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“Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie will not return to the paper after being suspended for writing a column comparing Everton footballer Ross Barkley, who is mixed race, to a gorilla and for writing disparaging comments about the city of Liverpool.”
– The Guardian. May 9, 2017.
On Friday morning, Kelvin MacKenzie took to Twitter to repeat his opinion that Ireland’s football coach Stephen Kenny should be “fired for the anti-English video he showed before his game against us.”
It’s been such a strange few months for Irish football that it shouldn’t have come as a real surprise that MacKenzie, a pop culture figure who represents a throwback to Spitting Image’s scariest moments and the new Toryism of the ’80s, gave his opinion. .
MacKenzie declares himself the “Most Successful Editor of The Sun” on his Twitter account. He was, without question, a force of nature, rising to that position in his early 30s and leaving a slimy trail of misery on the national imagination through front-page sensations and provocations. And his papers sold like hotcakes.
You would imagine that having turned it into one of the most powerful roles in British media life, you would hope to end your association with publishing in something more than a disgrace. But it is like this.
The reasons MacKenzie is so despised by the entire city of Liverpool are well documented and he, of course, knows them well: A citywide boycott against the Sun has been maintained since the despicable front page appeared four days after Hillsborough. tragedy in 1989. It will always be his epitaph in journalism and in life. He was allowed, because he was editor of the Sun, to shock and form an opinion before the advent of the Internet diluted his power. And although he stepped down as editor of The Sun in 1994, he remains emblematic of a dark and dangerous kind of voice; a genuine influencer before that silly term was invented.
And there were echoes at play this week. On Wednesday, it was reported that Stephen Kenny had shown his players a short video that included footage of the 1916 uprising and a compilation of goals against England. It was a strange thing for Kenny, given that a young and inexperienced Irish team was about to play England in a low-key match at a deserted Wembley. At worst, it was a naive mistake by a new manager who may be trying too hard.
And for many who hope that Kenny will have a reasonable chance of settling into the position, it is disappointing; There is an air of desperation for something as retro and unimaginative as a movie designed to stir blood. That the video was leaked into the public sphere and the subsequent declaration that the FAI would carry out an investigation has all the aspects of another adventure in parody.
But MacKenzie’s unexpected intervention pushes the episode into the macabre. It is very likely that when Stephen Kenny took the Irish job, he knew that someone would ask for his dismissal in no time. And with no wins and a goal scored after eight games in charge, the opening chapter has been a great challenge despite his perseverance with the belief that Irish teams can and should play expressive football.
Sad fool
But never in his wildest dreams could Kenny have imagined that Kelvin Mackenzie would be asking for his head, and an inspirational trick in the locker room instead of his team’s on-field performance.
But the Sun’s greatest editor of all time was deeply offended by the video, which he has not seen. And he was convinced that Kenny had to go.
“Or we could do the same,” he warned via Twitter.
“A video of the Birmingham pub bombing, the cruel Mountbatten murder. We lost 1,700 to the scum of the IRA. And the Irish lost 3-0. Good.’
In cold print, it reads like any of the thousands of slogans painted on the walls in violent decades: boring, reductive, and stupid. The effect, of course, was to revive feelings of antipathy towards the chief of the Sun here in Ireland.
He raved about the social media response, invoking Charles Henry Bewley, Ireland’s disgraced ambassador to Berlin during WWII. ‘Pro Nazi, anti-Semitic, Anglophobic. That’s the thing to do in Irish politics.
It’s easy to dismiss all of this as just the rant from another dingy-sounding fool on Twitter. But MacKenzie’s prominence over two decades and the streak of print journalism venom he unleashed in British society, causing so much lasting damage, was not insignificant.
MacKenzie was born in 1946 and grew up during a wave of intense emigration from Ireland to England in the 1950s. He was editor of the Sun during another wave, in the 1980s. Tens of thousands of Irish people were welcomed into English cities in those decades and they have prospered there. The relationship between the two countries has always been complex and familiar. But the best, represented by Steve Coogan or Johnny Marr or Peter Kay or Kate Bush, is exceptionally rich, warm and nuanced – literally the best of both worlds.
It is the opposite of whatever Kelvin MacKenzie has represented during his career as an opinion maker: a kind of empty, hateful, joyous feast of the misery of others; a glee for those embarrassed in his expositions, a staggering lack of empathy for something or someone, and a deeply misunderstanding of the very nation for which he wrote his headlines.
And this sad footnote, which infers Anglophobia from an invisible video montage in an Irish football team’s locker room, is the latest reminder of how unalterably narrow and bleak the worldview was behind those decade of covers. sometimes notorious of Sun.
Without result
One of the footnotes on the Hillsborough front page that appeared in the Sun newspaper refers to the journalist who wrote the story. It was Harry Arnold, an old school tabloid journalist and a former royal correspondent at the time in a distinguished career where ethics mattered. He was at the office the day the news agency’s story about the alleged fan behavior was featured.
He carefully rewrote it, emphasizing that nothing was proven and he was horrified by the shocking accusations that the Sun presented under the headline La Verdad, a headline that will be cataloged as one of the most defamatory lies in the history of journalism; a permanent stain on the craft.
Arnold was shocked and says he protested to MacKenzie before the newspaper went to print. But it was in vain. Soon after, he left the Sun to work for Roy Greenslade at the Mirror.
In 2014, Greenslade revealed that he had received an email from Arnold shortly before he died. Greenslade was one of many who recognized Arnold as one of the last mythical figures – the true legend of Fleet Street. But Arnold was still upset by the Hillsborough story in the last years of his life. In his email, he thanked Greenslade for “getting me out of the misery of Kelvin’s clutches.”
Of his former editor, he wrote: “I consider him the most unpleasant man I have met in my 40-year career.”
The truth hurts.
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