Reds in the burgh – Liverpool Fans in Edinburgh

Okay a little history lesson regarding the sun newspaper

On the Wednesday following the disaster, Kelvin MacKenzie, then editor of The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper with national distribution owned by Rupert Murdoch, used the front page headline ‘THE TRUTH’, with three sub-headlines: ‘Some fans picked pockets of victims’; ‘Some fans urinated on the brave cops’; ‘Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life’.

The story accompanying these headlines claimed that ‘drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims’ and ‘police officers, firemen and ambulance crew were punched, kicked and urinated upon’. A quote, attributed to an unnamed policeman, claimed that a dead girl had been abused and that Liverpool fans ‘were openly urinating on us and the bodies of the dead’.

Following The Sun’s report, the newspaper was boycotted by most newsagents in Liverpool, with many refusing to stock the tabloid and large numbers of readers cancelling orders and refusing to buy from shops which did stock the newspaper. The Hillsborough Justice Campaign also organised a national boycott, which was less successful but certainly hit the paper’s sales.

Remember this Bob?

On 6 January 2007, during their team’s FA Cup defeat to Arsenal at Anfield, Liverpool fans in The Kop held up coloured cards spelling out “The Truth” and chanted “Justice for the 96″ for 6 minutes at the start of the game. The protest was organised by fan group Reclaim The Kop, with the support of Liverpool Football Club, and was directed at both Kelvin MacKenzie and the The Sun, as well as the BBC for employing MacKenzie as a presenter.

To this day, many people in the Liverpool area refuse to buy The Sun as a matter of principle, and the paper’s sales figures within Merseyside have been very poor since the day the original story was printed – as of 2004, the circulation in Liverpool was down to 12,000 copies a day, 200,000 less than previously.^[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster

http://www.reclaimthekop.co.uk

http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/lfc_story/memorial/a_index.shtml