British newspaper, founded 1821
The Sunday Times
is a British Sunday newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's
quality press
market category. It was founded in 1821 as
The New Observer
. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of
News UK
(formerly News International), which is owned by
News Corp
. Times Newspapers also publishes
The Times
. The two papers, founded separately and independently, have been under the same ownership since 1966. They were bought by News International in 1981.
In March 2020,
The Sunday Times
had a circulation of 647,622, exceeding that of its main rivals,
The Sunday Telegraph
and
The Observer
, combined.
[4]
[5]
While some other national newspapers moved to a
tabloid format
in the early 2000s,
The Sunday Times
retained the larger
broadsheet
format and has said that it intends to continue to do so. As of December 2019, it sold 75% more copies than its sister paper,
The Times
, which is published from Monday to Saturday.
[6]
The paper publishes
The Sunday Times
Rich List
and
The Sunday Times
Fast Track 100
.
History
[
edit
]
Founding and early history (1821?1915)
[
edit
]
The paper began publication on 18 February 1821 as
The New Observer
, but from 21 April its title was changed to the
Independent Observer
. Its founder, Henry White, chose the name apparently in an attempt to take advantage of the success of
The Observer
, which had been founded in 1791, although there was no connection between the two papers. On 20 October 1822 it was reborn as
The Sunday Times
, although it had no relationship with
The Times
.
[7]
In January 1823, White sold the paper to
Daniel Whittle Harvey
, a radical politician.
[
citation needed
]
Under its new owner,
The Sunday Times
notched up several firsts. A wood engraving it published of the coronation of
Queen Victoria
in 1838 was the largest illustration to have appeared in a British newspaper.
[8]
In 1841, it became one of the first papers to serialise a novel:
William Harrison Ainsworth
's
Old St Paul's
.
[9]
The paper was bought in 1887 by
Alice Anne Cornwell
, who had made a fortune in mining in Australia and by floating the Midas Mine Company on the London Stock Exchange. She bought the paper to promote her new company, The British and Australasian Mining Investment Company, and as a gift to her lover
Phil Robinson
. Robinson was installed as editor and the two were later married in 1894.
[10]
In 1893 Cornwell sold the paper to Frederick Beer, who already owned
The Observer
. Beer appointed his wife,
Rachel Sassoon Beer
, as editor. She was already editor of
The Observer
? the first woman to run a national newspaper ? and continued to edit both titles until 1901.
[11]
The Kemsley years (1915?1959)
[
edit
]
There was a further change of ownership in 1903, and then in 1915 the paper was bought by
William Berry
and his brother, Gomer Berry, later ennobled as Lord Camrose and
Viscount Kemsley
respectively. Under their ownership,
The Sunday Times
continued its reputation for innovation: on 23 November 1930, it became the first Sunday newspaper to publish a 40-page issue and on 21 January 1940, news replaced advertising on the front page.
[12]
In 1943, the Kemsley Newspapers Group was established, with
The Sunday Times
becoming its flagship paper. At this time, Kemsley was the largest newspaper group in Britain.
[
citation needed
]
On 12 November 1945,
Ian Fleming
, who later created
James Bond
, joined the paper as foreign manager (foreign editor) and special writer. The following month, circulation reached 500,000.
[13]
On 28 September 1958, the paper launched a separate Review section, becoming the first newspaper to publish two sections regularly.
[14]
The Thomson years (1959?1981)
[
edit
]
The Kemsley group was bought in 1959 by
Lord Thomson
, and in October 1960 circulation reached one million for the first time.
[15]
In another first, on 4 February 1962 the editor, Denis Hamilton, launched
The Sunday Times Magazine
. (At the insistence of newsagents, worried at the impact on sales of standalone magazines, it was initially called the "colour section" and did not take the name
The Sunday Times Magazine
until 9 August 1964.) The cover picture of the first issue was of
Jean Shrimpton
wearing a
Mary Quant
outfit and was taken by
David Bailey
. The magazine got off to a slow start, but the advertising soon began to pick up, and, over time, other newspapers launched magazines of their own.
[
citation needed
]
In 1963, the
Insight
investigative team was established under Clive Irving. The "Business" section was launched on 27 September 1964, making
The Sunday Times
Britain's first regular three-section newspaper. In September 1966, Thomson bought
The Times
, to form
Times Newspapers Ltd
(TNL). It was the first time
The Sunday Times
and
The Times
had been brought under the same ownership.
[
citation needed
]
Harold Evans
, editor from 1967 until 1981, established
The Sunday Times
as a leading campaigning and investigative newspaper. On 19 May 1968, the paper published its first major campaigning report on the drug
thalidomide
, which had been reported by the Australian doctor
William McBride
in
The Lancet
in 1961 as being associated with birth defects, and been quickly withdrawn. The newspaper published a four-page
Insight
investigation, titled "The Thalidomide File", in the "Weekly Review" section. A compensation settlement for the UK victims was eventually reached with
Distillers Company
(now part of
Diageo
), which had distributed the drug in the UK.
[
citation needed
]
TNL was plagued by a series of industrial disputes at its plant at Gray's Inn Road in London, with the print unions resisting attempts to replace the old-fashioned hot-metal and labour-intensive
Linotype
method with technology that would allow the papers to be composed digitally. Thomson offered to invest millions of pounds to buy out obstructive practices and overmanning, but the unions rejected every proposal. As a result, publication of
The Sunday Times
and other titles in the group was suspended in November 1978. It did not resume until November 1979.
[
citation needed
]
Although journalists at
The Times
had been on full pay during the suspension, they went on strike demanding more money after production was resumed.
Kenneth Thomson
, the head of the company, felt betrayed and decided to sell. Evans tried to organise a management buyout of
The Sunday Times
, but Thomson decided instead to sell to
Rupert Murdoch
, who he thought had a better chance of dealing with the trade unions.
[
citation needed
]
The Murdoch years (1981?present)
[
edit
]
Rupert Murdoch
's
News International
acquired the group in February 1981. Murdoch, an Australian who in 1985 became a
naturalised
American citizen, already owned
The Sun
and the
News of the World
, but the Conservative government decided not to refer the deal to the
Monopolies and Mergers Commission
, citing a clause in the
Fair Trading Act
that exempted uneconomic businesses from referral.
The Thomson Corporation
had threatened to close the papers down if they were not taken over by someone else within an allotted time, and it was feared that any legal delay to Murdoch's takeover might lead to the two titles' demise. In return, Murdoch provided legally binding guarantees to preserve the titles' editorial independence.
[
citation needed
]
Evans was appointed editor of
The Times
in February 1981 and was replaced at
The Sunday Times
by
Frank Giles
. In 1983, the newspaper bought the serialisation rights to publish the faked
Hitler Diaries
, thinking them to be genuine after they were authenticated by the own newspaper's own independent director,
Hugh Trevor-Roper
, the historian and author of
The Last Days of Hitler
.
[16]
Under
Andrew Neil
, editor from 1983 until 1994,
The Sunday Times
took a strongly
Thatcherite
slant that contrasted with the traditional paternalistic conservatism expounded by
Peregrine Worsthorne
at the rival
Sunday Telegraph
. It also built on its reputation for investigations. Its scoops included the revelation in 1986 that Israel had manufactured more than 100
nuclear
warheads
[17]
and the publication in 1992 of extracts from
Andrew Morton
's book,
Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words
. In the early 1990s, the paper courted controversy with a series of articles in which it rejected the role of HIV in causing AIDS.
[
citation needed
]
In January 1986, after the announcement of a
strike
by print workers, production of
The Sunday Times
, along with other newspapers in the group, was shifted to a new plant in Wapping, and the strikers were dismissed. The plant, which allowed journalists to input copy directly, was activated with the help of the
Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union
(EETPU). The print unions posted pickets and organised demonstrations outside the new plant to try to dissuade journalists and others from working there, in what became known as the
Wapping dispute
. The demonstrations sometimes turned violent. The protest ended in failure in February 1987.
[
citation needed
]
During Neil's editorship, a number of new sections were added: the annual "
The Sunday Times
Rich List
" and the "
Funday Times
", in 1989 (the latter stopped appearing in print and was relaunched as a standalone website in March 2006, but was later closed); "Style & Travel", "News Review" and "Arts" in 1990; and "Culture" in 1992. In September 1994, "Style" and "Travel" became two separate sections.
[
citation needed
]
During Neil's time as editor,
The Sunday Times
backed a campaign to prove that HIV was not a cause of AIDS.
[18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
In 1990,
The Sunday Times
serialized a book by an American conservative who rejected the scientific consensus on the causes of AIDS and argued that AIDS could not spread to heterosexuals.
[20]
Articles and editorials in
The Sunday Times
cast doubt on the scientific consensus, described HIV as a "politically correct virus" about which there was a "conspiracy of silence", disputed that AIDS was spreading in Africa, claimed that tests for HIV were invalid, described the HIV/AIDS treatment drug AZT as harmful, and characterized the WHO as an "Empire-building AIDS [organisation]".
[20]
The
pseudoscientific
coverage of HIV/AIDS in
The Sunday Times
led the scientific journal
Nature
to monitor the newspaper's coverage and to publish letters rebutting
Sunday Times
articles which
The Sunday Times
refused to publish.
[20]
In response to this,
The Sunday Times
published an article headlined "AIDS ? why we won't be silenced", which claimed that
Nature
engaged in censorship and "sinister intent".
[20]
In his 1996 book,
Full Disclosure
, Neil wrote that the HIV/AIDS denialism "deserved publication to encourage debate".
[20]
That same year, he wrote that
The Sunday Times
had been vindicated in its coverage, "The Sunday Times was one of a handful of newspapers, perhaps the most prominent, which argued that heterosexual Aids was a myth. The figures are now in and this newspaper stands totally vindicated ... The history of Aids is one of the great scandals of our time. I do not blame doctors and the Aids lobby for warning that everybody might be at risk in the early days, when ignorance was rife and reliable evidence scant." He criticized the "AIDS establishment" and said "Aids had become an industry, a job-creation scheme for the caring classes."
[22]
John Witherow
, who became editor at the end of 1994 (after several months as acting editor), continued the newspaper's expansion. A website was launched in 1996 and new print sections added: "Home" in 2001, and "Driving" in 2002, which in 2006 was renamed "InGear". (It reverted to the name "Driving" from 7 October 2012, to coincide with the launch of a new standalone website,
Sunday Times Driving
.) Technology coverage was expanded in 2000 with the weekly colour magazine "Doors", and in 2003 "The Month", an editorial section presented as an interactive CD-ROM. Magazine partworks were regular additions, among them "1000 Makers of Music", published over six weeks in 1997.
[
citation needed
]
John Witherow oversaw a rise in circulation to 1.3 million
[23]
and reconfirmed
The Sunday Times
's
reputation for publishing hard-hitting news stories ? such as the
cash for questions
scandal in 1994 and the
cash for honours
scandal in 2006, and revelations of
corruption at FIFA
in 2010.
[24]
The newspaper's foreign coverage has been especially strong, and its reporters,
Marie Colvin
,
Jon Swain
,
Hala Jaber
,
Mark Franchetti
and
Christina Lamb
have dominated the Foreign Reporter of the Year category at the British Press Awards since 2000.
[
citation needed
]
Colvin, who worked for the paper from 1985, was killed in February 2012 by Syrian forces while covering the
siege of Homs
during that country's civil war.
[25]
In common with other newspapers,
The Sunday Times
has been hit by a fall in circulation, which has declined from a peak of 1.3 million to just over 710,000. It has a number of digital-only subscribers, which numbered 99,017 by January 2019.
[26]
During January 2013,
Martin Ivens
became 'acting' editor of
The Sunday Times
in succession to John Witherow, who became the 'acting' editor of
The Times
at the same time. The independent directors rejected a permanent position for Ivens as editor to avoid any possible merger of
The Sunday Times
and daily
Times
titles.
[27]
Online presence
[
edit
]
The Sunday Times
has its own website. It previously shared an online presence with
The Times
, but in May 2010 they both launched their own sites to reflect their distinct brand identities. Since July 2010, the sites are charging for access.
An iPad edition was launched in December 2010, and an Android version in August 2011. Since July 2012, the digital version of the paper has been available on Apple's Newsstand platform, allowing automated downloading of the news section. With over 500 MB of content every week, it is the biggest newspaper app in the world.
[
citation needed
]
The Sunday Times
iPad app was named newspaper app of the year at the 2011 Newspaper Awards and has twice been ranked best newspaper or magazine app in the world by iMonitor.
[
citation needed
]
Various subscription packages exist, giving access to both the print and digital versions of the paper.
On 2 October 2012,
The Sunday Times
launched Sunday Times Driving, a separate classified advertising site for premium vehicles that also includes editorial content from the newspaper as well as specially commissioned articles. It can be accessed without cost.
Related publications
[
edit
]
The Sunday Times Travel Magazine
[
edit
]
This 164-page monthly magazine was sold separately from the newspaper and was Britain's best-selling travel magazine.
[28]
The first issue of
The Sunday Times Travel Magazine
was in 2003,
[29]
[30]
and it included news, features and insider guides.
Notable stories
[
edit
]
Some of the more notable or controversial stories published in
The Sunday Times
include:
[31]
- Thalidomide
, a drug prescribed to pregnant women to treat morning sickness, was withdrawn in 1961 following reports that it was linked to a number of birth defects.
The Sunday Times
spent many years campaigning for compensation for the victims, providing case studies and evidence of the side-effects. In 1968, the Distillers Company agreed to a multimillion-pound compensation scheme for the victims.
[
citation needed
]
- The paper sponsored
Francis Chichester
's single-handed circumnavigation of the world under sail in 1966?67, and the
Sunday Times
Golden Globe Race
in 1968?69.
[
citation needed
]
- The Insight team ran an investigation into
Kim Philby
, the Soviet double agent, that ran on 1 October 1967 under the headline "Philby: I spied for Russia from 1933".
[
citation needed
]
- Insight carried out a major investigation in 1972 into
Bloody Sunday
in Northern Ireland.
[
citation needed
]
- The newspaper published the faked
Hitler Diaries
(1983), believing them to be genuine after they were authenticated by historian
Hugh Trevor-Roper
.
[16]
- Israeli nuclear weapons: using information from
Mordechai Vanunu
,
The Sunday Times
in 1986 revealed that Israel had manufactured more than 100 nuclear warheads.
[
citation needed
]
- On 12 July 1987
The Sunday Times
began serialisation of the book
Spycatcher
, the memoirs of an
MI5
agent, which had been banned in Britain. The paper successfully challenged subsequent legal action by the British government, winning its case at the
European Court of Human Rights
in 1991.
[32]
- The paper ran a story claiming
Queen Elizabeth II
, who generally maintains a strictly impartial role politically, was upset with the style of
Margaret Thatcher
's leadership.
[33]
- In 1990, in what became known as the
Arms-to-Iraq
affair, the paper revealed how Matrix Churchill and other British firms were supplying arms to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
[
citation needed
]
- In 1992, the paper published extracts from
Andrew Morton
's book
Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words
, which revealed for the first time the disastrous state of her marriage to
Prince Charles
.
[
citation needed
]
- In its "
cash for questions
" investigation in 1994,
Graham Riddick
, MP for Colne Valley and
David Tredinnick
, MP for Bosworth, accepted cheques for £1,000 each from an Insight journalist posing as a businessman in return for tabling a parliamentary question. The investigation followed information that some MPs were taking one-off payments to table questions.
[34]
- Under the headline, "KGB:
Michael Foot
was our agent",
The Sunday Times
ran an article on 19 February 1995 that claimed the Soviet intelligence services regarded Foot, a former leader of the Labour Party, as an "agent of influence", codenamed "Agent Boot", and that he had been in the pay of the KGB for many years. The article was based on the serialisation of the memoirs of
Oleg Gordievsky
, a former high-ranking KGB officer who defected from the Soviet Union to Britain in 1985. Crucially, the newspaper used material from the original manuscript of the book which had not been included in the published version. Foot successfully sued for libel, winning "substantial" damages.
[35]
- In 1997?98, the paper ran a series of exclusive stories based on revelations from
Richard Tomlinson
, a former MI6 spy, about life inside MI6 and secret MI6 operations around the world.
[
citation needed
]
- During the siege of the United Nations compound in
East Timor
in 1999, the paper's foreign reporter, Marie Colvin, was one of only three journalists (all women) who remained to the end with the 1,500 people trapped there. She reported their plight both in
The Sunday Times
and in interviews on radio and television and was widely credited with saving their lives.
[36]
- In 2003,
The Sunday Times
published confidential Whitehall documents revealing the names of more than 300 people who had declined
New Year's
,
Queen's Birthday
and
Dissolution honours
(i.e. knighthoods,
OBEs
, etc.)
[
citation needed
]
- In 2006, in an investigation that became known as "
cash for honours
",
The Sunday Times
revealed how several prominent figures nominated for life peerages by the then prime minister,
Tony Blair
, had loaned large amounts of money to the Labour Party at the suggestion of
Lord Levy
, a Labour Party fundraiser.
[
citation needed
]
- In mid-2009, the newspaper ran a series of articles revealing how politicians were abusing the expenses system.
[37]
- Between 2004 and 2010, the newspaper ran an award-winning investigation by
Brian Deer
which revealed that research by
Andrew Wakefield
into the
MMR vaccine
was fraudulent. The investigation led to Wakefield being banned from medicine, and the retraction of his research from
The Lancet
.
[
citation needed
]
- In March 2010, undercover reporters from
The Sunday Times
Insight team filmed
members of parliament agreeing to work for a fictitious lobbying firm
for fees of £3,000?£5,000 a day. One of those implicated,
Stephen Byers
, described himself as "sort of like a cab for hire".
[38]
- In October 2010, an investigation by the newspaper exposed
corruption within FIFA
after a member of the association's committee which grants the World Cup guaranteed his vote to an undercover reporter after requesting £500,000 for a "personal project".
[24]
- In 2011, the paper broke what became known as the
cash for influence scandal
: it revealed that
Adrian Severin
,
Ernst Strasser
, Pablo Zalba Bidegain and
Zoran Thaler
tried to influence EU legislation in exchange for promised money. Both Strasser and Thaler resigned in March 2011.
[39]
- In March 2012, the paper filmed
Peter Cruddas
, the co-treasurer of the Conservative Party, offering access to David Cameron, the prime minister, in return for donations of £250,000. Cruddas resigned several hours later. Cameron said: "What happened was completely unacceptable. This is not the way we raise money in the Conservative Party."
[40]
- In January 2013, the seven-times
Tour de France
winner
Lance Armstrong
confessed to having used performance-enhancing drugs during each of his Tour victories. The confession ended years of denials about allegations of cheating during most of the cyclist's professional career.
The Sunday Times
chief sports writer
David Walsh
had spent over a decade investigating Armstrong, his team and the systematic
doping
rife in the sport. The newspaper was forced to pay Armstrong £300,000 in damages in 2006 after he sued it for libel. Following Armstrong's lifelong ban (and subsequent televised confession)
The Sunday Times
said it would sue him to recover the damages, plus interest and costs, for the original proceedings which it called "baseless and fraudulent".
[41]
- In June 2014, the Insight team at
The Sunday Times
published a front-page story "Plot to buy the World Cup" that detailed how
Qatar
used secret slush funds to make dozens of payments totalling more than $5m to senior officials at
FIFA
to ensure the country won enough votes to secure hosting rights to the
2022 FIFA World Cup
.
[42]
The revelation prompted calls for Qatar to be stripped of hosting the World Cup.
[43]
The reporting by Jonathan Calvert and Heidi Blake won numerous awards, including the
Paul Foot Award
.
[44]
It also formed the basis for the book by Calvert and Blake, published by
Simon & Schuster
,
The Ugly Game
.
[45]
- In June 2015,
The Sunday Times
ran a lead front article titled "British spies betrayed to Russians and Chinese". The article was controversial because it contained numerous unlikely and unsubstantiated claims. Shortly after publication parts of the online version of the article were changed quietly by the newspaper. The article appeared to be an attempt to smear the American whistleblower
Edward Snowden
, thus fuelling further doubt as to its independent editorship.
[46]
[47]
[48]
- A 2016
Sunday Times
investigation into the unsolved
Whiston
murders of John Greenwood and Gary Miller
in 1980 led to the unearthing of new evidence, which led
Merseyside Police
to re-open the 40-year-old case.
[49]
[50]
Subsequently, in 2019 police attempted to re-try the original suspect acquitted in 1981 under
double jeopardy
legislation, but were not permitted to do so by the
Director of Public Prosecutions
, causing police to campaign for a change in the double jeopardy law.
[51]
[52]
- In August 2019,
The Sunday Times
received the leaked
Operation Yellowhammer
file about preparations for a "no deal"
Brexit
.
[53]
- In April 2020, an investigation by
The Sunday Times
'
Insight
team revealed Prime Minister
Boris Johnson
had skipped five
COBR
meetings in the early months of the
COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom
.
[54]
The investigation suggested that the British government underestimated the threat of the virus and failed to adequately prepare, and scrutinised Johnson's leadership during the crisis. It became the most read story in the history of
The Times
.
[55]
This, and subsequent investigations into the
government's pandemic response
, formed the basis of the 2021 book
Failures of State
.
[56]
Controversies
[
edit
]
Phone hacking scandal
[
edit
]
In July 2011,
The Sunday Times
was implicated in the wider
News International phone hacking scandal
, which primarily involved the
News of the World
, a Murdoch tabloid newspaper published in the UK from 1843 to 2011. Former British prime minister
Gordon Brown
accused
The Sunday Times
of employing "known criminals" to impersonate him and obtain his private financial records.
[57]
[58]
Brown's bank reported that an investigator employed by
The Sunday Times
repeatedly impersonated Brown to gain access to his bank account records.
[59]
The Sunday Times
vigorously denied these accusations and said that the story was in the public interest and that it had followed the
Press Complaints Commission
code on using subterfuge.
[
citation needed
]
Errors
[
edit
]
Over two years in the early 1990s,
The Sunday Times
published a series of articles
rejecting the role
of HIV in causing AIDS, calling the
African AIDS epidemic
a myth. In response, the scientific journal
Nature
described the paper's coverage of HIV/AIDS as "seriously mistaken, and probably disastrous".
[60]
Nature
argued that the newspaper had "so consistently misrepresented the role of HIV in the causation of AIDS that
Nature
plans to monitor its future treatment of the issue."
[61]
In January 2010,
The Sunday Times
published an article by Jonathan Leake, alleging that a figure in the
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report
was based on an "unsubstantiated claim". The story attracted worldwide attention. However, a scientist quoted in the same article later stated that the newspaper story was wrong and that quotes of him had been used in a misleading way.
[62]
Following an official complaint to the
Press Complaints Commission
,
[62]
The Sunday Times
retracted the story and apologised.
[63]
[64]
In September 2012, Jonathan Leake published an article in
The Sunday Times
under the headline "Only 100 adult cod in North Sea".
[65]
This figure was later shown by a BBC article to be wildly incorrect.
[66]
The newspaper published a correction, apologising for an over simplification in the headline, which had referred to a fall in the number of fully mature cod over the age of 13, thereby indicating this is the breeding age of cod. In fact, as the newspaper subsequently pointed out, cod can start breeding between the ages of four and six, in which case there are many more mature cod in the North Sea.
[67]
Allegations of antisemitism
[
edit
]
In 1992, the paper agreed to pay
David Irving
, an author widely criticised for
Holocaust denial
, the sum of £75,000 to authenticate the
Goebbels
diaries and edit them for serialisation.
[68]
The deal was quickly cancelled after drawing strong international criticism.
[
citation needed
]
In January 2013,
The Sunday Times
published a
Gerald Scarfe
caricature depicting Israel's Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu
cementing a wall with blood and Palestinians trapped between the bricks. The cartoon sparked an outcry, compounded by the fact that its publication coincided with
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
, and was condemned by the
Anti-Defamation League
.
[69]
After Rupert Murdoch tweeted that he considered it a "grotesque, offensive cartoon" and that Scarfe had "never reflected the opinions of
The Sunday Times
"
[70]
the newspaper issued an apology.
[71]
Journalist Ian Burrell, writing in
The Independent
, described the apology as an "indication of the power of the Israel lobby in challenging critical media coverage of its politicians" and one that questions Rupert Murdoch's assertion that he does not "interfere in the editorial content of his papers".
[72]
In July 2017, Kevin Myers wrote a column in
The Sunday Times saying
"I note that two of the best-paid women presenters in the BBC ?
Claudia Winkleman
and
Vanessa Felt
, with whose, no doubt, sterling work I am tragically unacquainted ? are Jewish. Good for them". He continued "Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity. I wonder, who are their agents? If they’re the same ones that negotiated the pay for the women on the lower scales, then maybe the latter have found their true value in the marketplace".
[73]
[74]
After the column
The Sunday Times
fired Myers.
[74]
The
Campaign Against Antisemitism
criticized
The Sunday Times
for allowing Myers to write the column despite his past comments about Jews.
[73]
Other editions
[
edit
]
Irish edition
[
edit
]
The
Republic of Ireland
edition of
The Sunday Times
was launched on a small scale in 1993 with just two staff:
Alan Ruddock
and
John Burns
(who started as financial correspondent for the newspaper and is at present acting associate editor). It used the slogan "The English just don't get it".
[75]
It is now the third biggest-selling newspaper in Ireland measured in terms of full-price cover sales (Source: ABC January?June 2012).
[
full citation needed
]
Circulation had grown steadily to over 127,000 in the two decades before 2012, but has declined since and currently stands at 60,352 (January to June 2018).
[76]
[77]
The paper is heavily editionalised, with extensive Irish coverage of politics, general news, business, personal finance, sport, culture and lifestyle. The office employs 25 people. The paper also has a number of well-known freelance columnists including
Brenda Power
,
Liam Fay
,
Matt Cooper
,
Damien Kiberd
, Jill Kerby and
Stephen Price
. However, it ended collaboration with
Kevin Myers
after he had published a controversial column.
[78]
The Irish edition has had four editors since it was set up: Alan Ruddock from 1993 until 1996,
Rory Godson
from 1996 until 2000,
[79]
Fiona McHugh
[80]
from 2000 to 2005, and from 2005 until 2020
Frank Fitzgibbon
.
[81]
John Burns has been acting editor of the Irish edition from 2020.
[
citation needed
]
Scottish edition
[
edit
]
For more than 20 years the paper has published a separate Scottish edition, which has been edited since January 2012 by
Jason Allardyce
. While most of the articles that run in the English edition appear in the Scottish edition, its staff also produces about a dozen Scottish news stories, including a front-page article, most weeks.
[82]
The edition also contains a weekly "Scottish Focus" feature and Scottish commentary, and covers Scottish sport in addition to providing Scottish television schedules. The Scottish issue is the biggest-selling 'quality newspaper' in the market, outselling both
Scotland on Sunday
and the
Sunday Herald
.
[
citation needed
]
Editors
[
edit
]
- 1821: Henry White
- 1822:
Daniel Whittle Harvey
- 1828:
Thomas Gaspey
- 1854: William Carpenter
- 1856:
E. T. Smith
- 1858: Henry M. Barnett
- 1864: Joseph Knight and Ashby Sterry (acting editors)
- 1874:
Joseph Hatton
- 1881: H. W. Oliphant
- 1887:
Phil Robinson
- 1890:
Arthur William a Beckett
- 1893:
Rachel Beer
- 1901:
Leonard Rees
- 1932: William W. Hadley
- 1950:
Harry Hodson
- 1961:
Denis Hamilton
- 1967:
Harold Evans
- 1981:
Frank Giles
- 1983:
Andrew Neil
- 1995:
John Witherow
- 2013:
Martin Ivens
- 2020:
Emma Tucker
- 2023: Ben Taylor
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Retrieved
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.
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.
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.
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- ^
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.
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.
- ^
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.
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. 15 June 2015.
- ^
"Two unsolved mysteries: Justice at last?"
.
The Times
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. Retrieved
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2023
.
- ^
"Case of boys' 1980 Whiston murder reopened"
.
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. Retrieved
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"Whiston boys' murders: 'Double jeopardy reform needed'
"
.
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. 18 February 2020
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"
.
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.
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"Operation Chaos: Whitehall's secret no?deal Brexit preparations leaked The Sunday Times obtains the government's classified 'Yellowhammer' report in full"
.
The Sunday Times
. Retrieved
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.
- ^
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"Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster"
.
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.
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. Retrieved
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.
- ^
"Government 'asleep at wheel' in run-up to outbreak"
.
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.
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.
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External links
[
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