A Rant

For the past couple of weeks I have been buying The Sun.  Quite a confession, but I can assure you I wasn't doing so out of choice.  They have been publishing tokens, which once you collect nine of reward you with a pair of tickets to Alton Towers.  We have been planning a trip there for some time and so I snapped up the chance to avoid the £48 per person entrance fee (which is ludicrous, but not the source of my anger currently...).  We are hoping to go along with friends so I was buying two copies a day.  At first I thought this would be great; I am not a regular newspaper reader and this would be a good chance to stay abreast of the news.  How wrong I was.

Firstly, page 3 is embarrassing.  When you're a 14 year old boy I am sure it is a fine place to indulge your ricocheting hormones, but as an adult it makes reading the paper in public impossible.  Also, many of the news stories surrounding the grinning sex object are far too inappropriate.  This stuff is best left for lads mags.  I imagine it also puts off any women from buying the Sun, which probably pleases the editors no end, who clearly think women are there to be looked at, not spoken to!

However, I can get past the page 3 girl, I'm not the first person to find it odd that this is still acceptable.  What is unacceptable is how opinionated a newspaper can be, and also how disgustingly racist.  For the first few days I was happily skimming through the paper, looking for amusing puns in the headlines.  And then I stumbled upon a column by Rod Liddle.  There was so much casual, needless racism in his column which I won't repeat it on here because I don't want that sort of traffic coming to this blog.  Check out the link though, it turns out he is often in trouble for his racist and sexist views.  After reading his hateful articles I couldn't bring myself to open the paper I was tied into buying two copies of each day again.  Morally, I should have stopped buying it after that, but I really wanted those free tickets!  Anyway, I am happy to say I have collected all of the tokens now, and I guarantee I will never be buying such a poor excuse for a newspaper ever again.  It is still in my recycling bin and makes me feel quite dirty each time I walk past it.