Why Wayne’s place isn’t in The Sun
By
Mickey Blue Eyes.

In a relatively “free” society we are all entitled – esoteric arguments aside – to pursue an honest living any way, any time we want. Thus, Wayne Rooney is entitled to make contributions via a journalist to The Sun newspaper if he so wishes. It’s his life and his name he is selling. But in my opinion he is making a terrible mistake in choosing any of the media owned by Rupert Murdoch. Here’s why.

A mere twenty years ago Murdoch’s newspapers launched the most savage extreme right-wing propaganda attacks even in British history. One of their main targets was our city and its people. This is not the place to list in detail their cultural atrocities or lies. That will come later and in a much longer piece. However, anyone who was paying attention at the time – or who has made even a cursory independent study – will know Murdoch and his thug-journalists were responsible for the most evil distortion of the truth in Britain since the Second World War. Given the precedents that’s some action, that. The journalists responsible would not be out of place in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Their disgraceful litany included our city’s economic decline, the “Toxteth” riots and the murder of little James Bulger. Each of these terrible events were merely symptomatic of a right-wing induced litter-strewn authoritarian rat-hole national culture. But propagandist Murdoch and his employees had found their easy target to blame for all of it, and the opportunity to say Look What Happens To You When You Don’t Do As WE Say. In the process they destroyed the lives of millions of innocent and decent citizens not only on Merseyside but throughout the nation.

Then came the horrors of the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989. Incredibly, the Sun and Murdoch’s Times newspapers told lie after lie about the causes. It was no real surprise they blamed the fans, a lie so pernicious it fell easily before Lord Justice Peter Taylor’s subsequent official inquiry and was even emphasised as untrue in his two-volume report. The real causes were an outdated and downright dangerous stadium, grossly negligent police direction of crowds, and a police attitude encouraged over the years by Murdoch journalists and editors like Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie and Andrew Neil, both of whom write, look and sound like extreme right-wing criminal thugs.

At this, enough was enough. An organised boycott of the guilty newspapers was started out in Kirkby and quickly spread to the rest of Merseyside. After a few weeks it no longer needed organising. The spontaneous reaction was truly overwhelming. Stickers and posters appeared everywhere encouraging everyone to boycott the guilty rags. It worked. Their local circulations were devastated and have never recovered. I hope they never will. Even now, fifteen years on you can hardly find a copy of the boycott targets. In fact I hope the guilty journalists rot in hell for what they did. McKenzie and Neil have never had the courage to appear in public on Merseyside to explain themselves, let alone apologise.

The chief culprit was The Sun newspaper and its editor Kelvin McKenzie. Innocent people were hardly dead, let alone buried, before the propaganda started and it devastated any chance of popular knowledge of the REAL causes. To this day you will find individuals who haven’t read or understood the contents of Peter Taylor’s report. This is particularly true the greater the distance from Merseyside. Over the years I found it necessary to correct international media such as Time magazine and CNN in their misreporting. Needless to say the corrections were admitted to me – I still have the correspondence – but never received equal coverage to their original statements. The cultural damage has been huge.

The sum total of all this propaganda was virtually to eliminate any immediate prospect of economic recovery for Merseyside. Hundreds of thousands of our people had their prospects for a decent life destroyed by the media poison which supported extreme right-wing economics. The same applied to many other areas of provincial Britain, particularly in coal-mining areas. Understandably, many thousands of our citizens left the city to make a reasonable life elsewhere for themselves and their families. Most people over the age of twenty have never forgotten and never will forget those times. Forgiveness is non-existent. Mere mention of the guilty parties is enough to cause the most extreme outpouring of justified contempt and anger.

One of the problems for a young man of Wayne Rooney’s age is that he hasn’t experienced that kind of horror at first hand. I hope he never will. For him, it will all be a distant local legend, one he hears locals talk about but which he can’t FEEL in the same way. If he could feel it, he wouldn’t have accepted the relatively paltry payment he gets from Murdoch.

As he goes through life he will find the same necessity as everyone else: he will have to draw some lines in the sand, some bench mark for his own set of principles. He has to negotiate his own Rites of Passage. In this case I believe he has made a terrible mistake, probably at the behest of his agent Paul Stretford. Murdoch’s extremist propaganda outlets represent the very worst of our culture in much the same way as Stretford. We are right to detest them and those who continue to manufacture lies in precisely the same way as Murdoch’s other media mouthpieces in the United States and Australia.

In my view Wayne has made an adolescent mistake, the sort we have all made. I hope he draws some sensible conclusions. It’s his life to win or lose. And the despised Sun newspaper won’t help him toward a settled conscience, but it will suck the blood out of his talents and then cast him off as a lifeless corpse.

Wayne, for your own sake, I hope you make the right choices. (03/07/04)