Justice for the 96

Horse 980 - It was twenty years ago today.

Twenty years ago today during an FA Cup Semi Final between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool, 96 people died as a result of a crowd crush at Hillsborough. It remains the deadliest football disaster in England and as a result fundamental changes were brought about into the design of football stadia including the introduction of all-seated stadia and the removal of barriers at the front of stands.

Although indeed a disaster, on of the most shocking things was the way that the event was reported by the Murdoch press:


The headlines read:
"Some fans picked pockets of victims"
"Some fans urinated on the brave cops"
"Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life"

Whilst inside they reported:
"drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims"
"police officers, firemen and ambulance crew were punched, kicked and urinated upon"
"a dead girl had been abused"
"Liverpool fans 'were openly urinating on us and the bodies of the dead'"

If you'd read that in the newspaper you'd be quite frankly disgusted and quite rightly so except...
it was all made up.

The editor in-chief at The Sun Kelvin MacKenzie, said in 2006 - "I was not sorry then and I'm not sorry now" for the newspaper's coverage.
http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_headline=ex-sun-editor--i-was-right-on-hillsborough&method=full&objectid=18190784&siteid=50061-name_page.html
The subsequent Taylor Report found that every single claim made in The Sun was an abject lie. In fact The Sun did finally issue an apology "without reservation" in a full page opinion piece on 7 July 2004, saying that it had "committed the most terrible mistake in its history", however the Liverpool Echo slammed it, calling it "shabby" and "an attempt, once again, to exploit the Hillsborough dead."

Reaction to the disaster was felt all through the football world. In the European Cup Semi Final between AC Milan and Real Madrid on the 19th, in what was supposed to be a minutes silence, the A.C. Milan fans sang Liverpool's "You'll Never Walk Alone" as a sign of respect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZrVfMRyoE0
Even Liverpool's fiercest rivals (and back-handed friends) Everton, laid scarves at the memorial set up at Anfield not long after the event.

The Sun itself still suffers as a result of the article, before 15th April 1989 it had a circulation of just over 200,000 copies daily in Liverpool. Today according to the statistics company ABC, it still fails to get to 12,000 despite only having a selling price of 30p as opposed to 45p in the rest of the country and adjusted for inflation being nearly 40% cheaper today.

Serves them right I say.

The Liverpool Echo ran this today:
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/videos-pictures/pictures-of-liverpool/hillsborough/2009/04/07/hillsborough-remembered-92534-23329614/i2/

Justice for the 96.