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A ‘mammary lapse’: The Sun brings back topless Page 3
Calling it a ‘mammary lapse’, The Sun on Thursday brought back a topless model on its infamous Page 3, days after campaigners, MPs and others had welcomed news from its sister publication, The Times, that the page would no longer feature bare breasts.
Calling it a ‘mammary lapse’, The Sun on Thursday brought back a topless model on its infamous Page 3, days after campaigners, MPs and others had welcomed news from its sister publication, The Times, that the page would no longer feature bare breasts.
In an issue symbolic of its verve or worse – depending on which side of the fence you sit – The Sun cheekily added an ‘apology’ on behalf of all those publications and others who had rejoiced in dropping the topless models that first burst on its Page 3 in 1970.
A notice on the top of its front page read: ‘We’ve had a mammary lapse’. On Page 3, it had another notice beside the image of a topless woman, titled ‘Clarifications and corrections’.
A caption under the photograph reads: "Further to recent reports in all other media outlets, we would like to clarify that this is Page 3 and this is a picture of Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth. We would like to apologise on behalf of the print and broadcast journalists who have spent the last two days talking and writing about us."
In its latest edition, the Times sought to put the record straight, by saying that its sister paper had "made a clean breast of it and admitted there's still some nudes to report".
As media experts believed that falling sales may have something to do with the return of a topless model or a cheap PR stunt, campaigners expressed dismay and indicated that the campaign against Page 3 would resume in right earnest.
Both The Sun and The Times are part of Rupert Murdoch’s stable. The Times reported earlier this week that the tabloid was “quietly dropping” the feature and that Murdoch was understood to have signed off on the change of policy.
The Sun does not publish topless models on weekends, and its Irish edition dropped them in 2013. Murdoch had tweeted in September that the topless images were ‘old fashioned’.
