The Sun is cross with Russell Brand. It’s really cross. It’s Dropping The Paywall cross.
After Brand wrote a Guardian piece yesterday criticising the Sun on Sunday for printing allegations he was unfaithful, the paper has hit back with a piece entitled “20 Reasons why Russell Brand is the biggest hypocrite in Britain” (we presume they’ve been reading Buzzfeed).
These mostly boil down to one reason: has previously written for the Sun, which although he might not have realised it at the time, contractually obliges him to be nice about everything it does, ever.
Seriously, the Sun‘s editor could punch a kitten and those three Shagger of the Year awards mean that he couldn’t say a peep about it.
The hitjob is yet another reminder that anyone who speaks up in favour of press reform can expect what Kelvin McKenzie allegedly offered John Major – a bucket of shit poured all over them. Previous examples include the Mail’s multipage denunciation of one of the Leveson Inquiry assessors, as well as the paper’s leaking of NS columnist Mehdi Hasan’s job application letter after he criticised the paper on Leveson.
PS. The Mole is quite taken with the Sun‘s casual cuss of the Guardian website – it claimed Brand’s piece appeared on a “little-read media blog”. The Guardian’s website has 5.8m weekly uniques, while the Sun withdrew from the official auditing of its web traffic after introducing a paywall this year.
PPS. This was Brand’s response. This one could run and run.
There is a difference between “hypocrisy” and “time passing”. I used to take drugs, now I don’t. That’s not hypocrisy, I’ve woken up.
— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) November 30, 2013
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