The Sun Newspaper is the most popular in the UK, owned by Rupert Murdoch and News International, the same company who own the Times and Sky, it claims to be in touch with the common man and woman.

The Paper in General:

The Sun is a centre right newspaper politicially, it has generally supported the conservatives, although became a supporter of Tony Blair through his centre right policies and his effective media management. Now the Sun is back supporting the conservatives but its views have remained slightly conservative throughout, with strong views on policing, crime and other things. The paper was first published in 1964, it was popular but not incredibly until the 80's when under the editorship of the uncompromising Kelvin Mackenzie it went out of its way to be attention seeking and loud, its headlines could be vicious, funny or just plain loud.

Since then the paper has been the most popular on the high street and has a huge following of the middle and working class readership, its stories can range from the important news of the day to facile exposes of celebrities, its main rival is the more left-leaning Daily Mirror but it is easily winning this battle.

The sun generally costs 30p although this goes up on Saturdays, at the moment due to the credit crunch (or falling readership) it has gone down to 20p.

What does a daily copy of the sun consist of?

You have the standout front page headline, page 2 will consist of politicial news, page 3 is a picture of a half naked page 3 girl (sometimes helpfully providing her insight into the G20 or something) and a silly story, following this you get the main news of the day and then a column by one of the sun's many column writers, you then have gossip news, a centre spread of something and the tv news and a 3 page section on reality tv, this is followed by a woman section, cartoons a page of business news and then the sport.

Whats Good and Whats Bad:

Well the stories are well written in a populist way to appeal to the masses but they generally lack detail or foresight and are too opinionated for me really. The gossip section is a waste of time, the writer seems obsessed with stories about himself meeting people and is happy to create feuds or nasty rumours to feed his own narcissism, the columnists can be varied too. You have Jane Moore who is generally quite sensible, Clarkson and Kelvin MacKenzie who are both very loud and outspoken, occasionally funny, ocassionally going too far and then Jon Gaunt a man who is very passionate but can often get caught very far beyond the line of political correctness.

On Fridays there is a review of the weeks television by Allie Ross and this is one of the best newspaper columns of the week and a really good reason to buy the paper, he is almost as funny as Charlie Brooker and his page is generally hilarious.

On Fridays there are helpful review pages of film, theatre, games and music, this is an added section and Friday is definitely the day to buy the paper for 20p as its much thicker than other days.

Finally we have the sport, this is the reason I buy the paper (though only on Mondays to catch up on Football results and Friday for this and the tv column and reviews), there are some great sports writers including the excellent Colin Hart on boxing, the football coverage is comprehensive and they cover cricket and rugby in great detail too. On Mondays there is generally a big football pullout section in the middle of the paper covering the weekends games too.

My View:

I have explained when I will read the paper, only on Mondays and Fridays for sport and decent columnists, I find the paper is pro-British which is great but it can go way too far and become a caricature of itself, sometimes they come up with great stories, sometimes like with Hillsborough, they manage to alienate whole areas of the country and they'll never recover them. I think the paper is not always balanced, but is an easy read and for 20p is worth buying on certain days and just avoiding any bits you find disagreeable.