Editor of London’s Most Popular Paper Defends Its Racy Contents

Newspaper editors do not usually make news, but most of Britain’s serious papers Tuesday carried a lengthy interview with the editor of the Sun, the country’s raciest and largest-selling popular tabloid.

For the best part of the eight years Kelvin MacKenzie, 42, has edited the Sun, he has declined interviews while his paper has gone from strength to strength on a much-scorned mixture of gutter-level gossip, screaming headlines, half-naked women, and snappy sports coverage.

So when Mackenzie decided to break his silence and spin his words of popular-press philosophy to a group of reporters from the more conventional newspapers here, he found an attentive audience.

Baring It All

“Kelvin bares it all in confessions of a Sun editor,” said the Guardian, which left out of its report MacKenzie’s typically cheeky assertion: “We could all go and edit the Guardian, whereas the editor of the Guardian couldn’t edit the Sun.”

He may have a point. Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Sun (circulation 4 million) and four other British newspapers, once told a visitor that he thought the Sun, under MacKenzie’s stewardship, was the best-edited paper in the world.

If the degree to which an editor puts his personal stamp on the paper is the measure of successful editing, then MacKenzie surely is in a class of his own.

His selection of stories is nothing if not idiosyncratic, even bizarre. To his mind the most important story in the world Tuesday was “Four Pet Bunnies Killed by Head.” Beneath the front-page, 2-inch-high headline was the story of how a school principal shot a neighbor’s rabbits because they were eating his lettuce.

His readers were told the tale was a “SUN EXCLUSIVE.” Certainly, no other paper bothered to print it.

MacKenzie dismissed the judgment of more conventional editors, saying: “They ask what is the most uninteresting thing which has happened in Britain or the world yesterday, put that at the top of the page, and then descend slowly.

“To think there are decent trees in Finland being cut down for that. Journalism is about doing the unobvious story: the big story from Lebanon is the day when there isn’t any shooting.”

Not a Strong Point

Readers of the Sun would be hard-pressed to know whether the guns in Lebanon were firing or silent at any time. Foreign news is not its strong point, except if it involves movie stars or models.

But at the office of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the Sun is taken extremely seriously. Editorially, it hammers home the Thatcherite principles of free enterprise and individual responsibility.

It has, in the words of one of Mrs. Thatcher’s closest aides, “popular resonance.” The aide said: “If you want to know what the average Briton is thinking, don’t read the Times, the Telegraph, or the Guardian. Read the Sun.”

One feature of the Sun is its daily “Page Three Girl,” a black-and-white photo of a topless model with a tee-hee caption. Tuesday’s Page Three Girl showed a bare-chested blonde, under which read the words: “Hairdresser Sharon . . . started work as a shampoo girl--and is still putting the lads in a lather.”

Although the Page Three Girl has infuriated feminists, the Sun attracts more female readers than any other paper. The pinups, said MacKenzie, were “a fixture.”

Increasingly politicians and others have expressed misgivings about the Sun’s irresponsibility, its invasion of privacy, and its sheer arrogance.

It provoked legislation, narrowly defeated in parliament, which would have imposed limits on media intrusion. It brought censure from other editors and journalists for setting a new low in reporting standards and bringing the entire profession into disrepute.

As the major sign of public outrage, the Sun was ordered to pay singer Elton John a record $l.56 million in libel damages for unfounded allegations about his sex life.

Invited to Lunch

It was a somewhat chastened editor who invited the reporters to lunch to mark the 20th anniversary of Murdoch’s acquisition of the Sun, which has its roots in the unlikely origins of a serious trade union-backed newspaper.

“We have made some big errors. Elton John was a big error. When you’re as big as the Sun, when you drop a big clangor, that’s the danger,” he said.

MacKenzie acknowledged that he was also concerned about the prospect of tighter legal controls on the media. There is no right-to-know legislation on the books here, and English libel laws are much tighter than in the United States. A new secrecy act threatens to put even stricter limits on the flow of official information to the media.

“A law of privacy is just another form of denying readers their right to know,” he said.

In response to the complaints against his paper, MacKenzie earlier this year appointed an in-house omsbudsman to pass judgment on contentious stories. So far 2 of 63 complaints have been upheld.