One month into the
Falklands War, on May the 2nd, 1982 the Argentine cruiser '
General Belgrano' was engaged by the Royal Navy submarine HMS Conqueror. Initial details were sketchy, and it appeared as if the Belgrano had been severely damaged.
Two days later The Sun, Britain's most popular tabloid newspaper, ran the story. For the headline, editor Kelvin McKenzie chose the word 'GOTCHA' in huge bold letters. "Our lads sink gunboat and hole cruiser", the story continued.
"The Belgrano and its 1,000 crew needn't worry about the war for some time now".
As headlines go, it was fairly unremarkable; but as the story was running, more details trickled in - the Belgrano hadn't just been holed, it had actually been sunk, and 368 of the 1,000 crew would never 'worry about the war', or anything else, ever again.
Nowdays, the headline is infamous. To be fair to The Sun, reports of casualty figures were delayed and conflicting. Nonetheless, it seemed inappropriate to use a sports metaphor ('Gotcha' was a popular headline for stories about Cricket) to mark a bloody military victory against a forty-year old WW2 relic which had been struck without warning.
Later on in the decade, McKenzie managed to offend even more people with another headline - 'The Truth' - over a lead story stating that the Hillsborough Disaster was the fault of drunken yobs. That's another story.