“News Group are claiming they are entirely innocent of the things I had accused the Sun of doing,” 90s dreamboat and long-time Rupert Murdoch foe Hugh Grant posted on X. “As is common with entirely innocent people, they are offering me an enormous sum of money to keep this matter out of court.”
Grant, alongside Prince Harry and others, had been suing News Group Newspapers (NGN), the publisher of Rupert Murdoch’s biggest UK tabloid The Sun, for what he alleged was widespread unlawful information gathering, including phone tapping, burglary and “blagging” (gaining under false pretences) confidential information about him.
Grant said he had “reluctantly” accepted the settlement, on account of the costs he may be later forced to pay if the case continued — Prince Harry’s lawyer conceded the royal could also be “forced” to agree to a deal.
NGN has always denied allegations of any wrongdoing by staff at The Sun and, returning to Grant’s point about the behaviour of innocent parties, has settled more than 1,300 cases. “The Sun does not accept liability or make any admissions to the allegations,” a spokesperson said. And indeed with the following track record, who could detect any reason to doubt that the reporting of Murdoch’s redtops has been anything other than completely above board?
A ‘culture of illegal payments’
The closure of Murdoch’s News of the World, after the Leveson Inquiry revealed widespread phone hacking at the publication, sometimes blurs out how widespread the alleged misconduct really was.
Deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers told the inquiry in 2012 that evidence suggested there was a “culture of illegal payments” to public officials, authorised at a senior level, at The Sun.
Not just “the odd drink or meal”, she said. The payments were “regular, frequent and sometimes significant sums of money to public officials”.
The payments covered people in “police, military, health and government”, she said. It didn’t end up sticking: 19 of The Sun’s reporters were prosecuted under an investigation into these relationships but only one, Anthony France was convicted, after it was found he had paid a police officer £22,000 (A$42,500) between 2008 and 2011 for information that lead to 38 published stories. However, this conviction was later quashed on appeal.
That The Sun paid public figures for leaks is not in question; it paid Bettina Jordan-Barber, a “mole” at the Ministry of Defence, £100,000 (A$193,000). Chief reporter John Kay told the resulting trial he “never” thought the payments were illegal. Kay and three other Sun journos were cleared. Jordan-Barber was jailed for 12 months.”
The fake sheikh
Legendary sting-based scoop-getter Mazher Mahmood was frequently accused of “entrapment” over his decades as “the fake sheikh”, humiliating various high-profile figures (often in sport) by posing as a sheikh and offering various corrupting inducements. Mahmood was working for The Sun of Sunday (established to fill the grubby gap in the market left by NotW) when a drug sting against R&B singer-songwriter and former X-Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos led to his downfall.
The trial that resulted from his elaborate entrapment of Contostavlos collapsed — Mahmood was found to have lied in his evidence and was later jailed for 15 months after being found guilty of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
The Falklands and Hillsborough
Most people probably think of the Falklands War as Thatcher’s war. For me — and, I suspect, for a good many other journalists, that bizarre spasm of post-imperial imperialism was really The Sun‘s war. Or, to be more precise, Kelvin’s war. Kelvin MacKenzie’s Falklands coverage — xenophobic, bloody-minded, ruthless, often reckless, black-humoured and ultimately triumphalist — captured the zeitgeist. Here was a new Britain and a new kind of newspaper heralding the emergence of a transformed culture.
So wrote former assistant editor Roy Greenslade in The Guardian 20 years later. While it didn’t break any laws, The Sun‘s coverage of the early 80s conflict in the Falklands is notorious. The headline “STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA!” became a T-shirt. The paper sold thousands of them. Most notoriously, when British forces sank the Argentinian ship the ARA General Belgrano (eventually killing 368 people) the paper ran the headline “GOTCHA”.
The paper’s reporting of the 1989 tragedy at Hillsborough football ground, during which 96 people were killed and dozens badly injured, however, might be its lowest point. In the aftermath of the tragedy, The Sun ran a story under the headline “The Truth”, quoting a police officer who claimed Liverpool supporters had stolen from and urinated on victims as they lay dying, and beat up “brave cops” trying to help. It emerged in 2012 that they were sent by a Sheffield news agency, White’s, and quoted by The Sun almost verbatim — at which point the paper issued an apology. The Sun is still boycotted in Liverpool.
