A big anniversary is looming. No, nothing to do with east Germans streaming through gaps in the Berlin wall. On 17 November 2009 it will be 40 years since the first edition of Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun newspaper rolled off the presses.

The Sun existed before Murdoch took over. It first appeared in 1964, and was a relaunch of the socialist Daily Herald, which in the 1930s was the world’s best-selling newspaper. But Murdoch’s takeover marked a complete change of direction — the ‘Dirty Digger’ turned The Sun into a sensationalist tabloid full of scandal, sex and popular games such as bingo.

However you look at it, Murdoch’s 40-year ownership of The Sun has been an extraordinary business success. In 1969, it was selling about 850,000 daily copies. This soon rose into the millions. In the 1980s, the daily sale was 4 milllion — the biggest circulation in Europe after Germany’s Bild. In the mid-1990s it was up to 4.7 million or so. Even now it sells 3 million, showing great resilience in the face of the Internet onslaught on publishers.

Such huge sales make it influential. The Sun has not been popular in Brussels, being seen as eurosceptic and sometimes downright dishonest in its coverage of EU affairs. Take a look at the Commission’s ‘myths and rumours’ website, which attempts to answer misleading press stories about the EU, and you will see that most of the best stories come from The Sun, from builders being forced to wear t-shirts in hot weather because of cancer fears, to an obligation to hand in sex toys to the authorities because of electronic waste rules. As far as I know, The Sun has no Brussels correspondent for the Commission to take issue with.

The ‘barmy Brussels bureaucrats’ stories can be seen as damaging of course, because The Sun does sell so many copies. But eurocrats can take some comfort in the fact that they are not The Sun’s only targets. From the outset of Murdoch’s reign, the paper has claimed to stand up for the man or woman in the street against unwarranted interference in their business. Before Brussels, The Sun targeted ‘loony leftie’ local councillors in Britain, and then the 1980s/1990s Labour party in general. The Sun even claimed to have won the 1992 general election for the Conservatives with its eve-of-poll headline: ‘If [Neil] Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.’

Right-wing rag

The Currant Bun, as former editor Kelvin Mackenzie called it, is seen as a right-wing rag but in fact its success has left it owing an allegiance to no-one. It switched its backing to Labour under Blair, but is now turning its back on Brown. It is of course owned by an Australian turned American, whose interest in Europe (or anything) is the impact it might have on his bottom line. When Murdoch turned The Sun tabloid he put in place a team that was not part of the then London press establishment. Most of the senior editorial staff were recruited from northern English regional papers with a natural distrust of ‘down south’, or anywhere further afield.

The EU has been a victim of this inbuilt scepticism, as with the famous headline from November 1990: ‘Up yours, Delors… At midday tomorrow Sun readers are urged to tell the French fool where to stuff his ECU’. But is it such a bad thing in the end? The role of the press is to be a check on power, and The Sun, for its many faults, has played its part.

The Sun is also an antidote to power because it expresses its ideas clearly, though in its particular vernacular, whereas those in power use language to disguise their motives. Journalists in Brussels should not forget that the daily ritual of the midday briefing and densely-written Commission statements is an exercise in information control and news management. Sometimes a Sun-style information blunderbuss is needed to blow away the obfuscation.

And it’s nice to see The Sun has not totally lost its knack of turning out classic headlines (‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’, etc.). The recent ‘Barmy Britney’s barnet barney’ (Britney Spears argued with her hairdresser) showed that the subs still have it. Incidentally, The Sun’s take on Berlin, 1989: ‘It’s wall over.’

It’s hard to see, however, what The Sun might look like if it makes it to a fiftieth anniversary. Rupert Murdoch is now nearly 80, while newspaper circulations are falling and their readerships fragmenting. The Sun will survive in some format no doubt, but its glory days are most likely behind it.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 3:01 pm and is filed under EU. 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.