Sunday, March 09, 2008
Opinion

Something about Harry

The BBC has assured us that there are no more media blackouts operating

Britain’s Prince Harry takes his gear off upon his arrival at in England on  March 1 after a 10-week tour of duty in Afghanistan.
CREDIT: SHAUN CURRY/AFP/Getty Images

By Colby Dunn

Editor’s Note: Freelance writer Colby Dunn is a former Sunday Paper intern. In January, she moved to London, where she attends Richmond University.

Over the last seven days, I have been hard-pressed to go more than a few hours without hearing or seeing the words ‘Prince Harry’ somewhere or another. They’re plastered across the front of every newspaper at every newsagent on my street, drifting out of the snatches of conversation I catch on the morning train, repeated incessantly on BBC 24, Britain’s answer to CNN, and on almost every Web site I’ve seen recently. Honestly, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if, instead of travel conditions, the PA on the underground announced: “Attention: This is the control room at Gloucester Road station. Prince Harry arrives home from Afghanistan, where he was valiantly fighting the Taliban, if you hadn’t already heard.”

It’s not that I object to the four-page spreads devoted to the muscular future monarch—I think we were all a little surprised that the historically less-attractive of Di’s two kids has developed a rugged handsomeness—it’s just that the whole subject has become cringe-worthy for me.

As an American, I have a pretty low tolerance for the endless royal gossip that’s so ubiquitous in London, but there’s more to it than that. I’m tired of hearing about the saintly British press, whose dedication to “national security” was undermined by the callous American reporter Matt Drudge. So many times this week, I’ve had, or overheard, conversations with colleagues and fellow train riders that included a phrase like, “It was the Americans that revealed him, wasn’t it? Of course.”

There is this sense of ownership—“they’re our royals”—floating around London, and it has become obvious that however the British press may crucify the Queen’s family members for their missteps, it will also bend over backwards for them in a situation of necessity.

Prince Harry’s thwarted quest for adventure and something approaching normalcy has brought to the surface an ever-simmering sentiment in the U.K.—that the ever-grasping Americans simply don’t know how to act properly. A man actually said to me this morning, “America just needs to grow up a bit—they’re a little immature, you know.” The patriot in me honestly wanted to slap him, though all I could manage at the time was to make an incredulous face. It’s not so much that I was being a defensive American; I just couldn’t help thinking that was, as the Brits would say, a bit rich.

The Brits slag their royals through the mud all day long when they’re not in camouflage, but when it comes to colluding with a Ministry of Defence (MoD) public relations campaign, the crown’s offspring are their “very own royals” for whom the press will keep quiet.

On a BBC Web page explaining the network’s blackout decision not to reveal where Prince Harry was carrying out his military duty, reader comments like this were par for the course:

“It is a disappointment that a US scandal website should feel that they have the right to publish a story about a member of our Royal family that has absolutely nothing to do with them or their country.”

Now, I won’t pretend that I like Matt Drudge any more than most—I think he’s a second-rate journalist who sometimes turns up a diamond in what is otherwise a load of garbage—but I do think he is taking the fall for something that would have eventually happened anyway. The BBC’s world news editor, Jon Williams, said it himself: “In truth, the surprise is that the agreement lasted so long.” 

And now that the agreement between the crown and the press has been broken, it seems like a pretty sweet deal for all involved, doesn’t it? The media, in the end, get months’ worth of face time with the increasingly handsome prince, enough to fill and sell papers until the end of the decade. In return, the MoD gets a mountain of good press that the army usually only dreams about: royal son goes gallantly to war, fighting patriotically, playing shirtless games of rugby and having an all-round good time with his buddies, being a lovely hero…with a gun! Don’t you want to join him?

And Harry—who really is the loser in this whole deal—finally, for once, gets what the rest of us take for granted: the chance to pursue a career he chose without minders, rubberneckers and the weight of history chasing him around.

But are such agreements really the kind of behavior the media is supposed to engage in? As a journalist, I understand that the government and the media do have a give-and-take relationship. But when you start making deals of this titanic magnitude with the government, you intertwine press and politics too closely. The BBC has assured us that there are no more media blackouts operating—“there’s nothing else we’re not telling you,” quips Jon Williams—but now that’s about as believable as Amy Winehouse claiming she’s really off drugs this time.

The BBC, along with the rest of the U.K.’s media, has stressed that the agreement was voluntary. But that’s the most worrying part of the whole thing—that no one forced them into doing exactly what the military asked. They’ve run, not been dragged, into the arms of the government they’re supposed to be keeping in check.

So I suppose in the Harry saga, it’s not the America-bashing that bothers me most, because it’s true that everyone and their mother has been cashing in on this story on both sides of the Atlantic—even Ralph Nader (yes, Ralph Nader) has banged out a piece praising the prince.

It’s really the hypocrisy on this side of the pond that is, for an American, a bit much to stomach. And for a journalist, it’s downright frightening. SP

Colby Dunn is filling in for News Editor Stephanie Ramage.