Don’t buy the Sun campaign

As people started to come to terms with the disaster that occurred at Hillsborough only days before, many others began questioning how and why it happened. A police investigation was also underway to try and determine the truth and get to the bottom of why so many fans were allowed into the stadium in the first place.

Despite many people still in shock over the tragedy however, the disaster also turned out to be the catalyst of the biggest controversy in the history of sport, -with media-sport relations taking a nosedive after the Sun newspaper printed a controversial headline and accompanying story on its front page. It all started on the Wednesday following the disaster, the then editor of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, used the headline ‘The Truth’ with three sub headlines that read ‘ Some fans picked pockets of victims’, ‘Some fans urinated on the brave cops’, and ‘Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.’ The story also went on to claim that ‘drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims’ and quoted an unnamed policeman that claimed a dead girl had been ‘abused’.

The newspaper at the time believed that the claims were from a reliable source. Following the Sun’s report, many newsagents in Liverpool boycotted the paper and declared that they would never sell the title again. The same feeling ran among the people of Liverpool too with many people cancelling orders for the daily paper. Because of the huge backlash that the story caused, the newspaper and its editor were forced to apologise and explain their actions – however, these apologies didn’t come straight away. MacKenzie explained his reporting in 1993 whilst talking to a House of Commons Select Committee, 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 had not agreed with what was said, we would not have gone with it.’ Despite this apology however, he later said in 2006 that he only apologised because the newspaper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, told him to do so. The Sun issued an apology for their treatment of the Hillsborough disaster ‘without reservation’ in a full page opinion piece in 2004 however.