The Sun

The Sun is a British daily tabloid newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The Sun originated as the Daily Herald, a trade union owned paper, renamed and relaunched under new ownership as The Sun in 1964. It adopts a liberal political line, but its content is largely concerned with celebrity, sport and entertainment tittle-tattle and its continuing publication, despite protests, of 'Page 3 girls' - large photographs of bare-breasted young women on page 3. The Sun also has a policy of supporting the NHS. The Sun has the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the English-speaking world.

While it does not explicitly support any political party asides from when UK General Elections take place, The Sun usually makes it quite obvious which political party it is supporting at any one time, through the way its articles are written. While it had supported the Labour Party since 1997, it currently takes a very Pro-Conservative Party attitude in most of its articles. However, it will likely not formally announce this until the next general election in 2009 or 2010.

Many people (possibly including the paper's owners and staff members) believe that The Sun effectively chooses who will win any given election, in that it has a large readership covering a wide political spectrum, and former Prime Minister John Major for one has publicly acknowledged The Sun's role in his re-election in 1992. However, many instead believe that The Sun simply backs whichever party is most popular at any given time, so as to avoid a potentially disastrous alienation of their customers by continuing to back an unpopular party (as happened to the Daily Mirror through much of the 1980s).

Liverpool's The Sun Boycott[edit]

Some Liverpool newsagents banned the sale of The Sun Newspapers and started to call it "The S*n" or "The Scum"