Connect: Just before midnight on Monday, a Sky News frontman was showing viewers the front pages of Tuesday's British dailies. He read out lead-story headlines. Most of the papers were leading with reports of the Hutton Inquiry.
The Sun, however, filled the screen with the latest example of its legendary darkness: "BONKERS BRUNO LOCKED UP", it screamed in capital letters.
The Sky guy baulked and didn't read the headline aloud. Instead, he merely remarked that the Sun was "leading with the Bruno story", before raising his voice and moving on brusquely to show other front pages. For years, the Sun has specialised in tales of "bonkers" but using the word as an adjective to describe Frank Bruno was too coarse even for its stablemate, Sky News.
It was also too coarse for many viewers. The newspaper and radio phone-in shows were deluged with complaints. Frank Bruno, the former boxer and panto star, did not deserve such loutish coverage, said complainants. The Sun got the message and changed its splash headline for later editions to "SAD BRUNO IN MENTAL HOME", adding an underlined sub-head of "Hero sectioned".
Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the British mental health charity, Sane, described the crass initial headline as "ignorant". It was certainly that, but it was also worse than ignorant; it was ignominious. The usual defences - "dramatic impact", "it's the language used in the boozer", "lighten up, po-face" - and the rest of a discredited list were not attempted this time.
Instead, the following day's Sun launched a "Fund for Frank", urging readers to "dig deep . . . like Bruno did for boxing". Money collected would go to Sane and Wallace was given space to plead that Bruno be given time to heal. "Frank has courage to defeat this," said a huge headline, while a columnist exhorted readers to "pray for Frank: a casualty of fame".
The switch from "Bonkers Bruno" to a "Fund for Frank", though it maintained alliteration, was craven. The initial, offensive headline was not only insensitive but sneering. It objectified and ridiculed the ex-boxer while distancing the paper from him. The revised tone, with its cheesily intimate stress on Bruno's first name, should fool nobody.
"The sight of Frank Bruno mentally unravelling is a cautionary tale of modern times," said the intro to the "Pray for Frank" tripe. Perhaps it is, but the sight of the Sun unravelling under a barrage of legitimate complaint is a cautionary tale for media sleazeballs who insist that the sole job of journalism is "to give the punters what they want". The punters, after all, didn't want "Bonkers Bruno".
The episode, yet again, raises questions of a press gone "bonkers". Somebody, after all, composed the vile headline. Clearly, it was then agreed upon and offered to the British public as a valid, albeit irreverent example of tough-minded journalism. But it was shameful and viewers of Sky News, as well as its frontman, knew it.
The headline was not simply a mistake. It was a mistake so revealing that it caught the Sun with its trousers down. Mocking the mental breakdown of Frank Bruno mocks all mental breakdowns. It revives a time when mentally ill people were treated as objects of amusement and scorn, publicly paraded for the delectation of cretins who believed themselves sane.
Since January the Sun has been edited by Rebekah Wade (35), the paper's first female editor. As editor of the News of the World, Wade ran the infamous "name and shame" campaign against paedophiles. That campaign was so successful it led to a paediatrician's office being vandalised by a mob incited by Wade's controversial but circulation-boosting crusade.
Critics of "name and shame" said that Wade was cashing-in on the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne. Whether she was or not, her general right-wingery (she supported attacking Iraq) and incitement of vigilantes impressed the paper's proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. She got the Sun job she had long craved and pledged to bring back the paper's "old style sense of fun".
This "old style sense of fun" appears to include a very old style sense of fun in mocking people suffering from mental illness. In itself, that surely is a form of mental illness and Wade - given her callous display towards Bruno - deserves to be named and shamed for her paper's gross behaviour. "Wacko Wade Strikes Again" might make a suitably sensitive headline.
There is always a case for strong and, when appropriate, funny tabloid journalism. A sense of irreverence, too, is necessary. But "bonkers" journalism, inciting readers to vigilantism and to snigger at mental illness, is neither strong nor funny. Yet such is the Murdoch style that encouraging these barbarities is a valuable quality that leads to an editor's chair.
Aping British imports, Irish journalism has become increasingly sleazy. However, the cost to society can be enormous, coarsening it by spreading poisonous attitudes. In debasing itself below the lowest level of "what the punter wants", Wacko Wade's 'Sun' has made its dark agenda crystal clear. With "Bonkers Bruno", decent people can say "Gotcha!", Becky.