It's hard to know where to start with this.
Ok, so below is an article that's been on The Sun's website for nine years - a badly written celebration of Jimmy Savile in which the paper takes him out for the day to mark Jim'll Fix It's return to UKTV Gold in 2007 (that's the gist so you don't have to read it).
After finding and reading the piece last week I tweeted that it was pretty distasteful for the tabloid never to have bothered deleting the toady tribute in the years since Savile was exposed as one of history's worst sex offenders, particularly because it veers into seriously dark territory like this mispunctuated conclusion:
Not only are the ramifications of this oversight awful even by The Sun's low standards, it left even more of a bad taste when the paper had so openly been going all out to pulverise the BBC over its own egregious oversights regarding Savile, seriously attempting to take the moral high ground over the broadcaster by making out it knew all along about Jimmy's predatory ways, even claiming "Sun stories ignored" in another judgemental editorial last month.
Very strange then, if the tabloid was "onto him" so long ago, that as well as the above "Sun Fixes it for Jim" adoration it later ran such a gushing hagiography upon his death in 2011, which is also still live on its website here:
However, however, the biggest humdinger of them all was to arrive yesterday with sledgehammer timing, more shameless and phoney than anything I've seen The Sun deliver during my career in journalism.
It had the audacity to publish this new Savile outrage piece:
It's difficult to fathom not just how stupid the paper's minions can be - from the writer of the piece to the sub-editor to the section editor - in not bothering to check its own archives for the very editorial examples of what it's condemning the BBC for, but the sheer level of hypocrisy by which its own example is so much worse than the relatively innocuous TOTP mini-interview archived by the BBC.
If the latter interview is "disturbing" according to The Sun's lackey writer, then what must the paper think of its own lines about Savile "off to Stove Mandeville to work his magic on the hospital patients" - how furiously would it have reacted if these were the words unearthed on BBC Online or anywhere else?
It makes even more of a black-comedy mockery of the quote it gleefully prised out of poor David Hines of the National Victims' Association, who was clearly oblivious to the reality that it was at The Sun itself he should be aiming his denouncement.
The epilogue to this sorry tale is that, following some choice words I and others tweeted highlighting the rankness of this duplicity, The Sun finally quietly removed the offending 2007 article from its website, but not before I captured the evidence presented here today.
So well done, The Sun, for the further imperishable proof if any were needed of the depths you'll plumb in your ceaseless quest to manufacture outrage, when it's your own conduct that's the most deserving of it.
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