Obsolete

The Sun has never been and never will be renowned for its high quality journalism. The newspaper that introduced the topless woman on its 3rd page to the world has always been racing to the bottom of the barrel. It's since been aped and beaten to the bottom of that barrel by the Daily Star and Sport, but continues to rule the roost. In a country that often finds itself staring into the abyss on a daily basis, it's still the highest selling and most read. The Sun hasn't broken any scandals recently (its sister paper the News of the Screws seems to get more than its share of late) but it's still the newspaper that many politicians fear and many love for its humour. Many of us also hate it because of the bile it preaches, how it betrays its working class readership and for its preaching of celebrity crap. For instance, today's front page features Sharon Osbourne confessing that she can't defeat bulimia. Fascinating.

All this said, you wouldn't expect the Sun, with its fiery right wing agenda and its attacks on "political correctness" to pay money to someone associated, however tenuously or dubiously to terrorism £30,000. That is exactly what it has just done.

There is no evidence or any question that Samantha Lewthwaite had any idea what her husband Jermaine Lindsay had been planning to do. She is free to tell her story and to earn money from it. That I do not question. What I do question is the Sun's rank hypocrisy. This is the same newspaper that for the last couple of years has been involved in a hate and vilification campaign against Maxine Carr, the girlfriend of Ian Huntley, who murdered the two Soham schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

Maxine Carr was found guilty of perverting the course of justice. She was not involved in the murder of the girls, as she was away from home at the time. She believed his pleas of innocence, and has paid the price. It's very likely that she was living in complete fear of Huntley, terrified of him. There's been allegations that he had beaten her. Despite Maxine Carr serving her sentence and paying her dues to society, she has since not been left alone by the howling tabloid press, always looking for someone to scapegoat and blame. With the moor murderers, they had the figure of Myra Hindley to target, a bleach blonde whose police photo became an iconic image of "evil". She was never released from jail, mostly as a result of the hatred whipped up against her. Despite Carr's attempts to carry on with her life, with the creation of a new identity, she has not been left alone. There have been numerous falsehoods written about her. The latest, true or not, was in yesterday's Sunday Mirror which reported that she had visited the graves of Holly and Jessica to grieve for them personally. This was evidence to the Sunday Mirror that she somehow doesn't care about what their parents feel. I'm not sure how they reached that conclusion, but that's what was printed.

Carr had been a teacher's assistant at the school where Huntley also worked as a caretaker. She had known both the girls well. Whether the girls had called at Huntley's home to see her or whether he had met them is not known. Carr no doubt has been through hell since the girls were murdered and now has to face the rest of her life living with the regret that she lied to police and was unable to stop the deaths of two little girls. That is a life sentence in itself.

Maxine Carr herself was interviewed by the Mail on Sunday. She was not paid. The Sun no doubt had something to say about it at the time, but I'm not going to waste time searching for it. The Sun didn't feel it was necessary to mention in their story that they had paid Samantha Lewthwaite for her interview. You can imagine what the Sun might have said if it had been the Daily Mirror that had paid her for her story. No doubt there would have been cries of leftist apologism for relatives of murderers. The Sun greeted the arrests of the July 21st attempted bombers with the headline "GOT THE BASTARDS". Rebekah Wade is not only a piss-poor editor doing the bidding of a billionaire media megalomaniac, she is one that can't even see the craven hypocrisy of her treatment of those who have gone through similar problems.