Prince Harry blows £10k on champers + Marlon King converts to Islam
The email led with those two stories:
Clicking on the Harry story today re-directs to the Sun's homepage - a sure sign a story has been removed. The reason? Because Harry didn't spend four hours in the club and didn't spend £10,000 on drinks.Some 'exclusive'.
Clicking on the Marlon King picture also takes you to the Sun's homepage. That story has also vanished from their website.
Yet it took up most of page 9 in yesterday's paper:
Disgraced soccer star Marlon King has converted to Islam in jail – and named himself after hook-handed hate preacher Abu Hamza.
It was soon picked up by the Mail (and countless football websites and forums) which repeated all the Sun's quotes:
King, who was convicted of sexual assault and assault occasioning actual body harm when he punched a 20-year-old female university student and broke her nose in December 2008, has also demanded that other prisoners call him Abu Hamza Tariq...
An insider is quoted in The Sun as saying: 'Marlon's gone from bad boy convict to devout Muslim in next to no time. He is talking about Abu Hamza as a hero - even though he is hated by the public.'
It's not clear why the Sun removed the story. Is it all wrong, or only partly wrong? Certainly the Abu Hamza bit sounds highly unlikely.
Either way, and as with the Harry story, the Sun is simply shrugging its shoulders and pretending the article never existed.
Oddly, the Mail article remains online - including a mistake of calling the prison HMS (rather than HMP) Wayland.
But for the Sun, the stories that dominated pages 1, 5 and 9 of their paper yesterday have been withdrawn within a day.
That's some achievement.
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The Sun seems to have featured quite a number of prison stories lately, with the Venables case and the attack on Ian Huntley etc. Surely these stories have been passed to the paper by other prisoners or from prison officers. If the stories are coming from prisoners this would suggest the paper is paying convicted criminals for stories or if they are from officers the paper is paying officers to breach their contacts. If the Press Complsints Commission had any balls at all they would be investigating how 'The Sun' is getting these stories, and take appropriate action if the paper is paying money to criminals in return for stories.
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