Azernews.Az

By Bloomberg

Readers of Britain’s best-selling tabloid, The Sun, found women clad in bikinis instead of the topless models who have featured on page 3 since 1970.

Rupert Murdoch tweeted in September that the feature was old-fashioned. A “No More Page 3” campaign has won support on social media in recent years, garnering almost 220,000 signatures in favor of scrapping the controversial images.

The newspaper continues to show women clad in lingerie and bikinis on the page, while topless pictures are still available on its website.

“Page 3 is really beyond its use-by date,” said David Banks, a former editor at The Sun whose job as night editor was choosing the woman for the next day’s newspaper. “It’s inevitable its time has come.”

Murdoch’s News U.K. operation, a division of News Corp. that owns The Sun and The Times of London newspapers, did not respond to queries about the decision.

The Sun is Britain’s No. 1 newspaper with a daily circulation of 1.89 million at the end of December, according to the U.K.’s Audit Bureau of Circulations. While the paper is best known for Page 3 and covering celebrity sex scandals, it has been polishing its image recently to appeal more to families.

Double Standards

The “No More Page 3” Facebook site, a campaign started by writer Lucy-Anne Holmes to “Take the Bare Boobs Out of The Sun,” was filled with congratulatory messages today and notes on TV appearances to discuss the move.

“It wasn’t about Page 3 being offensive but about the impact on our society of judging men and women by different standards,” Stella Creasy, a lawmaker for Walthamstow in London, said in a BBC Radio 4 interview today. “It was saying to all of us that what mattered was our breasts not our brains.”

Page 3 first drew opposition in the 1980s, when lawmaker Clare Short introduced a bill in Parliament to kill the feature. In recent years British universities including Oxford and the London School of Economics canceled subscriptions. The Murdoch- owned Irish Sun dropped its version of Page 3 a year and a half ago.

Banks said the end of the topless version of the Page 3 girl is only a partial victory, given the continuing appearance of barely dressed women on the page and the topless pictures on Page3.com. “We’re still going to be titillated, though I admire The Sun for beginning this progress toward not producing soft porn.”