Read part one of Roger Domeneghetti's gripping dissection of the Hillsborough disaster.

It would be wrong to suggest all of the media was actively involved in a conspiracy over Hillsborough but their way of working, coupled with their attitudes to football fans and the inhabitants of Liverpool, created fertile ground in which the police lies could take root and grow.

News is a product; journalists don’t just report it, they create it by prioritising some aspects of a story over others. Simplistic explanations which focus on one cause are sought, thus denying the context and true complexity of the issue at hand. Furthermore, journalists tend to rely on certain “trusted” contacts.

So as is often the case, in the search for the causes of Hillsborough precedence was given to official statements, particularly from the police, but also from politicians and FA officials — people who were expected to be detached and accurate.

The bereaved and survivors were relegated to providing the “emotional” side of coverage in human interest stories. This allowed the police to detract attention from their own failings by pointing the blame at the fans.

The police allegations gained further currency because they played on the negative perceptions held at the time of all football fans as drunken hooligans and also of Liverpool as an anarchic, rebellious city.

Liverpool had been hit harder than most by the recession of the 1970s, a crisis its politicians had failed to deal with adequately. Tensions boiled over with the Toxteth riots in 1981 and in 1983, as Margaret Thatcher swept to power, Labour took control of Liverpool council.

Two years later, led by the militant tendency, the council announced a controversial budget setting it at odds with both Thatcher’s government and the Labour Party leadership.

In a speech to the Tory backbench 1922 Committee, Thatcher declared Liverpool council, along with the miners, to be “the enemy within.”

Coverage of the political battles which ensued amounted to little more than a sustained attack on the people of Liverpool and gave rise to a series of long-lasting, negative stereotypes that have infused popular culture. This was the background to the infamous Sun front page purporting to tell “THE TRUTH.”

Despite anger on Merseyside at the media’s coverage, by the weekend after the tragedy the narrative had begun to stick and a Gallup poll for the Sunday Telegraph showed that already 25 per cent of people blamed the fans, with 22 per cent blaming police and 27 per cent saying they didn’t know who was responsible.

It wasn’t just the coverage and its consequences that drew sharp criticism but also the conduct of the media. Survivors spoke of their shock at how photographers had walked up to the fencing at Hillsborough, taken photos and moved on without trying to help.

One told how he saw a photographer pulling a rescuer off the railings to enable him to get a better shot of those trapped inside and others told how photographers jostled with those tending to the injured on the pitch.

Unlike the false allegations about fans’ behaviour printed in The Sun and other papers, these claims were supported by TV footage which showed police having to move photographers out of the way of rescuers — particularly near the fences behind the goal.

Such behaviour from the press continued in the aftermath of the disaster. Staff at both Sheffield hospitals, where the victims were taken, had to deal with journalists pressing them for information in person and by phone as well as the intrusive and at times aggressive behaviour of photographers trying to get pictures of grieving relatives and the bodies of the dead.

There was no respite when the survivors and victims’ families returned to Liverpool. There journalists posed as priests, social workers and “friends of friends” to try and get access to people’s homes. They also rang victim support lines and used false names to try to get background information.

Liverpool Social Services issued all staff with identity cards to prevent the press from impersonating them.

The editors of the Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post released a joint statement saying they would not send photographers to victims’ funerals as a mark of respect and because of “the excesses of some London papers.”

However, it didn’t stop the nationals from turning up anyway with one victim’s sibling saying: “As I was burying my brother all I could see were photographers clambering over the walls of the cemetery and peering from behind gravestones. All you could hear in the silence was the clicking of cameras.”

In response to 349 written complaints with 3,651 signatories naming 35 newspapers, the Press Council launched its “most detailed and wide-ranging investigation ever.”

Yet the subsequent report published in July 1989 ran to little more than 2,000 inconsistent words. While it condemned The Sun’s front page, it left the press effectively un-censured.

Two years later, following the Calcutt Report into the excesses of tabloid journalism and under the threat of statutory regulation, the Press Council was replaced by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).

Twenty-three years after that, following the Leveson Inquiry into the excesses of tabloid journalism and under the threat of statutory regulation, it was announced that the PCC would also be replaced. The more things change, it seems, the more things stay the same.

While many have heard of the Taylor Report, which paved the way for all-seater stadiums, few have heard of Lord Justice Taylor’s interim report which focused on the causes of the disaster.

Delivered in August 1989, Taylor’s findings were unequivocal. He found no evidence to support the claims in The Sun. Instead he wrote that: “Those who made them, and those who disseminated them, would have done better to hold their peace.”

Taylor determined that the fundamental cause of the tragedy was a failure to stop fans entering the central pens once Gate C had been opened.

This “blunder of the first magnitude” was compounded when Duckenfield failed to take any control once the disaster began. Taylor emphatically dismissed police allegations that an unexpectedly large number of Liverpool fans turned up with no, or forged, tickets in a deliberate attempt to force entry.

His report emphatically dismissed police allegations that alcohol was to blame, pointing out that the majority of fans weren’t drunk and the few that were played no part in the tragedy.

Taylor emphatically dismissed further police allegations that fans were unco-operative. “How could they be?” he asked rhetorically, adding: “In that crush most people had no control over their movements at all.”

Even on the issue of fans supposedly turning up late, Taylor pointed out that they were only required to be inside the ground 15 minutes before kick-off and so it was to be expected that many would turn up, as they did, between 2.30pm and 2.40pm.

In short, every single allegation levelled against Liverpool fans by the police was rejected by Taylor less than four months after the disaster. The truth — the real truth that is — was in plain sight from the start.

Yet still the myth grew. Neither Taylor’s interim findings nor the Press Council’s report did anything to stem the flow of inaccurate and insensitive coverage.

Instead, the media just carried on with the predetermined narrative built on the false allegations that large numbers of violent, drunk, ticketless fans arrived at the ground late.

Time and again the police’s version of events was unquestioningly presented as fact with little, if any, balance provided. The allegations of drinking and violence were reiterated in the run-up to Liverpool’s first return to Hillsborough to face Sheffield Wednesday in a League match.

A variety of papers ran stories based on the quotes from anonymous police officers which cast doubt on the Taylor report by, claiming the fans were “stoned paralytic” or “drink-sodden louts.”

Similarly at the initial inquests, despite Taylor’s findings, police continued to put forward their false narrative and the press continued to lap it up with drink again being the focus.

The Sun misrepresented the findings which showed that drink was not an issue by claiming: “15 HILLSBOROUGH DEAD TOO DRUNK FOR DRIVIN” and that “at least two had TWICE the legal drink-drive limit in their blood.” So, that’ll be about three pints then.

Later, the press leapt on the claims of a pub manager who told the inquest how Liverpool fans had drunk his pub dry. The fact the pub’s landlord later said the claim was “absurd” was ignored.

In his evidence to the inquiry, Superintendent Marshall, in charge outside the ground, reiterated the false claims regarding fans’ behaviour. “DRUNKEN FANS AT HILLSBOROUGH ‘SPAT AT POLICE’” screamed the Daily Telegraph. No space was given to the survivors

and other witnesses who disputed the claims.

While the crudest articulation of the “drink and violence” narrative could be found in the tabloid press, it was apparent in all the coverage and it wasn’t just the reserve of journalists.

In the revised second edition of his acclaimed history of football, The People’s Game academic James Walvin wrote: “Both at Hillsborough and Heysel […] crowd disturbances had bedevilled the game. Football had become synonymous with hooliganism.”

It was an astonishing verdict on the post-Hillsborough rebuilding of stadiums coming as it did five years after the Taylor Report had unequivocally demonstrated that hooliganism played no part at all in the disaster.

Walvin wasn’t alone and many other academics either directly or indirectly linked Hillsborough to hooliganism, thus building on and further legitimising the media’s narrative. After all, those clever types don’t get stuff wrong do they?

In a similar vein Nick Hornby, the man who supposedly made it OK for the middle classes to like football, wrote in Fever Pitch that: “Though it’s clear that the police messed up badly that afternoon, it would be terribly vengeful to accuse them of anything more than incompetence.” Like the denigration of an entire city through a 27-year long cover-up perhaps?

In 2004 Boris Johnson wrote in The Spectator about what he perceived as “Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way in.”

These allegations were emphatically dismissed by the inquest jury last month but it’s worth reiterating that they had been dismissed by Lord Chief Taylor in his interim report 15 years before Johnson wrote his column.

It would be TV that finally gave the bereaved and survivors a voice, just as it had on the day of the tragedy. In 1994 Anne Williams, whose son Kevin died at Hillsborough, wrote to several TV documentary makers with the evidence she had gathered that cast doubt on the 3.15pm cut-off point at which the coroner at the original inquest had determined all the victims had died.

Roger Cook subsequently broadcast a programme, Kevin’s Mum, which outlined the issues, bringing them to wider attention and leading to a parliamentary debate.

Two years later, ITV would broadcast Hillsborough, a two-hour long prime-time drama-documentary written by Jimmy McGovern. The writer had touched on the subject in an episode of Cracker after which the families had asked him to make a programme about the tragedy. He did, researching the subject meticulously and determining that there was a “truth that needs to be told.”

Brian Reade agreed. The journalist who had written so eloquently about the reasons behind the tragedy in its immediate aftermath had moved to the Daily Mirror and he persuaded his editor Piers Morgan that McGovern’s drama could be used as a springboard for a nationwide campaign.

Other papers began to take an interest also but the Mirror led the way and on the day of the broadcast declared: “All Britain must watch the most harrowing programme ever made.”

It was “time to end this cover-up.” The following weekend they launched a call for new inquests and within three days had gained 32,000 signatures. Slowly the tide was beginning to turn.

• Roger Domeneghetti is the author of From the Back Page to the Front Room: Football’s Journey Through the English Media, which is available from ockleybooks.com.