Kelvin Calder MacKenzie (born 22 October 1946) is an English media executive and a former newspaper editor. He became editor of The Sun in 1981, by which time the publication had been established as Britain's largest-circulation newspaper. After leaving The Sun in 1994, he was appointed to executive roles in satellite television and other broadcasting outlets, as well as being involved in a number of publishing enterprises.
After short periods as a columnist at the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, MacKenzie returned to The Sun as a columnist. His contract was terminated by mutual consent in May 2017, after he was suspended for comparing footballer Ross Barkley to a gorilla.
Early life and career MacKenzie was born in Thanet, Kent, to Ian and Mary MacKenzie, both journalists working for The South London Observer. He is of Scottish descent, with ancestors from Aberdeenshire.
When the South London Press took over their paper, Mary became press chief for the Conservative leader of the Greater London Council, Horace Cutler. Educated at Alleyn's School in Dulwich, MacKenzie left school with one O-level in English literature.The Independent 22 January 1994 He joined the South East London Mercury at 17 and, for the next ten years, worked on local and then national newspapers, including the Daily Express.
MacKenzie has said that, early in his career, he discovered that he had little writing ability and that his talents lay in making up headlines and laying out pages. By 1978, at the age of 32, he became managing editor of the New York Post, two years after it had been purchased by Rupert Murdoch.
Editor of The Sun After moving back to the United Kingdom, and a period as night editor of the Daily Express, Murdoch appointed MacKenzie to The Sun as editor in 1981. Conflict between the two mastheads meant that MacKenzie performed both jobs for a time.
In 1978, The Sun had overtaken the Daily Mirror as the newspaper with the highest sales in the UK. MacKenzie cemented the paper's image as a right-wing tabloid, not only increasing its profile, but also making it known for attacks on left-wing political figures and movements, and its sensationalist front-page celebrity exposés. They often proved to be misleading or false, and many controversies in that area occurred during MacKenzie's editorship. Commentators including The Guardian contributor Roy Greenslade, and journalist John Pilger, commented on the alleged "Murdoch effect". MacKenzie himself stated that he felt his own spell as editor of The Sun had a "positively downhill impact on journalism".
The paper was frequently accused of dumbing down public discourse because of its preoccupations. Pilger blamed it for the promotion of jingoism, racism, homophobia, and intolerance. It was widely criticised for its perceived cruelty both to the targets of Mackenzie's – sometimes false – allegations. Frequently, his choice of targets were not only left-wing politicians and celebrities, but also ordinary members of the public. His alleged cruelty to his own staff and colleagues was also criticised, to which MacKenzie later responded: "Look, I am not here to be helpful. I am here to help myself, right, so I have no regrets to how I treated some people."
Headlines
MacKenzie was responsible for the "Gotcha" front-page headline of 4 May 1982, which reported the contentious sinking of the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano by a British submarine during the Falklands War. MacKenzie was criticised for the headline, although he had actually changed the front-page of later editions to "Did 1,200 Argies drown?" after it was established that there had been a large number of Argentine casualties.
MacKenzie's coverage of the Falklands War was criticised by some commentators for being a glorification of war (Greenslade was working with MacKenzie on The Sun at the time).
MacKenzie was responsible for the "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" front-page headline. The claims made in the accompanying article, that the comedian had placed his girlfriend's hamster on a sandwich and ate it, turned out to be entirely untrue and was an invention of the publicist Max Clifford. That headline is often held up as the prime example of The Sun'''s supposedly celebrity-obsessed, sensationalist and often inaccurate journalism.
Politics In the general elections which were held during his time as editor, MacKenzie's Sun strongly supported the Conservative Party and its policies.
Although the coverage of the 1992 election is particularly prominent, there were many other vitriolic personal attacks on Labour leaders by MacKenzie's Sun during elections, such as during the 1983 campaign, when MacKenzie ran a front page featuring an unflattering photograph of Michael Foot, then nearly 70 years old, alongside the headline "Do You Really Want This Old Fool To Run Britain?".
MacKenzie's coverage of the UK miners' strike of 1984–1985 was supportive of the actions of the police and the Thatcher government against the striking NUM miners. The paper was accused of making misleading or even outright false claims about the miners, their unions, and their leader Arthur Scargill. At one point, MacKenzie prepared a front page with the headline "Mine Führer" and a photograph of Scargill with his arm in the air, a pose giving the appearance of him making a Nazi salute. Print workers at The Sun, regarding it as being a cheap smear, refused to print it.Greg Philo, War and Peace News (Open University Press, 1985), p. 138.
At the time of the 1987 general election, MacKenzie ran a mock-editorial entitled "Why I'm Backing Kinnock, by Stalin".
On the day of the 1992 election, MacKenzie used the front-page headline "If Kinnock Wins Today, Will The Last Person To Leave Britain Please Turn Out The Lights", accompanied by a picture of Kinnock's head superimposed over a lightbulb. Although the paper initially supported the government of John Major, because it appeared that Major shared the ideological hostility of Thatcher towards European integration, that soon changed. According to MacKenzie, following the UK's forced exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday in September 1992, Major telephoned him to ask how the paper would report the story. While Major has denied the conversation ever took place, MacKenzie has said his response was: "Prime Minister, I have on my desk in front of me a very large bucket of shit which I am just about to pour all over you."Chippindale & Horrie, p. 442. The precise wording varies from source to source.
False stories In January 1987, MacKenzie published a completely untrue front-page story alleging that pop singer Elton John had engaged in sex with underage rentboys. Shortly afterwards, MacKenzie published another entirely false allegation that the singer had the voice boxes of his guard dogs removed because their barking kept him awake at night. Shortly after publication, MacKenzie confirmed the inaccuracy of that story by sending a reporter to the singer's house, who quickly discovered that all of John's guard dogs were quite capable of barking.
MacKenzie later said that he found it difficult to understand why he had believed, let alone published, the claims about the guard dogs, which he later realised were absurd. John sued The Sun for libel over both of the fallacious claims and was awarded £1,000,000 in damages in 1988.
MacKenzie later said of John:
There were many other controversies during MacKenzie's time in charge of The Sun. At one point, he ran a story about a previously unknown member of the public who had just undergone a heart transplant operation. The story denounced the man as a "love rat", Sun journalists having been told that he had left his wife 15 years earlier. Aside from criticism about the story's highly questionable news value, the newspaper was furiously condemned as the story was run when the man's recovery was still in the balance.
MacKenzie and his team were accused of simply inventing many of the stories that appeared in the newspaper, as well as interviews and, in some instances, that proved to be the case, such as when an entirely fabricated interview with the disfigured Falklands war hero Simon Weston was published, which was criticised for "inviting readers to feel revulsion at his disfigurement". MacKenzie himself once told his staff: "Give me a Sunday for Monday splash on the royals. Don't worry if it's not true—so long as there's not too much of a fuss about it afterwards."
Some other controversies during MacKenzie's editorship include a headline describing Australian Aborigines as "The Abo's: Brutal and Treacherous", which was condemned as "inaccurate" and "unacceptably racist" by the Press Council, and MacKenzie's sending of photographers to break into a psychiatric hospital to ask actor Jeremy Brett, who was a patient there at the time, and who was suffering from manic depression and dying of cardiomyopathy, whether he was "dying of AIDS". The newspaper apparently suspected Brett of being a homosexual and that his mystery illness might be AIDS, which it was not.
Those incidents led to considerable criticism of The Sun, but the newspaper's profile increased dramatically during MacKenzie's time as editor, although sales figures dipped. On the subject of the sensationalist and sometimes inaccurate reporting which appeared in The Sun during his time as editor, MacKenzie said:
Hillsborough disaster coverage
April 1989 saw the single biggest controversy during MacKenzie's period as editor, later described in a Sun editorial in 2004 as "the most terrible mistake in our history", occurred in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, a crowd crush during an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield, which claimed the lives of 97 Liverpool fans.
Three days after the disaster, The Sun published an editorial which accused people of "scapegoating" the police, saying that the disaster occurred "because thousands of fans, many without tickets tried to get into the ground just before kick-off – either by forcing their way in or by blackmailing the police into opening the gates".
The next day, The Sun had the front-page headline, "The Truth", and accused Liverpool fans of theft, and of urinating on and attacking police officers and emergency services. It quoted Conservative Member of Parliament Irvine Patnick to support its claim that a group of Liverpool supporters told a police officer that they would have sex with a dead female victim. The journalist who wrote the first draft of the article, Harry Arnold, said that MacKenzie claimed he would "make it clear that this is what some people are saying", but MacKenzie chose the headline "The Truth" only after staff members convinced him not to use "You Scum". Its source was a Sheffield news agency, Whites, which later said that four South Yorkshire Police officers were the source of the claims, as well as "a leading MP backing many of the police claims".
The article was accompanied by graphic photographs showing Liverpool fans, including young children, choking and suffocating as they were being crushed against the perimeter fences surrounding the terraces – this was widely condemned as inappropriate.
In their book about the history of The Sun, Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote: