The Sun is known for other things than its tact. Following the Hillsborough Disaster when 96 Liverpool supporters were killed in a crush at a football stadium it ran a two word headline: ‘The Truth’. The truth, as the Sun saw it, was that some fans had been picking the pockets of the dead, while others had been urinating on the police offers who waded in to help.

Liverpool was outraged. Most of the city’s newsagents refused to sell the paper, and many still do.

Then there was the Wapping Dispute where a move to new working practices, a potential slashing of the workforce and a relocation from Fleet Street in the centre of the city out to Wapping in the Docklands sparked strikes that lasted over a year.

You could argue that the switch would have happened sooner or later anyway, but the way in which it was conducted, with a whole new printing plant being built in secrecy and kept under wraps until the last minute, didn’t really make it look like the management trusted its staff.

But since the appointment of Rebekah Wade as editor, taking over at the helm of The Sun following the departure of David Yelland back in January the paper’s activities have become particularly worrying. Let’s not forget that it was during her tenure at the News of the World that the paper launched a name and shame campaign, which saw gangs out on the streets hunting down paedophiles. Innocent people were caught up in the resulting campaign, with a paediatrician in Wales returning home to find her house had been vandalised by idiots who, caught up in national hysteria, didn’t know the difference between a doctor who helps children and an abuser who hurts them. Or simply didn’t care.

It is since Wade’s appointment that the paper’s two perhaps most repugnant acts have been carried out. On 20th February it distributed a French edition on the streets of Paris. The headline, ‘Chirac est un ver’ (Chirac is a worm), was accompanied by a photo of the French president’s face pasted onto the body of a worm which itself was spiralling out of an outline of France from somewhere in the region of Clermont-Ferrand.

The accompanying article opened with the kind of words you’d expect to hear spoken by an invasion force: ‘Greetings to the citizens of Paris from The Sun newspaper, which is read by ten million people every day.’ It then went on to reveal that apparently ‘British people feel M Chirac, who in the UK is nicknamed the ‘worm’, is arrogantly strutting about trying to make France seem more important in the world than it really is.’

But do we? Has anyone over here, outside of the Sun’s editorial offices, ever called Chirac ‘the worm’? It’s certainly not a term I’ve heard used unless in connection with this article. But here is the UK’s best selling daily newspaper telling the French people that it is how we refer to their President. It is putting words into our mouths.

Is it any wonder that relations between our respective leaders are at their lowest ebb for years?

And then yesterday morning The Sun hit out again, publishing yet another French edition, this time even more abusive than the last. It describes Chirac as ‘Saddam Hussein’s whore’, explaining that ‘Last month we accused Chirac of behaving like a worm. Today we say to the people of France: we did not go far enough. Your president is not just a worm. He has behaved like a Paris harlot.’

Gloating, it reported its explots on its own site this morning. using the most jingoistic, stereotypical and unnecessary language, with tracts like ‘We drove from the printers through the seedy back streets of Paris to leave thousands of copies at Metro stations. Our boys in the Gulf can be reassured that The Sun will always fight their battles back home’, ‘On a sunny Champs Elys

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2003 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Europe, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.