Press Exposure: Sun Stroke (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing was more memorable in Dennis Potter's interview on the South Bank Show, shortly before he died last year, than when he revealed the name he had given to the cancer which was killing him. It was Rupert — after Rupert ("I’d shoot the bugger if I could") Murdoch. I look at the Sun said Potter, warming to his theme and I ask myself is this what we've come to.

Well yes. except that there’s a bit more to it than that. What we’ve "come to" is not just a malignant press baron and a newspaper which will stoop as low as it needs to boost its sales. We've "come to" a situation in which a quarter of the population lives below a Department of Social Security poverty line. A situation in which Shelter are handling a record caseload as more and more people are homeless. A situation in which the publisher of a string of soft porn magazines (the kind of man who is always liable to be "exposed" by the Sun) says he is flooded with requests from women anxious to pose for his publications. Because that's their only way of getting a living.

This situation — its poverty, misery, degradation — is not new. We have not "come to" it because we have lived with it for a very long time, however its details may have changed. How do we cope with it? Well one way is to understand it as the symptoms of a social system which is outworn and sick at its roots and which must be replaced by a fundamentally different way of running the world. Another way (but we would have to be like Rupert Murdoch) is to say we're doing very nicely so we’d like to leave things as they are. Or (if we're among Murdoch's devoted customers) we can defend our sanity with the kind of mental anaesthetic which makes the trivial important and vice versa. Flavour the anaesthetic with a large measure of fantasy and we "come to" the Sun.

Murdoch's odious rag was originally the Daily Herald which, owned 49 percent by the TUC, was the Labour Party’s only reliable supporter — and. in the 1930s, the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain. In the 1950s the Herald fell on hard times and in 1961 it was bought by Cecil King’s IPC group, which guaranteed it another seven years’ publication. In 1964, in an effort to stem falling sales, the paper was revamped as the Sun, with a large orange blob on its masthead. By the end of IPC's guarantee it was seen that the Sun could not survive and it was again up for sale. Robert Maxwell offered to take the paper off IPC's hands for nothing but fell foul of union opposition. This let in Murdoch, who already owned the News Of The World; in 1969 he got the Sun for the knockdown price of £800,000. It now makes him millions every year, the kind of profits which can easily stand expensive libel suits, like the one which made Elton John richer by £1 million and a grudging apology in the Sun.

Regal Pomposity

It takes the breath away now, but Murdoch's Sun promised to be a paper "that cares — passionately — about the truth, beauty and justice". Its editor was Larry Lamb, whose regal pomposity was in sharp contrast to the loud boorish cruelty of the man who succeeded him. Kelvin Mackenzie was diabolically clever at rapidly setting out the shock horror stuff which passes for news in the Sun. And he did not seem greatly troubled about whether what he was setting out with such skill was true or not.

Since then the Sun has been synonymous with the lowest standards of journalism and concern for human society. Page Three girls present a relentless distortion of our sexuality, hyped-up by the kind of puns which are a speciality of the paper. (A recent example was the invitation to readers to give their opinion on Princess Diana's new wet-look hairstyle in a "RefHAIRrendum".)

The sanitised semi-nudity of Page Three girls and cartoons — like a recent example in which a policeman was apparently having oral sex through a car window with a well-known TV actress — do not prevent the Sun sometimes taking a stridently moral stance on sex. Double standards are something the paper takes in its stride. Like the time it invented an interview with the widow of a soldier — Sergeant MacKay — who had been killed winning the Victoria Cross in the Falklands. As "The Paper That Supports Our Boys" the Sun might have been expected to respect Mrs MacKay's wish to be left alone in her grief. Instead they tried every trick in the book to get at her and then simply invented an interview out of information from other people and a rehash of material published by other papers.

We could go on. And on. The headlines (Gotcha; Stick It Up Your Junta; Up Yours Delors). The relentless hounding of vulnerable people like the dying Russell Harty. These are what have made the Sun such a success, with a daily sale of four million and a readership three times as much. For it as an extremely clever and sophisticated newspaper, whose success says a lot about capitalism in the latter part of the twentieth century. A malignant mouthpiece of a cancerous society.

Ivan