Paper Monitor
10:37 UK time, Tuesday, 30 January 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Uh oh, the Sun's beating the drum. With a front page that echoes a Benetton advert, featuring a racially-mixed collection of 11 children holding up placards spelling out the racist insults they have been called, it asks: "What do we all have in common?" Turn to page three - yes, that renowned destination for anyone seeking progressive thinking in the British press - and the same assembled crowd announce, through another set of placards, that they are "British".
They include one Sean Callen, 12, who on the front page is holding up the sign "Chav Scum". Sean, we are told, "hates the insult - a jibe at white working class people who wear brash designer clothes." Yet it's hard to escape the feeling that Sean has been thrown into the melting pot as a sop to that bedrock of Sun readership, the white working class. After all, the Sun itself doesn't exactly shy away from the word "chav" when knocking celebrities.
Only this month it took to comparing "classy Kylie" with "chavvy Charlotte Church" - headline: "Char is so vile-y to Kylie". Last week, star Sun columnist Jane Moore pinned the C-word on foul mouthed Jade Goody - "poster girl to the ignorant underclass and everyone else's acceptable face of chav". And don't forget Britney Spears who had a "chavtastic" wedding, and whose bump when pregnant turned "from chic to chav".
Granted, the Sun mostly employs "chav" in a fun, rather than judgemental way - the singer who is "less Parvarotti, more chav-arotti"; the assertion that Prince Harry is the new "king of chav"... but it hardly seems to be clamping down on the word.
So does today's front page herald a new dawn for the Sun - a more sensitive, caring side to Britain's biggest daily newspaper? Turn to page nine, for the report on the grandmother who sued the Sun over claims she'd had sex with footballer Wayne Rooney - "UNHAPPY SLAPPER" - and judge for yourself.
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