Global InformationCoverage of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun information
Coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster by the British tabloid The Sun led to the newspaper's decline in Liverpool and the broader Merseyside region, with organised boycotts against it. The disaster occurred at a football match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Ninety-seven Liverpool supporters were crushed to death, and several hundred others were injured, due to negligence by the South Yorkshire Police. On 19 April 1989, four days after the incident, The Sun published a front-page story with the headline "The Truth" containing a number of falsehoods alleging that Liverpool supporters were responsible for the accident.
Though other newspapers reported stories critical of the fans, The Sun drew outrage among Liverpudlians for its repetition of unreliable claims as fact—including false claims by police officers—and its position in the aftermath of the events. From 1993 to 2012, editor Kelvin MacKenzie, who was in charge of many of the publication decisions, gave conflicting comments on whether he was sorry for the front-page story and said that his mistake was in trusting a Conservative Member of Parliament—Irvine Patnick, who was quoted in the piece. The Sun issued apologies in 2004, after Wayne Rooney was criticised for giving exclusive interviews to the paper, in 2012, under the headline "The Real Truth", and in 2016, on a page 8–9 story in the aftermath of a second governmental inquest that concluded fans were unlawfully killed in the disaster.
After a protest in Kirkby in which women burned copies of the newspaper, The Sun (referred to as The S*n or The Scum) was widely boycotted in Merseyside. Sales have been estimated to have dropped from 55,000 per day in the region to 12,000 in 2019. Campaigns against the newspaper including Total Eclipse of the Sun and Shun the Sun first aimed to decrease purchases of the tabloid, and then supply of it by retailers. Journalists from the paper have been denied access to interviews at Liverpool and Everton grounds. Chris Horrie estimated in 2014 that the boycott had cost The Sun's owners £15 million per month, in 1989 terms, since the disaster.
In 2024, it was reported that the paper's coverage of the disaster would form part of the materials used to train British Members of Parliament in how to identify "fake news".[1]
- ^ Quinn, Ben (3 April 2024). "The Sun's Hillsborough stories used to teach MPs how to recognise fake news". The Guardian. GNM. Retrieved 3 April 2024.