Liverpool fans to demonstrate for boycott of the Sun
Posted by Phil Dickens at 19:10
Prior to this Sunday’s match against Sunderland, Liverpool supporters backed by the Hillsborough Justice Campaign will be holding a demonstration in support of a continued boycott of the Sun. This serves as a timely reminder of the real and lasting damage media sensationalism can cause.
Fans will be distributing leaflets explaining the boycott around the Anfield area, but the hope in this demonstration is to spread awareness beyond those who are already very unlikely to buy the paper. Fans are encouraged to collect posters from the shop opposite the Kop and display them in the ground prior to kick off. There is also the possibility of escalating this campaign by displaying a mosaic at the subsequent Bolton match.
Of late, it was the Sun’s sister paper – the News of the World – which came under intense scrutiny, for the phone hacking scandal. However with that paper’s closure, and the sacking of a significant number of people, much of the furore has since died down. But it would be a mistake to presume guilt lay entirely with this one newspaper, or even stopped at News International.
As Adam Ford pointed out a while back, “every newspaper is subject to exactly the same pressures, in a dwindling but highly competitive market. Murdoch merely acted to introduce a lowest common denominator, a barrel-scraping standard against which all other papers must measure themselves.”
Nor is this a recent phenomenon, as the involvement of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign tells us. Scousers have no love for “the Scum” because of its horrendous reporting of that disaster, in which 96 people died as a result of a human crush, whereby it falsely accused fans of stealing from and urinating on the dead.
The boycott has severely impacted sales of the rag in Liverpool, and is reasoned by some as the reason for continual price cuts and promotions in an attempt to boost sales.
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