The Sun is a daily tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and Ireland (where it is known as The Irish Sun ) with the second highest circulation of any daily English-language newspaper in the world and the biggest circulation within the UK, standing at an average of 2,986,000 copies a day between January and June 2008 and with a daily readership of approximately 7,900,000, of which 56 percent are male and 44 percent female. By circulation it is the tenth biggest newspaper in any language in the world, four places behind its Sunday stablemate the News of the World, although their circulations are close and these places were briefly reversed during May 2008. It reaches 2.9 million readers in the ABC1 demographic and 5.0 million in the C2DE demographic, compared to the 1.5 and 0.1 million respectively of its broadsheet stablemate The Times . It is published by News Group Newspapers of News International, itself a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
History
The Sun was first published as a broadsheet on 15 September 1964 - with a logo featuring a glowing orange disc. It was launched by owners IPC (International Press Corporation) to replace the failing Daily Herald. The paper did not live up to IPC's expectations. Circulation continued to decline and it was soon losing even more money than the Herald had done.
In 1969, IPC decided to throw in the towel. The tycoon Robert Maxwell, eager to buy a British newspaper (which he later did, with the Mirror Group in 1984) offered to take it off their hands and retain its commitment to the Labour party, but admitted there would be redundancies, especially among the printers. Rupert Murdoch had already bought the News of the World , a sensationalist Sunday newspaper, the previous year, but the presses in the basement of his building in London's Bouverie Street sat idle six days a week. Seizing the opportunity to increase his presence on Fleet Street, he made an agreement with the print unions, promising fewer redundancies if he got the paper. He assured IPC that he would publish a "straightforward, honest newspaper" which would continue to support Labour. IPC, under pressure from the unions, rejected Maxwell's offer, and Murdoch bought the paper for £800,000, to be paid in instalments. He would later remark: "I am constantly amazed at the ease with which I entered British newspapers."
The early Murdoch years
Murdoch appointed Larry Lamb as his editor. Lamb was scathing in his opinion of the Mirror, the paper where he had recently been a senior sub-editor. He shared Murdoch's view that the measure of a paper's quality was best measured by its sales, and he regarded the Mirror as overstaffed, and primarily aimed at an aging readership. Lamb hastily recruited a staff of about 125 reporters, who were mostly selected for their availability rather than their ability. This was about a quarter of what the Mirror currently employed, and Murdoch had to draft in staff on loan from his Australian papers. Murdoch immediately relaunched The Sun as a tabloid, and ran it as a sister paper to the News of the World . The Sun used the same printing presses, and the two papers were now managed together at senior executive levels.
The tabloid Sun first published on 17 November , 1969, with a front page "splash" headlined HORSE DOPE SENSATION - an "exclusive" in which a racing trainer admitted to the paper that he was doping his horses.
The paper copied its rival The Daily Mirror in several ways. It was the same size and its masthead had the title in white on a red rectangle of the same colour as the Daily Mirror . The front page had the same general style and it could easily be picked up by mistake. Sports news was on the back pages in both. The text was written for a slightly lower reading age than the Mirror. The Mirror's "Lively Letters" was matched by "Liveliest Letters", and the comic strip "Garth" by a comic strip "Scarth" featuring a frequently naked woman. Later strips included Striker , set in the world of football; Axa , about a barbarian woman in a post-apocalyptic world; Hagar the Horrible, the comic adventures of a home-loving Viking warrior; and George and Lynne , a domestic gag-a-day strip about a couple and their friends and neighbours. George and Lynne were normally pictured naked but discreetly covered.
Sex was used as an important element in marketing the paper from the start. While the Daily Mirror frequently featured a pin-up photograph of a young woman in bikini or lingerie, ostensibly as a fashion item, The Sun dispensed with the excuses; it featured what were openly glamour photographs of women, wearing fewer clothes than their Mirror counterparts. Exactly a year after it was first published, The Sun printed a topless model on Page 3 for the first time. The Page Three girl gradually became a daily staple of the paper. Features such as 'Do Men Still Want To Marry A Virgin?' and 'The Way into a Woman's Bed' began to appear. Serialisations of erotic books were frequent; the publication of extracts from The Sensuous Woman, at a time when copies of the book were being seized by Customs, produced a scandal and a gratifying amount of free publicity.
Despite the industrial relations of the 1970s - the so-called "Spanish practices" of the print unions - The Sun was very profitable, enabling Murdoch to expand to the United States from 1973.
Politically, The Sun in the early Murdoch years, remained nominally Labour. It supported Labour in the 1970 General Election, although in the two 1974 elections, the paper's attitude to Labour was "agnostic", according to Roy Greenslade in Press Gang (2003). The then editor, Larry Lamb, was originally from a Labour background, with a socialist upbringing. Deputy editor Bernard Shrimsley was a middle-class uncommitted Conservative.
In 1978 The Sun overtook the Daily Mirror in circulation, partly thanks to extensive advertising on ITV, voiced by actor Christopher Timothy.
A year later the paper caused a small stir by changing tack politically, endorsing Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 general election. On 3 May , it ran the unequivocal front page headline, VOTE TORY THIS TIME.
Thatcherite king of the tabloids: the 1980s
The Sun's sale grew and grew during the 1980s and the paper became increasingly brash under the editorship of Kelvin MacKenzie. Bingo, introduced in 1981, was a key driver of the circulation rise.
The Sun was an ardent supporter of Margaret Thatcher and her policies. Throughout the 1980s, its stance, on many issues, was to the right of the Daily Mail, and it maintained its very strong support for the Conservatives when Thatcher was succeeded by John Major in 1990.
The Sun also made frequent scathing attacks on what the paper called the "loony left" element within the Labour Party and on institutions supposedly controlled by it, such as the left-wing Greater London Council and Liverpool City Council.
The Sun also did a story extensively quoting a respected American psychiatrist claiming that British left-wing politician Tony Benn was "insane", with the psychiatrist discussing various aspects of Benn's supposed pathology. The story was discredited when the psychiatrist in question publicly denounced the article and described the false quotes attributed to him as "absurd", The Sun having apparently fabricated the entire piece.
The Sun , during the British miners' strike, 1984-1985 supported the police and the Thatcher government against the striking NUM miners. The paper was accused of making misleading or even outright false claims about the miners, their unions and Arthur Scargill. On May 23 , 1984, The Sun prepared a front page with the headline "Mine Führer" and a photograph of Scargill with his arm in the air, a pose which made him look as though he was giving a Nazi salute. The print workers at The Sun , regarding it as an attempt at a cheap smear, refused to print it.
The Sun strongly supported the April 1986 bombing of Libya by the USA, which was launched from British bases. Several civilians were killed during the bombing. Their leader was "Right Ron, Right Maggie"
In January 1986 Murdoch shut down the Bouverie Street premises of The Sun and News of the World , and moved operations to the new Wapping complex in East London, blocking union activity and greatly reducing the number of staff employed to print the papers; a year-long picket by sacked workers was eventually defeated (see Wapping dispute).
During the 1987 the Sun ran an extraordinary mock-editorial entitled "Why I'm Backing Kinnock, by Joseph Stalin.
Although the coverage of the 1992 election remains the best remembered, there were many other vitriolic personal attacks on Labour leaders by the Sun during election campaigns, such as in 1983 when the Sun ran a front page featuring an unflattering photograph of Michael Foot, claiming he was unfit to be Prime Minister on grounds of his age and appearance, as well as his policies, alongside the headline "Do You Really Want This Old Fool To Run Britain?",. Paradoxically, a year later, in 1984, the Sun made clear its enthusiastic support for the re-election of Ronald Reagan as president in the USA. Reagan was two years older than Foot.
The 1990s
The Sun vociferously supported the introduction of the controversial Poll Tax by Margaret Thatch
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