Hillsborough and The Sun

In 1989, English football had its worst ever tragedy. In an FA Cup semifinal match between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool Football Club held at Hillsborough in Sheffield, there was a miscommunication and horrific mistake made by the police about the opening of the gates to let fans in and since the stadium was standing room only, eventually the poor policing led to a human crush at the metal fence at the bottom of the stand, resulting in the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans. 96 people went to a football match and never returned.

The fallout after the disaster was immense. It's important to note that in the late 80s, football hooliganism and violence at matches was just now on its way out, so some people were quick to make the conclusion that it was the fault of the fans that day. Many publications took this idea and ran with it, condemning the morality of the Liverpool fans and blaming them for the deaths of the 96.

The most notorious of these reports came from Rupert Murdoch's The Sun which released an absolutely vicious series of accusations against the Liverpool fans labeled "THE TRUTH" which went on to enumerate how the fans were all incredibly intoxicated and urinated on the bodies of the dead while also punching and kicking rescue workers who were trying to help. None of this was at all true and it only served to spread misinformation about the disaster and to make the victims' families suffer even more.

Immediately the Liverpool market shut down almost all circulation of The Sun and it still to this very day sells incredibly few copies in Liverpool, despite multiple times of the paper trying to issue an apology but being rebuffed by the ongoing boycott. It just goes to show how quickly a public can turn on you and how they may never trust you again. Journalistic integrity may not mean a lot to these people but I'm sure sales do and they're regretting having ever published any of that.

Something I learned firsthand in my time in Liverpool was that its people are not ones who forget or forgive easily. There's an enormous memorial with all of the names of the Hillsborough victims as well as an eternal flame lit in their memory. It's a beautifully somber reminder of how Liverpool cherish their fans. And as I walk into the stadium that Sunday I notice something else: a tatted-up Scouser with a giant logo of The Sun on the back of his neck marked with a big red circle and a line going through it. It's amazing to see just how horrible a publication could be towards a group of people they knew almost nothing about and to see just how much of an impact that can make on a community and the media that they consume. It's not every day that you see a publication completely at odds with an entire community.