Page 3 girls don’t sit pretty with critics
LONDON: After widespread outrage over the publication of topless pictures of the duchess of Cambridge, the 42-year-old tabloid institution of page 3 is once more under threat.
A new campaign, called No More Page 3, appears to have tapped into public concerns about press morality, and has used the viral power of social networking sites to win almost 24 000 signatories to an online petition addressed to Dominic Mohan, editor of The Sun.
The campaign is being led by Lucy Holmes, an actress and writer, whose petition tells Mohan: “We are asking very nicely. Dominic, stop showing topless pictures of young women in Britain’s most widely read newspaper, stop conditioning your readers to view women as sex objects.”
On Wednesday Holmes said: “It has been a great start, but I do intend for it to get bigger. We are inviting The Sun’s biggest advertisers to withdraw their support for the last week of October. Although we would love to think The Sun would be concerned about the amount of people up in arms over the way they objectify women, I think they would be more concerned when their major advertisers start pulling out.”
The Sun, which was obliged to publish an unprecedented apology last week over its false reporting of the Hillsborough football tragedy and claimed its mistakes were the results of the culture of a bygone era, has so far refused to budge.
On Wednesday it interrupted five pages of coverage of the murders of young policewomen Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone to offer a naked picture of “Danni, 24, from Coventry”. Beneath the photo, the paper directed its readers to a new feature on its website, “Page 360”, “which gives an allround view of our beauties”.
This facility is also offered as an iPad app. But just as digital technology is being used to expand page 3, so it is also empowering its critics.
Holmes said: “This is part of the 1970s and it’s 2012 now – surely we are not the same society. We are not sitting quietly and taking it any more.” – The Independent