The Hillsborough disaster was for many fans a day that changed British football and brought about the end of the football terraces (place of fighting for many hooligans). On April 15, 1989, at Hillsborough, a football stadium in Sheffield home to Sheffield Wednesday F.C. hosted The tie between Nottingham Forest F.C. and Liverpool FC in the FA Cup semi final which was billed up to be one of the biggest games of the year, whereas in truth it was one that many will want to forget. There was a deadly human crush which resulted in the death of 96 football fans (all liverpool) and injuries to many others. But the most bizarre thing that happened was from the tabloid newspaper "The Sun". The Sun looked past the obvious fact that the police showed criminal neglegance in dealing with the problem the rght way and blamed the whole incident on the liverpool fans, something that many fans have never forgiven the sun for doing. From then on the relationship between the media and football fans has become fragmented and fractured. especially when hooligan incidants come around.
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'.
In their history of The Sun, Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie wrote:
'As MacKenzie's layout was seen by more and more people, a collective shudder ran through the office [but] MacKenzie's dominance was so total there was nobody left in the organisation who could rein him in except Murdoch. [Everyone] seemed paralysed, "looking like rabbits in the headlights", as one hack described them. The error staring them in the face was too glaring. It obviously wasn't a silly mistake; nor was it a simple oversight. Nobody really had any comment on it—they just took one look and went away shaking their heads in wonder at the enormity of it. It was a "classic smear".'
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.
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