THE SCUM AT THE SUN

Marjorie Smith

           The Sun's squalid ambush of Gordon Brown, by surreptitiously taping a private conversation between the PM and the mother of the deceased Grenadier Guardsman Jamie Janes deserves the utmost condemnation.

             The exploitation of a mother's grief for political ends by the Sun is a new low in the conduct of the print media in the UK. This follows the disgraceful treatment of Gordon Brown's visual disability the day before in the Sun, when Gordon Brown had sent a handwritten letter to Mrs Janes. Poorly written, it may have been, but that's the very nature of his disability which has been so shamelessly exploited for nefarious political ends by the editorial scum at the Sun.

           This is an outrageous breach of privacy and it should be noted was obviously a set-up by journalists at the Sun, without doubt with the full knowledge of the Editor AND the Chief executive of Murdoch's News International. This has not beeen Mrs Janes acting alone.

            One future initiative the PM should introduce immediately, is that any private conversation between the PM and a member of the public, should be conducted only on a encrypted phone that is provided (for the duration of the call only) by the cabinet office to the person involved.

           This follows the dreadful coverage of the PM's "supposed" conduct at the rememberance service at the cenotaph, when he allegedly failed to bow his head in respect, no doubt  being more concerned, because of his very poor eyesight,  about not falling over when walking backwards downstairs

            The conduct of the right-wing tabloid press over the past few days has been utterly appalling in relation to the Prime Minister's disabilty and if it was anybody else in public life outside politics, the journalist involved wouldn't even have started putting pen to paper. This has been a deliberate attempt by editorial teams in each of the right-wing press dictating to their minions what they wanted to see in their papers.

            The Editor of the Sun, Dominic 'Bizarre' Mahon, whose only real experience of journalism seems to have been confined to celebrity tittle-tattle (which I suppose makes him a perfect choice as editor of a downmarket tabloid) seems not to care one jot about journalstic ethics generally and the ethics code of the ineffectual Press Complaints Commission in particular.