h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the heirachy of informative current affairs sources, The Sun comes somewhere between the Daily Mail and Roger Hargreaves's Mr Men books. It is designed to provide the reader with a sense of having bought a newspaper without actually having to find anything out about the world in which they live.

Frequently what The Sun calls news bears no resemblance to what is currently going on in the world. On a day where an earthquake ravages Mexico and leave 3,000 dead with a further 200,000 homeless, The Sun is likely to lead with a story involving the break up of a soap star's marriage or a picture of a cloud which resembles a recently dead celebrity. After 4 pages of intrusive photos, a topless 20-something lissom beauty and news of other petty beaurocracies and infidelities, the earthquake might just warrant a footnote on page 12. Providing there were no fashion events to report on, anyway.

When The Sun does grudgingly cover a current affairs topic in some depth, the reader can be guaranteed a selective view on the subject with frequent xenophobic leanings, lots of moral high-ground taking and a view so blinkered as to make a racehorse feel claustrophobic. In The Sun, the European Union are "mad Euro-crats" who inevitably want to impose the "will of Brussels" to govern the size, shape & length of our cucumbers. Members of Parliament are frequently "Ministers For Sleaze" or linked with top class, cocaine snorting call girls. All professional sportsmen have, at one time or another, strayed from the path of fidelity with a "busty sex kitten". And possible her mother, sister, drugs dealer or any combination of the above.

The Sun caters for and reflects the views of the "hard working honest Brit" to the hilt. Bearing in mind The Sun's daily content, this says a worrying amount about the British people. Some of its headlines have passed into folklore - the morning after the sinking of the General Belgrano during the Falklands War, The Sun prompted outrage and earned condemnation by summing up the contentious loss of life with the succinct "Gotcha!". It later followed with the unforgettable "Up Yours Delors", reflecting the mood of many Britons. Granted, the mood of many Britons was being formed by only hearing one side of the argument, but it's a headline that we still remember some 10 years later.

Laugh as we might, The Sun is read by millions of impressionable souls each day, with its Sunday incarnation, The News Of The World, read by similar numbers. For many of these people, The Sun forms their opinions on current affairs and is possibly the only voice they hear & trust before they enter a polling booth to decide how their country is run.

If The Sun doesn't like you, a significant amount of people hear about your failings & your task is made correspondingly more difficult. On the day of the 1994 general election The Sun gave over its entire front page in a request for the last person leaving Britain to turn out the lights. If the Labour party won. Not so much a supportive act for the Tory party as opposed to a destructive act which helped lose Labour the election. At present The Sun is fighting a long running campaign against Britain's entry into the single European currency and the single European market, coincidentally a view shared by Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News International, who in turn own The Sun.

So many people with only one side of the argument. Which begs the question; why do so many people buy The Sun? There are a number of options. Firstly that they discovered it when they were much younger and bought it for the daily flash of cleavage on page 3 and it later became a habit. Or they really do feel that it provides a supportive voice that they lack on such issues. If the latter is true it means two things: that we will never be short of mutton and that the British public may always be viewed with some suspicion by out European counterparts. Still, at least we'll have our kebabs to keep us company whilst we sit in splendid isolation, peering sceptically across the English Channel........

An excellent summation of the fetid pile of cack, Lucan.

I notice you missed out some of the Sun's finest moments - such as claiming that some Liverpudlians in the crowd at Hillsborough for the disaster were picking the pockets of the dead and urinating on their bodies, a scandalous and unsupported claim which sees it boycotted in parts of Merseyside to this day - but you capture the spirit of the rag.

I asked my father (an otherwise decent, working-class Brit) why he buys it, and he claimed it was for the football coverage and (get this) because "it doesn't take too long to read". How can you answer that?

Most distressing of all, the tales of "European domination" that they cite have struck home and he would hate to lose the pound - despite the fact that sterling's current exchange strength means his company has no work and he may lose his job.

I tried to point out that, under European rules, we have just as much say in running Germany as they do in running us - and where are the Sun stories heralding "British MEPs tip vote to ban leather shorts"? Or could it be that we don't care what happens in Germany, France and the rest, and they don't care about us? The naivety and paranoia of it depresses me.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: I agree, and nicely written.

GVI