The Sun

It was all meticulously recorded and reported in the press.

Jennifer Bullen writes in their book, Media Representation of Footballers' Wives: A WAG's Life, that during the 2006 World Cup, where England were only in the tournament for 21 days, The Sun had ran 103 WAG-focused articles, which is nearly five articles per day, and the Daily Mail ran 69 articles.

And this doesn't even include broadsheet or magazine coverage, which I'm sure was also very high.

Again, there is a lot of important context to lay down about the British tabloid press when, number one, discussing the media coverage of WAGs, and number two, discussing why WAGs were such a phenomenon in 2006 specifically.

Racism, Islamophobia, transphobia.

It's very unfortunate that in the UK some of the major sort of right-wing media outlets are very mainstream and actually aren't thought of as being right-wing by a lot of the general public.

A lot of people perceive The Sun and the Daily Mail as being centrist papers, centrist tabloids, when their reporting has always lent pretty right-wing.

What the British tabloid press do is they move their target every decade or so.

Is security really the issue, or are Harry and Meghan demanding royal treatment? Plus, after Prince Harry's birthday Instagram post bonanza, are the Sussexes finally giving up on privacy? Meghan went on a social media binge this week, posting videos that all but gave away their exact location.

And as the King backs Harry's Invictus Games, is Charles now a Sussex squaddie? Plus, as former Scottish minister Nicola Sturgeon says she wants to abolish the monarchy to free Prince George, is being born royal really a burden? I'm Matt Wilkinson, royal editor of The Sun, and joining me to unpack all this are news commentator Samara Gill, and host of the Mark Dolan Show, Mark Dolan.

Welcome to you both.

Now look, guys, uh, company included, I like to, uh, see the good in people.

We'll get a, we'll, we'll ...

There's two, uh, large, um, kind of photo and video dumps, um, that Meghan, Meghan put on Instagram.

Um, but just the, the point you made there, Robert Jobson wrote for The Sun, uh, today, wrote a, a really wonderful piece, uh, talking about it, and he actually, he actually wrote very similar to that.

He said, uh, he, he said it was the New York near catastrophic car crash repackaged.

Its opposite was the tabloid, smaller, sharper, more compressed.

Though, as the original Sun reminds us, a newspaper's size and its personality are not necessarily the same thing.

That first Sun was a broadsheet, but it was intended to be bright, modern, and popular.

Its slogan was, A paper born of the age we live in.

very 1964 britain was changing fast the beatles that was the week that was satire pop art new universities young people with money in their pockets and no intention of behaving like their parents the men behind the paper thought there was a new readership out there waiting to be captured Not the old political radicals who had read the Daily Herald, but what the market researchers called social radicals.

They relaunched it.

New name, new look, new audience, new dawn.

The first editions of The Sun rolled off the presses in Covent Garden at 10.40 p.m. on the night of September 14th.