The Prince and the press
His Royal Highness, Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales, has been serving in Afghanistan as a troop leader for some ten weeks. The UK media were well aware of this, but out of respect for the security issues involved kept quiet. It took an obscure Australian magazine and Matt Drudge of the infamous Drudge Report website to reveal the Prince’s assignment and place both the young royal and his fellow soldiers at considerable risk.
Now, some would defend Drudge on the grounds that it is simple freedom of the press. And I agree. No governmental action against a journalist should ever be taken for that journalist’s use of the media to inform the public. No court of law should hear such a case nor any legislature seek to pass a law to curb such behavior. The court of public opinion, however, should make clear their disapproval.
At some point, national security and plain decency must outweigh sensationalism.
The public should react to what has been done by Drudge with the sort of scorn a man who risks the lives of other casually for profit deserves. His website should be abandoned. His advertisers, as abettors of the offense, should be boycotted. His dinner invitations (and invitations to act as a pundit on television) should be withdrawn.
That Drudge was unscrupulous and unfair was widely known. That he is also willing to place at greatly increased risk an entire battalion of men doing dangerous work in a war he allegedly supports simply to gain an increase in his readership places him in a new, entirely more contemptible category.
