Prince Harry In Helmland Hoo-ha

On January 7 the Australian women’s magazine New Idea blew the lid off a press agreement that had allowed Prince Harry to tour Afghanistan as a working soldier. The entire UK media had agreed to a Prince Harry moratorium in exchange for unprecedented access to the prince once his tour had finished.

The press moratorium on Prince Harry’s posting in Afghanistan was not unusual. These arrangements are not uncommon and not necessarily unethical. There are many situations in which it is necessary for the press to remain silent to preserve peoples’ safety.

For instance, the travels of politicians are routinely reported after the journey has been undertaken and specific bomb scares are never reported.

What is unethical about the situation is the very nature of the deal and the style of the reporting. It was disappointing that the leading lights of the UK media were so eager to get their hands on a blatant PR exercise in return for their silence and even more disappointing to see them happily regurgitate spoon-fed, government-friendly journalism.

Max Clifford, a man who really should know about PR exercises, described the tour as a “very calculated PR exercise.”

One Press Association journalist was allowed access to the soldier prince and once the story was leaked by the Drudge Report no time was wasted in releasing the prized coverage as 10,490 words of copy and over 200 pictures hit the desks of editors across the UK.

The story dominated the press. There were eleven pages devoted to Harry in the Daily Mail and Daily Express, nine in The Sun and six in the Daily Telegraph. We learnt about Harry’s breakfast routine, his baseball cap and even his toilet arrangements.

The picture spreads were heavily stylised. We had Harry posing in various military guises; striding purposefully towards us like Tom Cruise in Top Gun. As the Independent wrote, Helmland was receiving the “Hello! Treatment”.

The same editors then rushed to wildly praise Harry for his heroism and his change in character.
“Here’s To You Harry The Brave” toasted the Daily Mirror – a paper that usually relishes the sight of Harry dressed as a Nazi or stumbling out of an over-priced West End meat market.

It was journalistic fodder – the bad boy turned good story that they were all hoping for so they could eventually write the bad boy turned good then went bad again reprise.

A self-congratulatory pat on the back could be heard echoing down Fleet Street as the papers applauded their morality in keeping the prince’s whereabouts a secret.

There are three main areas in which this moratorium could be considered unethical.

Firstly, the moratorium would undermine public trust in the press. As Jon Snow said, “one wonders whether viewers, readers and listeners will ever want to trust the media again.”
This argument seems a hard one to fully support though.

The Independent, which has been critical of the press coverage of Harry in Helmland, said:

“In the case of Prince Harry, the alternative to agreeing to play ball was to break the story in advance, thus preventing Harry's deployment, or break it when he was there, so adding to the risk he was already taking. It requires a considerable egotism to place one's tuppenny scruples as a journalist ahead of the safety of British troops.”

A decent enough sentiment but as Joyce McMillan of The Scotsman writes this leaves the press open to accusations of hypocrisy.

“I am seeking to demonstrate that once we start suppressing news stories for any reason, however apparently sensible or compassionate, we stand at the top of a very slippery slope, and that a media industry which, in recent years, has rarely hesitated to wreck the lives of hapless ordinary people or vulnerable celebrities whose stories interest the public, can hardly expect to win many brownie points for keeping quiet in the case of a young prince desperate to prove his manhood on active service.”

It is also interesting to note that the continuing war in Afghanistan has been under-reported. It takes the arrival of Prince Harry and a PR exercise designed to legitimise our presence there to get it in the newspapers at all.

Secondly, as Afghanistan veteran Leo Doherty writes, the gung-ho reporting on Harry’s tour serves to perpetuate a myth that the war in Helmland is a “just war fit for heroes”.

Doherty believes that the army depends on such images of heroism and sacrifice to legitimise its operations. When a soldier dies in action it is insensitive to belittle the very cause of his death:

“This graveside reasoning goes roughly like this: ‘He loved his job and the Army; he was an honourable man; therefore his death can only be honourable and worthwhile.’”

This psychology allows soldiers to “come to terms with the deaths of their colleagues without calling into question the fundamental reason for such deaths.”

The fresh faces keep on turning up at Sandhurst for officer training.

If the media is all too happy to jump on the vainglorious bandwagon of war with the triumphant imagery of Harry the hero this myth can only be perpetuated. Only a rigorous media, unwilling to compromise with the state, can point out what Doherty describes as “the unpleasant truth”.
The willingness of the media to be used as a tool for propaganda is the final way in which the reporting on Prince Harry was unethical.

Ever since the original Gulf War in 2003, war has become a television spectacle. Journalists were embedded with coalition forces and were able to provide captivating images for their audiences.
The imagery may have been spectacular but the scope of the journalism was narrow. There was plenty of action but little insight.

As Anup Shah at http://www.globalissues.org/ writes, embedded journalists were only granted this access in return for sympathetic reporting towards the war.

“For the military however, it (embedded journalists) provided a means to control what large audiences would see, to some extent. Independent journalists would be looked upon more suspiciously. In a way embedded journalists were unwittingly making a decision to be biased in their reporting, in favour of the Coalition troops. If an embedded journalist was to report unfavourably on coalition forces they were accompanying they would not get any co-operation.”

The access granted to a single Press Association journalist by the Ministry of Defence was a particularly obvious example of this. The bargain went as such; you trade in your journalistic ethics to expose “the unpleasant truth” in return for some really cracking pictures that will sell lots of your papers. Anyone who didn’t want to join in would miss out, a terrifying prospect for editors operating in the oligopolistic UK media market.

Consequently, the majority of the UK press did just that and we were presented with what amounted to a massive advert for the war in Afghanistan.

Ironically, Prince Harry didn’t seem that enamoured with the efforts of the Ministry of Defence and the UK press to bolster his image when he said "I generally don't like England that much... it's nice to be away from all the press and the papers and all the general shite that they write."

No propaganda machine can counter foot-in-mouth expertise like that.


Max Clifford Quote: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/harrys-war-the-ugly-truth-790316.html

“Hello! From Helmland quote”, information on the Press Associations copy and pictures, Jon Snow Quote and Harry’s “shite” quote: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-peoples-prince-with-harry-in-afghanistan-dog-of-war-or-pr-pawn-790323.html
The Daily Mirror
Joyce McMillan:
http://living.scotsman.com/joycemcmillan/Joyce-McMillan--Silence-over.3833030.jp
Leo Doherty:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/harrys-war-the-ugly-truth-790316.html
Anup Shah – http://www.globalissues.org/