UK · Bias: Right-populist
News UK (News Corp / Murdoch family)
Murdoch bought The Sun in 1969 and turned it into Britain's loudest tabloid: Page 3, screaming puns, and enough political muscle that in 1992 it claimed — headline: 'IT'S THE SUN WOT WON IT' — to have swung a general election. For decades, courting its endorsement was a rite of passage for prime ministers of both parties. Its circulation has collapsed from four million to a number it stopped publishing entirely, but its front page still sets the agenda for British breakfast TV more mornings than not. The legal reckoning finally reached the paper itself in January 2025, when Murdoch's News Group settled Prince Harry's phone-hacking lawsuit with a public apology, an eight-figure payout — and, for the first time ever, an admission of unlawful activity by people working for The Sun, after decades of pinning everything on the defunct News of the World.
Four days after the 1989 Hillsborough stadium crush killed what would eventually be counted as 97 Liverpool fans, The Sun ran a front page headlined 'THE TRUTH', claiming fans pickpocketed the dead, urinated on police and beat up a rescuing officer. Every claim was false, fed to the paper by police shifting blame for their own failures. Liverpool never forgave it. The city's boycott of The Sun — newsagents refusing to stock it, taxi drivers refusing passengers reading it — is still enforced more than 35 years later, the longest-running consumer boycott in British media history. The paper's 2012 apology changed nothing on Merseyside.