On Jan 3rd, 1833, the Argentine flag, which was first raised on the Falkland Islands on Nov 6th, 1820, was lowered by the crew of a British warship and replaced by the British flag. After the British took possession of the Falkland Isles they settled it with sheep breeders, 500 kilometers ahead of the argentine coast. At that time the feud arose between Argentina and Britain. By 1982, the quarrel had been going on for decades and there had even been some shootings around the Islands. Despite this and the warnings, which had been given weeks before the invasion, London did not see the event coming. Three months before the war started, the Argentines had ordered all map material about the Falklands from London – and it was delivered promptly. Ten days before the attack the Times reported, that British secret service agents had radioed the mission plans of the Argentine marine to London and that American espionage satellites had observed the preparations for the invasion and told them to London. But the British Ministry of Defense ignored all the warnings. And so in the early hours of Friday, April 2nd, the Argentine troops went ashore on the Falklands.
The Falkland war turned out to take place on several frontiers, not only in the South Atlantic. It was also fought in London, in the shadow of the real war, it seems the newspapers went to war too. There was no live coverage and only little and delayed information that the journalist had access to, but still, the Falkland war was the dominating issue in the daily papers in the United Kingdom. The result was a great gap between the reality and the reported "facts". In order to enlarge their readership the papers tried aggressively to influence public opinion on the one hand and on the other hand try to hit the "nerve "of the British population with their headlines. You could hardly differ between sensationalism and journalism in this war.