, a little more context on the Hillsborough disaster:

Under a front page headline "The Truth", the paper printed allegations provided to them that some [LFC] 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." (wikipedia)

96 people died that day from being crushed by the crowd. Many fans tried to help the injured and dying by doing such things as tearing off the scaffolding to make stretchers. The youngest victim was 10. The Sun is garbage. Kelvin McKenzie is garbage.
posted by triggerfinger at 12:09 PM on January 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

The front page cause understandable outrage in Liverpool. The paper lost three-quarters of its 55,000 daily sale. It silly sells poorly there and it’s likely that it always will.

Great typo.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:31 PM on January 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I can only hope the forthcoming book will be better proof-read.
posted by John Shaft at 12:45 PM on January 27, 2016

This seems a good moment to quote Lytton Strachey's poem from 1914:

Last night I dreamt that I had gone to Hell.
I seemed to know the milieu pretty well.
The place was crammed as tight as it would hold
With men and hatred, folly, lust and gold.
And lies? Ah, I'd forgotten: without fail
Red hot for breakfast came the Daily Mail.

posted by verstegan at 1:48 PM on January 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Justice for the 96.
posted by walrus at 2:37 PM on January 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

If anyone's curious about The Daily Mail's endorsement of fascism, here's a scan of the article "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!" and here's a transcript.

(Check out the "Woman Through the Ages" bit in the "Crazy News Reel" sidebar. A thoroughly terrible paper.)
posted by Rangi at 2:40 PM on January 27, 2016

Apocryphally, MacKenzie fired The Sun's astrologer in a letter that began 'As you will already know..'
posted by GeorgeBickham at 2:47 PM on January 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

And from the same sidebar, their commentary on Freud:

"Freud pére explains that he got his big idea of sex ruling every human action from a chance remark by Charcot, the hysteria specialist. Over and above the ordinary and pretty terrible Oedipus-complex governing everybody else, architects have a specially awful pathegraphic inhibition derived from a nursery libido–fixation, the urge to place one coloured brick on abother coloured brick. I hardly dare describe the significance of this in you, though I am as well up in the Freudian patter as most of the Bloomsbury bots. It is quite appalling."

Are they parodying Freud's ideas here, or actually reading something sexual into building blocks?
posted by Rangi at 2:47 PM on January 27, 2016