As mentioned previously,
The Sun's coverage of the Hillsborough Disaster was both extremely inaccurate and damaging for the newspaper. By all accounts it was entirely the doing of editor
Kelvin McKenzie, the man who coined '
Gotcha' to celebrate the deaths of 368 Argentine sailors during the
Falklands War.
The edition in question is that of Wednesday, April the 19th, 1989. The banner headline was 'THE TRUTH', beneath which were the bulleted points, none of which were actually true:
'Some fans picked pockets of victims'
'Some fans urinated on the brave cops'
'Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life'
The Labour Party's 1983 manifesto was described as the 'longest suicide note in history'; that issue of The Sun was the most garish suicide note in history, and ensured circulatory oblivion in the Merseyside area. My mum is from Liverpool; we used to get the Sun. And then we did not.
It's often forgotten that the Daily Star ran the equally offensive headline 'Dead fans robbed by drunk thugs', and that the general tone of media coverage was initially directed against the fans themselves. The only official information at the time of the disaster came from the South Yorkshire police, and they were hardly unbiased, as covered in much greater detail above.