I am not really familiar with the Sun, but people here on HN seem to dismiss the story as a hoax because it's featured on the this website/newspaper. Can anyone please clarify what's its reputation and why should it be mistrusted? Thanks.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that the Sun makes stuff up... but they certainly don't question a "good story" as much as they should and seem to print almost everything at face value. It's the kind of paper that has sensationalist headlines about pederasts on the front page, topless pics of barely legal girls on page 3 and no sense of irony.
This particular article falls into the Jingoism style articles that the Sun is famous for. It's readers are, by and large, xenophobic bigots obsessed with reality TV and C-List celebrities.
They're the closest thing with have to Fox News here in the UK, (that's no coincidence as it's owned by Newscorp) and as such, articles in the Sun about other countries should be given the same level of credence you would give Bill O'Riley's comments about anything.
Other british tabloids you would do well to dismiss entirely out of hand are
- The Mail
- The Mirror
- The Express
- The Sport (often hilarious)
Unfortunately, a lot of the US media doesn't seem to be aware of this. There was an amusing incident a while back where Wired had an article claiming that the British government was installing CCTVs in peoples' houses to watch their parenting. There source for this nonsense was that most reliable of papers, the Express.
The Sun is famous for headlines like "Freddie Starr ate my hamster" and "Werewolf seized in Southend". The American equivalent would be something like the National Enquirer.
Sister paper to the News of the World (home of the "phone hacking") and home of Page 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Three (photos of topless glamour models).
For one, it published claims (later discredited) that football hooligans were partially responsible for the Hillsborough disaster, where mistakes in crowd control led to almost 100 deaths and 800 injuries among supporters of Liverpool F.C.; sales of The Sun are measurably lower in Liverpool to this day because of that story.
