The Super Soaraway Flat Earth Daily

The appearances yesterday before the Leveson Inquiry of a variety of Rupe’s current and former troops from the Super Soaraway Currant Bun seems to have gone to their collective heads, as today the paper has told its readers how Leveson has “hailed” the Sun (don’t worry, he hasn’t) because he agreed with present editor Dominic Mohan that he could point to positive as well as negative achievements.

But this isn’t good enough for the Murdoch hackery, so Leveson is said to have “saluted” them (wrong again), while the article fails to make sense: Mohan is quoted as saying that “the Sun gave its eight million readers an easy-to-read account of issues that were often highly complex”, which actually means the paper is “dumbing down, patronising, and cheap and nasty”.

And the idea that “The paper felt a great loyalty to readers and a duty to give help through the financial slump” is pure dross. Not while it’s advertising “Sun Bingo – Play online”, “Betting - £25 free bonus”, “Casino - £150 welcome bonus” and “Vegas Games - £25 bonus” it isn’t.

One cannot fault Mohan’s assertion that the Sun’s charity work is a force for good – this could not be otherwise – but what the paper fails to mention is all the kickings it has doled out to the less fortunate over the years, notably their going after Big Issue sellers. This crass victimisation smeared a group of people who were trying to get their lives back on track. It was totally out of order.

Moreover, the reporting of Kelvin “McFilth” MacKenzie’s appearance yesterday really did use the whole bucket of whitewash. While the inverse snob dig at the Guardian was faithfully reported, there was no mention of Elton John, Hillsborough, or the General Belgrano (as I told yesterday). Nor was there any word of Kel’s “bucket of crap” phone discussion with “Shagger” Major.

Anyone who sat through yesterday’s Leveson sessions could be forgiven for thinking that the Sun was operating in some kind of parallel universe, although in Mohan’s defence, this is the kind of selective reporting that any red-top tabloid uses on a daily basis. But as some kind of reliable account of “issues that were often highly complex”, it’s utterly useless and without merit.

No change there, then.