Kelvin MacKenzie

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Kelvin Calder MacKenzie (born October 22, 1946) is a media figure in the United Kingdom, and a long-time close associate of international media magnate Rupert Murdoch. MacKenzie is best known for his time as editor of The Sun newspaper from 1981 to 1993, during which time he firmly established the The Sun as Britain's best selling tabloid. However his period as Sun editor was also highly controversial - MacKenzie is remembered as the man responsible for the paper's "Gotcha" headline, as well its the highly controversial coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, which caused widespread outrage and was dismissed as entirely inaccurate by both the Press Council and the official government inquiry into the disaster.^[1] MacKenzie has been described by Piers Morgan as being "a brutal editor with a particular form of dangerous genius".^[2]

Contents 1 Biography 2 The Sun 3 Hillsborough controversy 4 After Leaving The Sun 5 Notes

[edit] Biography

MacKenzie was educated at Alleyn's School, but little else is known about his background or early journalistic career. By 1978, at the age of just 31, he was Managing Editor of the New York Post - two years after it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch, who already owned The Sun. Murdoch appointed him Sun editor in 1981. Murdoch is said to have described MacKenzie as his all-time "favourite editor"^[3].

MacKenzie was married for 38 years but in 2006 was divorced by his wife Jacqueline on the grounds of adultery. In the late 1990's, MacKenzie was in the news when he was caught by the Mail on Sunday holidaying in what the paper described as a "love nest" in Barbados with News International secretary Joanna Duckworth.[1]

[edit] The Sun

While it was in 1978 that The Sun initially overtook the Daily Mirror in terms of circulation, it was during MacKenzie's spell as editor that The Sun firmly established itself as the biggest selling newspaper in Britain. It was also under MacKenzie that the newspaper became renowned for what is felt by many commentators to be its populist and sensationalist approach to journalism (although others argue that this approach had already been established to a lesser extent under previous editors during the 1970's), MacKenzie presiding over many of the biggest controversies in the paper's history. Left-wing journalist John Pilger has accused the paper of exaggerating or even inventing news stories under MacKenzie (on some occasions this was proven to be the case ^[4]) and of severely dumbing down public discourse. More controversially, he has accused the paper of promoting jingoism, racism, homophobia and intolerance.^[5] MacKenzie himself is quoted as saying in the early 1980's (on the subject of how he percieved his target audience and how he approached journalism): "You just don't understand the readers, do you, eh? He's the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he's afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdoes and drug dealers. He doesn't want to hear about that stuff (serious news)." ^[6]

MacKenzie was responsible for the "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" front-page headline, probably the most famous in The Sun's history. The claims made in the accompanying article, that the comedian Freddie Starr had placed his girlfriend's hamster on a sandwich and proceeded to eat it, not surprisingly turned out to be entirely untrue. The headline is remembered mainly for its humour value and is also often held up as the prime example of the Sun's supposedly celebrity obsessed, sensationalist and often inaccurate journalism.[2][3]

More controversially, MacKenzie was responsible for the May 4 "Gotcha" front-page headline, which reported the sinking of the Argentinian battle-ship General Belgrano by a British submarine during the Falklands War. MacKenzie changed the front-page for later editions to: "Did 1,200 Argies drown?". MacKenzie's coverage of the Falklands War has been criticised by left-wingers such as The Guardian journalist Roy Greenslade as jingoistic, whilst MacKenzie has defended his "Gotcha" headline, saying: "'Gotcha' was mine, which I'm very proud about. The fact that the enemy were killed to my mind was a bloody good thing and I've never had a moments loss of sleep over it".[4]

MacKenzie's coverage of the British miners' strike, 1984-1985 supported the police and the Thatcher government against the striking NUM miners. The paper was accused of making misleading or even outright false claims about the miners, their unions and Arthur Scargill.^[7] MacKenzie at one point prepared a front page with the headline "Mine Führer" and a photograph of Scargill with his arm in the air, a pose which made him look as though he was giving a Nazi salute. The print workers at The Sun, regarding it as an attempt at a cheap smear, refused to print it. ^[8] Some Sun staff reportedly threatened to resign over the coverage, although none actually did so.^{[citation needed]}

MacKenzie's Sun supported the introduction of the controversial and highly unpopular Poll Tax by Margaret Thatcher and consistently stuck by Thatcher and her government on the issue despite widespread opposition which culminated in huge public protests, riots and eventually mass non-payment, all of which is seen as having contributed to Thatcher's own downfall before the tax was quickly repealed by her successor John Major. The Sun labelled those attending public protests opposing the tax as "thugs". [5]

In 1987, MacKenzie published a front-page story alleging that pop singer Elton John had had sex with underage rentboys. These claims were without any foundation and entirely false. Shortly after, MacKenzie published further allegations that the singer had had the voiceboxes of his guard dogs removed because their barking kept him awake at night. Not only were these additional claims also completely untrue, but MacKenzie himself confirmed their inaccuracy shortly after publication by sending a reporter to the singer's house, who quickly discovered that all of his guard dogs were quite capable of barking (MacKenzie later admitted that in retrospect he found it difficult to understand why he had believed, never mind published, the claims about the guard dogs which he later realised were self-evidently absurd). Elton John sued The Sun for libel over both these claims and was later awarded £1,000,000 in damages. [6]

There were many other controversies during MacKenzie's time in charge of The Sun. MacKenzie at one point ran a story about a previously unknown member of the public who had just undergone a heart transplant operation, the story denouncing the man as a "love rat", Sun journalists having been told that he had left his wife fifteen years earlier. Aside from criticism about the story's highly questionable news value, the newspaper was furiously condemned as the story was run when the man's recovery was still in the balance.^[9] MacKenzie also ran a story extensively quoting a respected American psychiatrist claiming that British left-wing politician Tony Benn was "insane", with the psychiatrist discussing various aspects of Benn's supposed pathology. The story was discredited when the psychiatrist in question publicly denounced the article and described the quotes attributed to him as "absurd", The Sun having apparently fabricated the entire piece.^[10] Indeed, many commentators accused MacKenzie and his team of simply inventing many of the stories that appeared in the newspaper, as well as interviews, and in some instances this was proven to be the case, most notably when an entirely fabricated interview with the disfigured Falklands war hero Simon Weston was published, which was criticised for "inviting readers to feel revulsion at his disfigurement".^[11] Some other notable controversies that occurred under MacKenzie include a headline describing Australian Aborigines as "The Abo's: Brutal and Treacherous" (which was condemned as "inaccurate" and "unacceptably racist" by the Press Council)^[12] and MacKenzie's sending of photographers to break into a psychiatric hospital to ask actor Jeremy Brett, who was a patient in the hospital at the time and who was suffering from manic depression and dying of cardiomyopathy, whether he was "dying of AIDS" (the newspaper apparently suspected Brett of being a homosexual and that his mystery illness might be AIDS, which it wasn't)[7]. These incidents caused The Sun to become a laughing stock in some quarters and to be heavily condemned in others, but the newspaper's profile increased dramatically during MacKenzie's time as editor and sales figures reached new heights. It is has been claimed that it was mainly the large increase in sales achieved by The Sun under MacKenzie that enabled Rupert Murdoch to greatly expand his business interests into satellite television.^[13]

[edit] Hillsborough controversy

In April 1989, the single biggest controversy during MacKenzie's reign occurred, later described in a Sun editorial in 2004 as "the most terrible mistake in our history", during the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, a deadly crush which occurred during an F.A. Cup semi-final at Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield which claimed the lives of 96 Liverpool fans. The Sun printed the front-page headline "The Truth", with three sub-headings, "Some Fans Picked Pockets of Victims", "Some Fans Urinated on the Brave Cops" and "Some Fans Beat Up P.C. Giving Kiss Of Life". The accompanying article claimed that ticketless and drunken Liverpool F.C. fans were responsible for the disaster, having supposedly tried to fight their way into the stadium by rushing the turnstiles and attacking policemen outside the ground. Further specific allegations were made that during the disaster itself Liverpool fans inside the stadium had stolen wallets and other items from the dead, had urinated over policemen and the bodies of dead fans, that they had beaten policemen attempting to save the lives of other fans and had sexually abused the body of a dead girl after shouting "throw her up and we'll fuck her" to policemen moving her body. The sources for these allegations were stated to be anonymous police officers and a Conservative MP from Sheffield who wasn't actually present at the game. The article was accompanied by graphic photographs showing Liverpool fans, including young children, choking and suffocating as they were being crushed against the perimeter fences surrounding the terraces - this was widely condemned as severely inappropriate^[14].

The coverage and the allegations caused intense uproar on Merseyside (where The Sun was boycotted, with public burnings of the paper organised and many newsagents refusing to stock it at all) and widespread criticism and condemnation from many commentators. The Press Council described the allegations unequivocally as "lies". The official government enquiry into the disaster dismissed the allegation that drunken Liverpool fans had been responsible for the disaster and concluded that inadequate crowd control and errors by the police had been the cause of the disaster. Various investigations conclusively disproved most if not all of The Sun's allegations - when clothing from each of the victims was recovered, none had any trace of urine other than those who had been found to have wet themselves during the crush (this also not surprisingly occurred with some fans who survived having been pulled from the terraces); all wallets, items of jewellery and significant personal possessions of each of the victims was quickly accounted for (thus disproving the allegation of pick-pocketing); no female victim was found to have been sexually abused; and while it has been established that a small number of Liverpool supporters verbally abused policemen who they apparently held responsible for the disaster, no policeman has ever come forward to claim that he was physically attacked by a fan. Some weeks after the disaster, Joan Traynor, who lost two sons in the disaster, was asked by ITN for permission to film the funeral of her sons. Traynor refused and publicly requested that the media respect her family's privacy with regard to the funeral. ITN and all other British media outlets did indeed respect Mrs Traynor's wishes with the exception of The Sun. Kelvin MacKenzie sent photographers to the funeral who clambered over a wall at the cemetery and took numerous photographs of the family laying the two boys to rest before eventually being chased away. The following day photographs of the family at the funeral appeared on the front page of The Sun. Mrs Traynor was said to be deeply upset about the intrusion at the funeral and the subsequent publication of photographs of her and her family on the front page of the same paper which had printing the aforementioned allegations about the disaster itself^[15].

Prior to the publication of The Sun's initial article, a number of local newspapers in Yorkshire published very similar allegations (such as The Sheffield Star and The Yorkshire Post)[8]. It has since emerged that many British national newspaper editors were offered the same story from the same sources the day before The Sun article was published (including Andrew Neil at Murdoch's The Times) but while many national newspapers printed allegations about Liverpool fans being responsible for the disaster, only MacKenzie and his counterpart at The Daily Star were prepared to print the more outlandish allegations about theft and abuse of dead bodies, with many editors feeling that the claims sounded dubious. Furthermore, the other national papers which printed coverage claiming Liverpool fans to be responsible for the disaster, including The Daily Star, apologised the day after publication, whereas The Sun did not. In their book about the history of the Sun, Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote: "As MacKenzie's layout was seen by more and more people, a collective shudder ran through the office [but] MacKenzie's dominance was so total there was nobody left in the organisation who could rein him in except Murdoch. [Everyone] seemed paralysed, "looking like rabbits in the headlights", as one hack described them. The error staring them in the face was too glaring. It obviously wasn't a silly mistake; nor was it a simple oversight. Nobody really had any comment on it, they just took one look and went away shaking their heads in wonder at the enormity of it. It was a classic smear."^[16] Murdoch for his part ordered MacKenzie to appear on BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend in the aftermath of the controversy to apologise. MacKenzie was quoted on the programme as saying: "It was my decision and my decision alone to do that front page in that way and I made a rather serious error". In 1993 he told a House of Commons National Heritage Select Committee that: "I regret Hillsborough. It was a fundamental mistake. The mistake was I believed what an MP said. It was a Tory MP. If he had not said it and the chief superintendent (David Duckenfield) had not agreed with it, we would not have gone with it." In 1996, MacKenzie again discussed the matter on Radio 4 but this time claimed: "The Sun did not accuse anybody of anything. We were the vehicle for others."

Sales of The Sun on Merseyside have never recovered, costing News International several million pounds a year,^[17] despite a belated full page apology by the newspaper in 2004.

MacKenzie sensationally reignited the controversy himself in 2006 when he was quoted as claiming that The Sun's allegations about Liverpool fans were actually true after all and that he had only apologised because he was forced to by Rupert Murdoch (see below).

[edit] After Leaving The Sun

In 1994 MacKenzie moved to BSkyB, another of Murdoch's News Corporation assets. MacKenzie left within a few months.

In 1995 MacKenzie joined Mirror Group Newspapers and was appointed joint boss of their fledgling L!VE TV British cable television channel. The station had previously been headed by Janet Street-Porter who had set out to establish L!VE TV as an alternative, youth-orientated channel. She clashed with MacKenzie over program content and soon left, leaving him in sole charge. MacKenzie took a radically different approach and was criticised for producing severely downmarket programming. MacKenzie introduced features such as nightly editions of 'Topless Darts' (featuring topless women playing darts on a beach), 'The Weather in Norwegian' (with a young, typically blonde and bikini-clad Scandinavian woman presenting weather forecasts in both English and Norwegian), other weather forecasts featuring dwarfs bouncing on trampolines and stock exchange reports presented by Tiffany, a young female presenter who would strip naked as she read out the latest share prices. A large amount of airtime was given over to tarot card readers and astrologers. L!VE TV's best known character was the News Bunny, a man dressed as a giant rabbit who popped up during news broadcasts to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to the various news stories to indicate whether or not he found them interesting or exciting. The station had a budget of only £2000 an hour and attracted very little in the way of an audience, never being watched by more than an average of 200,000 viewers but the channel was well known because of the controversy and criticism surrounding its programming, which led to the station being labelled "Tabloid TV" and even "Sun TV" (in reference to the newspaper, some critics accusing MacKenzie of doing nothing more than creating a television version of his old newspaper). MacKenzie has been accused of taking a "shamelessly tacky approach". He eventually left the station in 1997. MacKenzie himself later said of L!VE TV: "Bouncing weather dwarfs were a major milestone in British TV. Their weather forecasts will be five years old now. We used to shoot them in batches ... and it was just luck if the forecast actually coincided with the weather. We were really ahead of our time. If Channel 5 put on Topless Darts at 10pm they would double their ratings". [9]

In November 1998 MacKenzie headed a consortium (TalkCo Holdings) which purchased Talk Radio from CLT for £24.7 million. One of the financial backers was News International, News Corporation's main UK subsidiary.^[18] In 1999 TalkCo was renamed The Wireless Group and in January 2000 Talk Radio was rebranded as TalkSport. The Wireless Group acquired The Radio Partnership in 1999, gaining control of its nine local commercial stations. In May 2005, it was announced that the Northern Ireland media company, UTV plc, had made an agreed offer to buy the company, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. In June 2005 the takeover proceeded, with MacKenzie being replaced by UTV executive Scott Taunton.

He is currently chairman of one of the UK's largest marketing and communications groups, Media Square plc.

In September 2005 MacKenzie took over Highbury House Communications, a magazine publishing company based in Bournemouth and Orpington. HHC held a number of titles mainly in the Leisure and Computing (Games) market with a 'ladette' title sitting uncomfortably in their portfolio. HHC was already suffering from massive debts when MacKenzie took the reins and despite efforts on his part to broker a life-line to save the ailing company, he had inherited a poisoned legacy. Highbury didn't survive, and closed its doors in December 2005.

MacKenzie has appeared on the BBC's Grumpy Old Men TV series, discussing his pet hates. Ironically, considering the programme is made by the BBC, on one edition he accused the BBC of having a left-wing bias and of producing out-dated and poor quality programmes and news. MacKenzie said that the reason for this was that that BBC Television Centre is populated almost exclusively by "left-wing turds".

Despite the aforementioned criticism of the corporation, in March 2006 MacKenzie joined BBC Radio Five Live as a presenter. He made his debut on the station over the summer, presenting a series of programmes telling the story of various scandals which have occured at FIFA World Cup torunaments over the years. [10]

MacKenzie returned to The Sun to work as a columnist from May 2006 where he has again courted controversy, this time by making reference to Scots as 'Tartan Tosspots' and apparently rejoicing in the fact that Scotland has a lower life expectancy than the rest of the United Kingdom.^[19]

During an after-dinner speech to Mincoffs Solicitors LLP (a Newcastle-based law firm) on 30 November 2006, MacKenzie is reported to have said about the coverage of the Hillsborough disaster: "All I did wrong there was tell the truth. There was a surge of Liverpool fans who had been drinking and that is what caused the disaster. The only thing different we did was put it under the headline 'The Truth'. I went on The World at One the next day and apologised. I only did that because Rupert Murdoch told me to. I wasn't sorry then and I'm not sorry now because we told the truth". MacKenzie went on to compare Merseysiders with animal rights activists. Ironically, MacKenzie is also said to have remarked, "If this got out, it would blow up all over again". The remarks were met with widespread incredulity and condemnation, particularly on Merseyside, where Liverpool F.C., the local Liverpool Echo and numerous local MP's condemned MacKenzie, with Walton MP Peter Kilfoyle arguing that the quotes confirmed that MacKenzie was never "fit to edit a national newspaper". The Liverpool Echo called for The Sun to sack MacKenzie as a columnist. The Sun issued a statement saying that they had "already apologised for what happened and we stand by that apology." There has been no word on MacKenzie's future at the paper and no statement from MacKenzie himself has thus far been forthcoming. ^[20] [11]

A protest has recently been started by Football fans who oppose MacKenzie working for the BBC. Due to Mr MacKenzie's chequered past, they see his being employed by the corporation at odds with their guiding principles. Their on-line petition has gained around 7500 votes in just over a week and has the backing of the local press and even some MP's.

You can keep up to date with the petition here http://www.petitiononline.com/rawk1/petition.html

Further actions are planned at football matches in the near future and you can find out more here http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=155686.0

[edit] Notes