Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. On May 2, 1982, during the conflict between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a Royal Navy submarine torpedoed and sank an Argentine cruiser called the General Belgrano. The ship had been outside a large “exclusion zone” set by the British, and the attack killed more than three hundred people, many of them teens conscripted by Argentina’s military dictatorship; it became an instant controversy for Margaret Thatcher’s government. Thatcher’s supporters, though, rallied to her cause. The loudest press cheerleader for the war over the Falklands, an archipelago in the southern Atlantic that had been a British colonial possession since 1833, was The Sun. Rupert Murdoch had bought the paper in 1969 as an ailing, left-leaning broadsheet and transformed it into a populist right-wing tabloid, a playbook he later replicated at the New York Post. The Sun’s pages were crammed with sex, scandal, sensationalism, and now war.…