From the gutter to the sewers

by Rick Johansen

Yes, I know it’s ‘news’, but the photograph of the remnants of Paul Gascoigne across the Sun’s front page today is something I really didn’t want to see. I’m afraid that I have become so utterly cynical with Rupert Murdoch’s squalid little red top that I suspect it is something they were much wanted to see. Why else would Britain’s biggest selling newspaper use words like this?

‘The battered ex-Newcastle, Spurs and England great was seen stumbling from a taxi at lunchtime, clutching a bottle of gin.

‘Worried neighbours called police but he had vanished from his seafront pad by the time they arrived.

‘Officers launched a missing persons investigation before he was spotted in another cab, at one point accidentally exposing himself as he struggled to keep his trousers up.’

Mercifully, the Sun spared us a photograph of Gascoigne ‘accidentally exposing himself’, but judging from the photograph they did use it’s not hard to imagine the paper’s journalists and sub-editors having a good snigger about it all.

This is what the tabloid media does with fallen stars and few have fallen further than Gazza who was arguably (though not arguably in my view) the most talented English footballer of his generation. They build them up and knock them down and then some.

Do you think that was the worse the Sun could do? Dream on, for below a ‘source’ adds, helpfully: “He looked a right mess. I fear there could be a very tragic end for him.” Well, thanks for that. It must have been a considerable comfort for his family and friends to read that stuff. Want some more? How about the Sun’s own doctor, one Carol Cooper, performing an expert diagnosis for the paper’s readers. She concludes by saying, “I fear he’s too far gone. The final whistle can’t be far away.” Oh no. A joke about a seriously ill man who used to be a footballer. Could the Sun stoop any lower? Every time you think they’ve reached rock bottom, they do something even worse.

I have not helped matters in my small way – I do not have the Sun’s readership figures – by even referring to this very public tragedy. If it was any other kind of illness, I am not quite so sure whether even Rupert Murdoch would seek to profit from such misery, but then I wouldn’t put it past him.

Gazza getting better would not be quite such a good story for the journalists of the sewers but for so long as people queue up to buy their newspapers we can be sure that they will continue to run with the sad stories.

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