The Scottish Sun

The Sun newspaper is a funny old chestnut. The highest selling daily newspaper in Scotland, it must be doing something right. As the old editor said «give the people what they want.» But who decided the people wanted to read sleazy trashy stories?
Oddly, the newspaper sometimes tucks serious news features on issues such as the war in Afghanistan in the centre somewhere, in an almost embarrassed way hoping no one will notice.
The political views are a joke. For example, are we really to believe the editor has decided Labour is no good for Scotland because he genuinely wants what is best for the country, not that its owner, Rupert Murdoch, is right wing and wants all his media outlets to be so too?
I’m no newspaper snob. Broadsheet isn’t always my first choice as I find some of them to be boring. But The Sun isn’t my first choice either.

The Scottish Sun is a natural progression from the Beano.
In history it will go down as a priceless document of teenage pregnancies, rape, paedophilia and missing blue eyed blondes.
I suppose there is something entertaining about it. Maybe it’s the modern witch hunts that have marched from the mouths of wee local biddies and right onto the front page. Maybe it’s the unnecessary use of bold lettering to describe local MONSTERS that are out to DESTROY our lives and EAT our children.
It’s all a good laugh, isn’t it? But oops, I just remembered. That monster and his family are real people.

I must concur with my fellow Unilocaler, while there are many things to detest about the Sun newspaper, at least it’s 100% unashamedly sleazy.
Good journalism isn’t completely missing but it’s rare. Instead the Sun excels with its sports coverage, particularly of the lower football leagues, and its reliability when it comes to fantastic headlines. Super Caley Go Ballistic etc… was obviously its finest moment, but even when John Terry was caught being a naughty boy as recently as last week, it was the only paper which stepped up to the mark.
«Surely some paper must use „A Bridge Too Far“», a friend of mine quipped. And alas, there it was. In the Sun.
It’s not big and it’s not clever, but it does tend to raise a few more chuckles than its fellow comics.

I’ve recently moved onto reading the broadsheets as papers like The Sun, while convenient, don’t necessarily offer too much insightful journalism. They are however, quite entertaining.
Unlike The Daily Record who hides it’s sleazy gossip behind a family-​friendly veil, or The Daily Star which features little more than reality TV news and pages upon pages of celebrity upskirt shots, The Sun can be genuinely good fun. From a photoshopped image of a puffin dropping it’s muck on Berti Vogts after the 2002 Scotland — Faroe Islands debacle to the consistently offensive TV column by Ally Ross, it never fails to entertain, even if it doesn’t educate.
To that end, it’s probably got a hand to play in the dumbing down of everything from politics to TV that’s occured over the past few decades, but as long as it keeps giving the public their fix of sport, gossip and nudity, few will complain.