Whining about the Sun

I see the Sun celebrating its "40th birthday" (Murdoch buy-out was year zero I think) is causing some frothing on some blogs. Whether its the likes of Tim Ireland complaining about Page Three in a way that reveals more about his own condescending view about the intelligence of Sun readers than anything else. Or simply general whining about how they've crossed the line in attacking Gordon Brown personally whilst simultaneously ignoring the Mirror engaging in similar attacks on Cameron's (both of which as enjoyable to watch I should add), the message is clear. The Sun is EVIL!

My personal favourite was by Uponnothing on the Angry Mob website - a site that appears to specialise in moaning about the right wing press. Uponnothing considers the Sun journalists and writers to be "utterly fucking shit". When I read it I was reminded of the tale in Stick it up your Punter which chronicled a time when Sun hacks swapped jobs with hacks from a quality paper - can't recall which. The Sun guys found the swap easy, the quality paper guys just couldn't, if you pardon the pun, hack it.

The reason? Anyone can ramble on writing up a news story in 1000+ words. Doing it in 50 takes skill though. Just take any random day and have a look at a Sun leader and compare it to a Guardian one. They could even be making the same point but the former will be succinct whilst the latter will be waffle - not much different to the blog posts of some of those that moan about Sun funnily enough.

People may not like the political agenda of the Sun. They may feel that the Sun readership needs to be 'educated coz they is thick init' into realising that the girl with her tits out doesn't really know about quantitative easing and campaigning is a matter of justice and truth goddamit! However, thinking that that the people that work and write for the Sun are shit misses the point of how difficult it actually is to do what they do compared to the so-called "quality press".