Murdoch’s Sun Covers Up Page 3 Topless Women After 45 Years

January 21, 2015 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie

Readers of Britain’s best-selling tabloid,
The Sun, will no longer see pictures of topless women on page 3
after the newspaper quietly dropped what has been a staple of
the U.K. press since 1970.

The days of the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper’s “Page 3
Girls” have been numbered since Murdoch tweeted in September
that the page was old-fashioned. A “No More Page 3” campaign
has won support on social media in recent years, garnering almost
220,000 signatures in favor of scrapping the controversial images.

The newspaper continues to show women clad in lingerie and
bikinis on the page, while topless pictures are still available
on its website.

“Page 3 is really beyond its use-by date,” said David
Banks, a former editor at The Sun whose job as night editor was
choosing the woman for the next day’s newspaper. “It’s
inevitable its time has come.”

Murdoch’s News U.K. operation, a division of News Corp. (NWSA)
that owns The Sun and The Times of London newspapers, did not
respond to queries about the decision to drop the feature.

The Sun is Britain’s No. 1 newspaper with a daily
circulation of 1.89 million at the end of December, according to
the U.K.’s Audit Bureau of Circulations. While the paper is best
known for Page 3 and covering celebrity sex scandals, it has
been polishing its image recently to appeal more to families.

Double Standards

The “No More Page 3” Facebook site, a campaign started by
writer Lucy-Anne Holmes to “Take the Bare Boobs Out of The
Sun,” was filled with congratulatory messages today and notes
on TV appearances to discuss the move.

“It wasn’t about Page 3 being offensive but about the
impact on our society of judging men and women by different
standards,” Stella Creasy, a lawmaker for Walthamstow in
London, said in a BBC Radio 4 interview today. “It was saying
to all of us that what mattered was our breasts not our
brains.”

Page 3 first drew opposition in the 1980s, when lawmaker
Clare Short introduced a bill in Parliament to kill the feature.
In recent years British universities including Oxford and the
London School of Economics canceled subscriptions. The Murdoch-owned Irish Sun dropped its version of Page 3 a year and a half
ago.

Banks said the end of the topless version of the Page 3
girl is only a partial victory, given the continuing appearance
of barely dressed women on the page and the topless pictures on
Page3.com. “We’re still going to be titillated, though I admire
The Sun for beginning this progress toward not producing soft
porn.”