Coverage of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun

Coverage of the Hillsborough disaster by the British tabloid The Sun led to the newspaper's decline in Liverpool and the broader Merseyside region, with organised boycotts against it.

From 1993 to 2012, editor Kelvin MacKenzie, who was in charge of many of the publication decisions, gave conflicting comments on whether he was sorry for the front-page story and said that his mistake was in trusting a Conservative Member of Parliament—Irvine Patnick, who was quoted in the piece.

The Sun issued apologies in 2004, after Wayne Rooney was criticised for giving exclusive interviews to the paper in 2012, under the headline "The Real Truth", and in 2016, on a page 8–9 story in the aftermath of a second governmental inquest that concluded fans were unlawfully killed in the disaster.

[1] Journalist and academic Chris Horrie argued that The Sun gave less attention to the Merseyside teams Everton and Liverpool than other football teams, giving as an example its coverage of the 1986 FA Cup Final between the pair, which it nicknamed "The Giro Cup" (in reference to a slang term for welfare), and its relatively scanty mention of a 9–0 win by Liverpool against Crystal Palace.

He said that The Sun treated Liverpool as "effectively a foreign country" from the mid-1980s onwards, for the city's multiracial culture, left-wing politics and high rate of unemployment.

[2] On 15 April 1989, negligence by the South Yorkshire Police at a football match at Hillsborough Stadium between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest led to overcrowding in two central pens.

The article quoted Conservative Member of Parliament Irvine Patnick in its claim that a group of Liverpool supporters told a police officer that they would have sex with a dead female victim.

[3] Alex Hern of the New Statesman noted that the Daily Express's headline on the day of "The Truth" reported claims about fans as accusations by the police, rather than fact.

[11] The Daily Mirror, according to a later account by one of its reporters, received the same Whites news agency filing that The Sun used, but dismissed it as untrue and instead ran with the more critical headline "Fury as police claim victims were robbed".

[8] The Liverpool Echo soon replied to The Sun, asking "the London papers and the Sheffield police" to give their evidence for claims of fan violence.

[7] Following an April 2016 inquest, which found the 96 people to date who died in the disaster were unlawfully killed, The Sun was in a minority of newspapers not carrying the news on the front page.

In a report on the eighth and ninth pages, it displayed images of the 96 victims and ran an editorial which apologised "unreservedly", saying "the police smeared [supporters] with a pack of lies which in 1989 The Sun and other media swallowed whole".

[17] Families of the Hillsborough victims believe that coverage by The Sun interfered in the justice campaign and legal cases that continued until the April 2016 verdict.

[18][13] According to Davey Brett of Vice in 2017, Liverpudlians asked about the boycott discuss "struggle, solidaritary and strength in numbers ... community, compassion and coping".

[19] A 2011 anti-The Sun concert organised by the Hillsborough Justice Campaign featured artists including Mick Jones, James Dean Bradfield and The Farm; it developed into a national tour.

Anderson received criticism from Bob Satchwell from the Society of Editors for commenting that he "would ban it from shops across the city" if it were legal, as "that is what happens in dictatorships and banana republics".

in April 2017 after publishing a column by MacKenzie, the day before the 28th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, that included a passage about footballer Ross Barkley that insulted his intelligence and compared him to a drug dealer and a prisoner.

[26][27] In October 2021, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, wrote an article for The Sun about the Johnson government's handling of food and petrol shortages.

[28] Dowd wrote "I cannot in any way support, condone or make excuses for Keir Starmer writing for the S*n — whatever the reason" and Rotheram said "The piece published today has unsurprisingly upset a lot of people across my region.