06 March 2006

The Sun re-writes history


We all know that Rupert Murdoch likes to make history, with The Sun newspaper-led campaign driving Tony Blair's New Labour into power in 1997 and Fox News' ever so slighlty biased coverage helping George Bush back into office last year . However, it seems Murdoch has decided that making history alone isn't enough - now he wants to re-write it. After decrying the BAFTA awards for failing to give Brit Rachel Weisz an award ("BAFTA Brits Heart Broke"), today's edition of The Sun (page 12, 6 March 2006) said that "Rachel, 34, was tipped to win again after her triumph at the BAFTAs". So in the spirit of the moment Global Media Insight would like to congratulate Vigo Mortensen on winning the Best Actor award at this year's Oscars for A History of Violence.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

He's not the only one re-writing history... "with The Sun inspired headline "Will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?" driving Tony Blair's New Labour ino power in the mid 1990s" seems a bit like of historical revision to me (or a grammatical booboo).

After all, the headline in question was aimed at Labour under Kinnock and - unless you're being incredibly indirect - certainly didn't have much to do with Tony Blair's assumption of power.

Gareth Price said...

I apologise for the mistake which has been corrected - thanks for pointing it out that would have been perhaps a little too indirect. As a one-man operation posting quickly from work I would hope it is a more forgivable mistake though.

Anonymous said...

of course it's fine... I'm never sold on Murdoch when he trumpets his influence in these things anyway. Do the people he backs become winners, or does he choose to only back winners?

Gareth Price said...

Well when he took over the Sun in 1969 he only paid £50,0000 upfront because it was just a struggling afternoon newspaper (which went up to £500,000 on the condition the paper survived two years) so I guess we have to give him some credit!