Apologies for bringing this up again but I spotted a web page(Link below) where James Stephenson goes a very long way to defending Kelvin Mackenzie. Underneath that are some strong encouraging blog entries but also a few negative ones telling us we should forgive and forget!!!!!!!! WHAT?
I have complained about these as everyone can do. Have they forgotten the 96 who died?
Found this article on Wikipedia, intersting read!
In April 1989, the single biggest controversy during MacKenzie's reign occurred, later described in a S*n editorial in 2004 as "the most terrible mistake in our history", during the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, a deadly crush which occurred during an F.A. Cup semi-final at Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield which claimed the lives of 96 Liverpool fans. The S*n printed the front-page headline "The Truth", with three sub-headings, "Some Fans Picked Pockets of Victims", "Some Fans Urinated on the Brave Cops" and "Some Fans Beat Up P.C. Giving Kiss Of Life". The accompanying article claimed that ticketless and drunken Liverpool F.C. fans were responsible for the disaster, having supposedly tried to fight their way into the stadium by rushing the turnstiles and attacking policemen outside the ground. Further specific allegations were made that during the disaster itself Liverpool fans inside the stadium had stolen wallets and other items from the dead, had urinated over policemen and the bodies of dead fans, that they had beaten policemen, ambulance men and rescue workers attempting to save the lives of other fans and had sexually abused the body of a dead girl after shouting "throw her up and we'll fu*k her" to policemen moving her body. The sources for these allegations were stated to be anonymous high-ranking police officers from Sheffield Police and Irvine Patnick, a Conservative MP from Sheffield who wasn't actually present at the game. (On 11 January 2007 on BBC TV's Question Time, MacKenzie additionally claimed that one of his sources was a Liverpool news agency.) The article was accompanied by graphic photographs showing Liverpool fans, including young children, choking and suffocating as they were being crushed against the perimeter fences surrounding the terraces - this was widely condemned as severely inappropriate[14].
The coverage and the allegations caused intense uproar on Merseyside (where The S*n was boycotted, with public burnings of the paper organised and many newsagents refusing to stock it at all) and widespread criticism and condemnation from many commentators.
The Press Council described the allegations unequivocally as "lies". The official government enquiry into the disaster dismissed the allegation that drunken Liverpool fans had been responsible for the disaster and concluded that inadequate crowd control and errors by the police had been the cause of the tragedy. Various investigations conclusively disproved most if not all of The S*n's allegations - when clothing from each of the victims was recovered, none had any trace of urine other than those who had been found to have wet themselves during the crush (this also not surprisingly occurred with some fans who survived having been pulled from the terraces); all wallets, items of jewellery and significant personal possessions of each of the victims was quickly accounted for (thus disproving the allegation of pick-pocketing); no female victim was found to have been sexually abused; and while it has been established that a number of Liverpool supporters verbally abused policemen who they apparently held responsible for the disaster, no policemen, ambulance men or rescue worker have ever come forward to claim that they were physically attacked by a fan. Some weeks after the disaster, Joan Traynor, who lost two sons in the disaster, was asked by ITN for permission to film the funeral of her sons. Traynor refused and publicly requested that the media respect her family's privacy with regard to the funeral. ITN and all other British media outlets did indeed respect Mrs Traynor's wishes with the exception of The S*n. Kelvin MacKenzie sent photographers to the funeral who clambered over a wall at the cemetery and took numerous photographs of the family laying the two boys to rest before eventually being chased away. The following day photographs of the family at the funeral appeared on the front page of The S*n. Mrs Traynor was said to be deeply upset about the intrusion at the funeral and the subsequent publication of photographs of her and her family on the front page of the same paper which had printed the aforementioned allegations about the disaster itself[15].Sales of The S*n on Merseyside have never recovered, costing News International several million pounds a year,[17] despite a belated full page apology by the newspaper in 2004.
MacKenzie sensationally re-ignited the controversy in November 2006 when he claimed that his allegations about the Hillsborough tragedy had been true after all.
James Stephenson after all this decides to defend his decision to put Mackenzie on programme -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/01/controversial_views.html
« Last Edit: Jan 19, 2007 05:53:29 pm by homestrip »
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