The Sun will use anyone, and anything, to smear Gordon Brown – especially grieving mothers

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
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If it were stated baldly that a national British newspaper is running a daily campaign to destroy the career of a disabled man, highlighting his disability as an unacceptable weakness, no doubt much of the nation would be in uproar. And yet Gordon Brown’s visual impairment is currently being used against him by The Sun. Even worse in some respects, it is using the grief of a mother whose son recently died in Afghanistan to undermine Brown’s position as Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister.

There is no doubt that Brown’s mis-spelling of surname Janes as James was an unfortunate mistake but while Labour has few friends these days it takes a particularly devious and manipulative brain, such as one might discover inside the skull of a tabloid journalist, to suggest that the Prime Minister’s mistake reveals a callous lack of care on his part. If judging people on the basis of bad spelling, bad handwriting or typos is now the way forward we can expect the entire writing staff of The Guardian (or, it is affectionately known, The Grauniad) to be tried by News International grammar police shortly, with a dawn raid by Murdoch’s wide-boys in which computers, pens, and note-pads are confiscated.

Of course an immensity of grief and bitterness must result from losing a brave son at a young age in a war, and everyone must surely understand and make allowance for that inevitable process. Grief is universal and can lead to all sorts of things being said and done before the fuel of rage is exhausted, if it ever is. Your son’s name being mis-spelled on a hand-written letter of condolence is going to hurt, yes, but Brown telephoned Mrs Janes to apologise, and he did so quickly. It was the right thing to do.

Say what we like about the war, or about our troops not being given adequate resources, but Brown has no interest in or political gain to be made from deliberately insulting a grieving mother. The Sun, however, always of the opinion that it can tell the British public who to vote for and we will do as we are told, will use anyone and anything to get what it wants, and is certainly using Mrs Janes and her dead son in the hope of hastening the downfall of a democratically elected government.

I find the behaviour of The Sun this week far more offensive and distasteful—not to mention dangerous and sleazy—than an honest mistake ever could be.

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In recent weeks The Sun has also been running what amounts to a smear campaign against social networking site Facebook. It is interesting to note that the paper has published a number of positive stories about MySpace in that time, which is of course treated so well because it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and nobody has apparently told him that MySpace is… Well. It’s a bit shit.

Yesterday the ancient Australian billionaire revealed to the world that he plans to remove all News International content from search engines like Google. The simple addition of NOINDEX to pages will achieve that, it’s not something that requires heavy-duty expensive technology to be rolled out, and so we can but hope Murdoch carries through on what some are calling his threat, others like myself his gift to the world.

These two stories—the rubbishing of Facebook and the rubbishing of Gordon Brown—may appear at first to be unconnected, other than the fact that they are being attempted by The Sun. But they both stem from an unquenchable and never-ending thirst for power, and for the accumulation of money. And the ultimate source of the effluent is Rupert Murdoch—who isn’t British, who isn’t a democratically-elected spokesperson for any political party in any country, and who has always believed he has the power to change governments. Now he thinks he can change the Internet. He’ll be proven wrong about that, of course he will, but governments—yes, sadly for all of us: he can change those, so long as people believe what they read in tabloid newspapers. And they do.

It’s just sad, and tragic, and very wrong, that a mother’s grief is being used as it is this week by unscrupulous and immoral people who don’t have any of the bravery and humanity her son displayed in going to fight, and being prepared to die, for his country. I for one salute his courage and pour all the scorn and contempt I can muster on News International and its owner.

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