The Sun (United Kingdom)
The Sun is a British tabloid newspaper, published by the News Group Newspapers division of News UK, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Lachlan Murdoch's News Corp. It was founded as a broadsheet in 1964 as a successor to the Daily Herald, and became a tabloid in 1969 after it was purchased by its current owner. The Sun had the largest daily newspaper circulation in the United Kingdom, but was overtaken by freesheet rival Metro in March 2018.
The paper became a seven-day operation when The Sun on Sunday was launched in February 2012 to replace the closed News of the World and employed some of its former journalists. In March 2020, the average circulation for The Sun was 1.21 million, The Sun on Sunday 1,013,777.
The Sun has been involved in many controversies in its history, with some of the most notable being their coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. Regional editions of the newspaper for Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland are published in Glasgow, Belfast, and Dublin, respectively. There is currently no separate Welsh edition of The Sun; readers in Wales receive the same edition as the readers in England.
History
''The Sun'' before Rupert Murdoch
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 to replace the failing Daily Herald on the advice of market researcher Mark Abrams. The paper was intended to add a readership of "social radicals" to the Herald "political radicals". Of Abrams' work, Bernard Shrimsley wrote that 40 years later there supposedly was "an immense, sophisticated and superior middle class, hitherto undetected and yearning for its own newspaper.... As delusions go, this was in the El Dorado class". Launched with an advertising budget of £400,000, the brash new paper "burst forth with tremendous energy" according to The Times. Its initial print run of 3.5 million was attributed to "curiosity" and the "advantage of novelty", and had declined to the previous circulation of the Daily Herald within a few weeks.By 1969, according to Hugh Cudlipp, The Sun was losing about £2 million a year, and had a circulation of 800,000. IPC decided to sell to stop the losses, according to Bernard Shrimsley in 2004, out of a fear that the unions would disrupt publication of the Mirror if they did not continue to publish the original Sun. Bill Grundy wrote in The Spectator in July 1969 that although it published "fine writers" in Geoffrey Goodman, Nancy Banks-Smith and John Akass among others, it had never overcome the negative impact of its launch at which it still resembled the Herald. The pre-Murdoch Sun was "a worthy, boring, leftish, popular broadsheet" in the opinion of Patrick Brogan in 1982.
Robert Maxwell, a book publisher and Member of Parliament who was eager to buy a British newspaper, 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, meanwhile, had 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 were unused six days a week.
Seizing the opportunity to increase his presence on Fleet Street, he made an agreement with the print unions by promising fewer redundancies if he acquired the newspaper. 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".
Early Murdoch years
The Daily Herald had been printed in Manchester since 1930, as was the Sun after its original launch in 1964. Murdoch stopped publication there in 1969, which put the ageing Bouverie Street presses under extreme pressure as circulation grew. Additionally, Murdoch found he had such a rapport with Larry Lamb over lunch that other potential recruits as editor were not interviewed and Lamb was appointed as the first editor of the new Sun. Lamb wanted Bernard Shrimsley to be his deputy, which Murdoch accepted as Shrimsley had been the second name on his list of preferences.Lamb was scathing in his opinion of the Daily Mirror, where he had recently been employed as a senior sub-editor, and shared Murdoch's view that a paper's quality was best measured by its sales. Lamb regarded the Mirror as overstaffed and too focused on an ageing readership. Godfrey Hodgson of The Sunday Times interviewed Murdoch at this time and expressed a positive view of the rival's "Mirrorscope" supplement. Dropping a sample copy into a bin, Murdoch replied: "If you think we're going to have any of that upmarket shit in our paper, you're very much mistaken".
Lamb hastily recruited a staff of about 125 reporters, who were mostly selected for availability rather than their ability. That was about a quarter of what the Mirror then 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 managed together at senior executive levels.
The tabloid Sun was first published on 17 November 1969, with a front page headlined "HORSE DOPE SENSATION", an ephemeral "exclusive". An editorial on page 2 announced: "Today's Sun is a new newspaper. It has a new shape, new writers, new ideas. But it inherits all that is best from the great traditions of its predecessors. The Sun cares. About the quality of life. About the kind of world we live in. And about people". The first issue had an "exclusive interview" with the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson on page 9. The paper copied the rival 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. These papers are now known as red tops. The Mirror "Live Letters" was matched by "Livelier Letters".
Sex was used as an important element in the content and marketing of the paper from the start, which Lamb believed was the most important part of his readers' lives. The first topless Page 3 model appeared on 17 November 1970, Stephanie Rahn; she was tagged as a "Birthday Suit Girl" to mark the first anniversary of the relaunched Sun. A topless Page 3 model gradually became a regular fixture, and with increasingly risqué poses. Both feminists and many cultural conservatives saw the pictures as pornographic and misogynistic. Lamb later expressed some regret at introducing the feature, although he denied it was sexist. A Conservative council in Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire, was the first to ban the paper from its public library, shortly after Page 3 began, because of its excessive sexual content. Shrimsley, Lamb's deputy, came up with the headline, "The Silly Burghers of Sowerby Bridge" to describe the councillors. The decision was reversed after a sustained campaign by the newspaper itself lasting 16 months, and the election of a Labour-led council in 1971.
The Labour MP Alex Lyon waved a copy of The Sun in the House of Commons and suggested the paper could be prosecuted for indecency. Sexually related 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 while copies of the book were being seized by Customs produced a scandal and a significant amount of free publicity.
Politically, The Sun in the early Murdoch years nominally continued to support Labour. It advocated a vote for the Labour Party led by Harold Wilson in the 1970 UK general election, with the headline "Why It Must Be Labour"; but by February 1974, it was calling for a vote for the Conservative Party led by Edward Heath and suggesting that it might support a Labour Party led by James Callaghan or Roy Jenkins. In the October election, an editorial asserted: "ALL our instincts are left rather than right and we would vote for any able politician who would describe himself as a Social Democrat". In the 1975 referendum on Britain continuing membership of the European Economic Community, it advocated a vote to stay in the Common Market.
The editor, Larry Lamb, was originally from a Labour background with a socialist upbringing though his temporary replacement Bernard Shrimsley was a middle-class uncommitted Conservative. An extensive advertising campaign on the ITV network that was voiced by actor Christopher Timothy, may have helped The Sun to overtake the Daily Mirror circulation in 1978. Despite the industrial relations of the 1970s with the so-called "Spanish practices" of the print unions, The Sun was very profitable, enabling Murdoch to expand his operations to the United States from 1973.