The Sun never rises: Rupert Murdoch and the dustbin of history

The Football Association: “Allow journalists from The Sun newspaper in your press briefings, or no England games will be played at Anfield.”
Liverpool Football Club: “Alright then. No England games it is.”

Red wall

Media billionaire Rupert Murdoch recently decided that his once-prized possession, The Sun newspaper, is financially worthless. Murdoch announced that he had written down the value of The Sun newspaper to zero, acknowledging that the paper that created his fortune was now worth absolutely nothing.
Newspapers are struggling all over the world, but The Sun’s fall has been spectacular. Losing its readers, advertisers and its political raison d’être. Murdoch turned 90 this year. It is only a matter of time before the paper, a huge loss-maker, also loses the only person keeping it alive.
The Sun used to sell four million copies a day and made around £4 million a week. Today, the paper’s circulation figures are not published, and losses are heading towards £200 million.
A decent chunk of the losses spring from the News of the World phone hacking pay-outs. That whole saga cost the group around £80m in legal costs, including £52m of fees and damages paid to civil claimants.
The estimate of The Sun’s asset value was based on the assumption that it would not return to positive growth.
After 42 years as the UK’s best-selling newspaper, The Sun lost its title to the Daily Mail last year. The Sun’s brands do however reach 36m adults in the UK through its print titles and website.
The Sun has experimented with various digital business models to try to make up for the decline of its core business, including an online paywall that it introduced for two years and then dropped. News UK, Murdoch’s UK business, has tried to expand the brand into audio, betting and gaming.
It is next to impossible now to buy The Sun on Merseyside. This has been the result of decades-long campaigning against the paper’s malicious and slanderous lies surrounding the football disaster at Hillsborough stadium in 1989, where 96 fans lost their lives.
The paper accused fans of causing the disaster, of being drunk, of disrespecting the dead. It was a catalogue of misrepresentation, all founded on an agenda of division: South v North, Tory v Labour, and much else that fuelled the world of tabloid sleaze. Which is bizarre, as you couldn’t get more working class than Liverpool. The paper’s core readership was male, white and working class.

Green top

The strangest change of direction is the paper’s sudden concern for climate change. The tabloid Sun has been published for 52 years and until last week it couldn’t give a damn about the planet’s rising temperature.
It is a ludicrous attempt to attract the young. Can you imagine anybody under 40 reading the Sun?
The paper has launched a ‘Green Team’ advising readers on cutting their carbon footprint. It asks them to ‘join our campaign and save the planet’ by dropping used face masks into bins at Morrison’s where they’ll be recycled and ‘turned into benches and building materials.’
According to former Sun editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, “Nowadays, Murdoch has more pills than he has readers.”
I always found it insulting when people said that The Sun was “harmless fun.” It was neither harmless, nor funny. It was philistine and vulgar, and peddled low-brow journalism to the masses.
None shall mourn its passing.
As Martin Luther King put it, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”.

(Sources: Financial Times; The Spectator)

James Neophytou