Why Prince Harry's crusade against the British press fell flat…
London, Saturday,
The courtroom battle between Britain's playboy prince (38) and the nation's perennially mischievous tabloid press has thrown a harsh light on both parties. For Prince Harry, aka the Duke of Sussex, it reveals a life of extraordinary privilege, featuring innumerable foreign holidays, private jets, private yachts, elite schools - all managed by a whole panoply of personal assistants and staff. But everyone knows the British Royal family is fabulously privileged and rich - that's part of the point - so such revelations hardly tarnish the brand, although it might undermine the case he tries to make for himself and Meghan (41) as a hardworking young couple trying to bring up their children away from the glare of press scrutiny.
Harry's aim with his unprecedentedly high-profile court action is supposed to be a noble one: to reveal the tricks - no, worse, the unlawful methods - of the redtop UK tabloids. In this particular case, the tricks the papers used to ensure a regular diet of Royal 'exclusive' stories to their readers. But what has emerged in court is that Harry has nothing resembling evidence of such trickery, rather he relies on his gut sense that many of the details in the stories could only have come through "unlawful means". In other words, through crimes such as impersonation or even phone hacking. However, courts won't accept gut instincts as evidence and so the trial has come down to a forensic examination of some 33 tabloid stories about Harry.
And to Harry's credit, the case does reveal quite a lot about the tabloid press. Only it is not what Harry says. Rather, what has emerged in court is that the "news" in tabloid papers is not news at all, rather it is colorful story telling using nuggets of information already in the public domain.
Take, for example, a story that Harry had been asked to be the godfather to the son of the brother of his former nanny, Tiggy (58). The People: 'Matured Harry is a Godfather' (April 20 2003)
In court, Harry asserted that The People "had the means to hack Tiggy and her husband", adding: "I now believe that this is either how this article came about or was a means to glean additional information for the article after it appeared elsewhere." However, it emerged that the information about Prince Harry's appointment as godfather had been published a week before in the very respectful and not at all scurrilous Sunday Telegraph, as had news of Harry's expected attendance at the christening. To which, all the Duke of Sussex replied was that he could "see the similarities" but still did not know "how it was all obtained", thus widening the web of illegal information gathering to include the Sunday Telegraph's most earnest and obsequious columns.
But back to the hated red-tops. A Daily Mirror 'exclusive' entitled: 'Harry is a Chelsy fan' (Nov 29 2004, note the pun) that revealed the name of Harry's new girlfriend, Chelsy Davy (37), for example, was not exclusive at all but borrowed the information from a story in a more respectable source published two days before.
Likewise, Prince Harry claimed that only the hacking of either his or his girlfriend's phone could explain an article in The People headed punningly: 'Chel shocked' (April 09 2006, note the pun). This, he said, contained "specific" details of calls between the pair including that he had not enjoyed a lap dance at Spearmint Rhino, a gentleman's club. To support his suspicions, the Duke of Sussex pointed at three payments to a freelance journalist and also said that it was known that the newspaper's reporters had access to his girlfriend's mobile phone number and "would have access to her call data".
However, in the cold glare of legal scrutiny, it emerged that Harry's trip to Spearmint Rhino with other Sandhurst cadets had been widely reported the previous day.
At this, all Harry was able to offer as evidence of illegal information gathering was a line in The People's piece claiming that one of the lap dancers was a "tall, statuesque blonde that bore a passing resemblance to Chelsy". However, this, Harry said, was simply not true, so it hardly illustrates information gathering whether legal or illegal. It more likely illustrates that habit of Britain's tabloid newspapers of simply making up lurid details to embellish their stories.
We should not be surprised as, in fact, this is how all newspapers work. Stories are overwhelmingly written from official handouts or press releases, supplemented perhaps by the paper's own stock of historical newspaper cuttings. Many of the stories Harry claimed could only have been sourced by illegal means, turned out to be from these kinds of innocuous sources.
Additionally, around half of the 'exclusives' Harry offered as proof of illegal information gathering, turned out not to be exclusive at all, but rather recycled from other media earlier in the week. Take, for example, the Sunday Mirror exclusive entitled: 'Hooray Harry's dumped' (Nov 11 2007, the headline playing on the term 'Hooray Henry') included details the prince thought could only have been obtained by illegal means.
The Duke questioned how the newspaper could have known "exactly where I was" after being photographed going into a nightclub to "drown my sorrows" after splitting from his then girlfriend. He told the court: "I'm not entirely sure how anyone would have known we had broken up". However, it was pointed out that the News of the World had already run the story with the Sunday Mirror simply following it up the very same night.
In fact, overwhelmingly, the tabloid stories, flamboyantly splashed across their covers and center-spreads, turned out to be largely recycled material either from other tabloids, from reputable news agencies, or from official press releases. What Harry's court case reveals is not so much a clandestine and illegal network of journalists spying on public figures and hacking their phones, as a very lazy newspaper culture that relies on tidbits of genuine information from easily obtained public sources (such as publicists and other news media) which is then supplemented by speculative and colorful editorializing.
Indeed, one of the key revelations in the trial came from the mouth of the Daily Mirror's news editor for "royal" stories, Jane Kerr, who said that often her filed stories had extra details added by the paper's then editor, Piers Morgan (58) - and she would not know where he had got the details from. As Morgan was close to the then Prince Charles's deputy private secretary, she supposed he was adding factual information from such personal contacts… But for all she knew, he might just have been just making up lurid details. After all, many front page British tabloid stories have been brazenly fictitious. Like, for example, The Sun's front page on 13 March, 1986, which carried the sensational headline: 'Freddie Starr Ate my Hamster'.
The story went on to detail that the celebrity, Freddie Starr (76), had been staying at the home of his friend Vince McCaffrey after a show in Manchester, and asked McCaffrey's girlfriend, Lea La Salle, to make him a sandwich. When she refused, Starr grabbed her pet hamster (called Supersonic) sandwiched the rodent between two slices tof bread "and started eating it"!
Not surprisingly, The Sun report added, La Salle was "sickened and horrified" by the incident, which she would "never forget".
But was it, well, true? Not at all. Years later, Starr, a vegetarian since his teens, wrote with tangible exasperation in his 2001 autobiography: "I have never eaten or even nibbled a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole or any other small mammal."
However, the paper didn't make it up. There's a revealing postscript to the hamster story that reveals a lot about how the tabloid press really works. The Sun was fed the ridiculous tale by Max Clifford (74), Starr's own publicist, whose job it was to get the celebrity into the papers. The controversial spin doctor admitted to the Leveson inquiry in 2012 - a judicial public inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press - that he had encouraged The Sun to run the ridiculous report in order to drum up publicity for his client's upcoming tour.
So, the moral of the story is that the menace of Britain's tabloid newspapers lies not so much in the true information they gather (by whatever means, and they're notoriously lazy) as in the rubbish they will print when asked. Put another way, the real problem is the gullibility and appetite for colorful nonsense of the readers.
Harry's aim with his unprecedentedly high-profile court action is supposed to be a noble one: to reveal the tricks - no, worse, the unlawful methods - of the redtop UK tabloids. In this particular case, the tricks the papers used to ensure a regular diet of Royal 'exclusive' stories to their readers. But what has emerged in court is that Harry has nothing resembling evidence of such trickery, rather he relies on his gut sense that many of the details in the stories could only have come through "unlawful means". In other words, through crimes such as impersonation or even phone hacking. However, courts won't accept gut instincts as evidence and so the trial has come down to a forensic examination of some 33 tabloid stories about Harry.
And to Harry's credit, the case does reveal quite a lot about the tabloid press. Only it is not what Harry says. Rather, what has emerged in court is that the "news" in tabloid papers is not news at all, rather it is colorful story telling using nuggets of information already in the public domain.
Take, for example, a story that Harry had been asked to be the godfather to the son of the brother of his former nanny, Tiggy (58). The People: 'Matured Harry is a Godfather' (April 20 2003)
In court, Harry asserted that The People "had the means to hack Tiggy and her husband", adding: "I now believe that this is either how this article came about or was a means to glean additional information for the article after it appeared elsewhere." However, it emerged that the information about Prince Harry's appointment as godfather had been published a week before in the very respectful and not at all scurrilous Sunday Telegraph, as had news of Harry's expected attendance at the christening. To which, all the Duke of Sussex replied was that he could "see the similarities" but still did not know "how it was all obtained", thus widening the web of illegal information gathering to include the Sunday Telegraph's most earnest and obsequious columns.
But back to the hated red-tops. A Daily Mirror 'exclusive' entitled: 'Harry is a Chelsy fan' (Nov 29 2004, note the pun) that revealed the name of Harry's new girlfriend, Chelsy Davy (37), for example, was not exclusive at all but borrowed the information from a story in a more respectable source published two days before.
Likewise, Prince Harry claimed that only the hacking of either his or his girlfriend's phone could explain an article in The People headed punningly: 'Chel shocked' (April 09 2006, note the pun). This, he said, contained "specific" details of calls between the pair including that he had not enjoyed a lap dance at Spearmint Rhino, a gentleman's club. To support his suspicions, the Duke of Sussex pointed at three payments to a freelance journalist and also said that it was known that the newspaper's reporters had access to his girlfriend's mobile phone number and "would have access to her call data".
However, in the cold glare of legal scrutiny, it emerged that Harry's trip to Spearmint Rhino with other Sandhurst cadets had been widely reported the previous day.
At this, all Harry was able to offer as evidence of illegal information gathering was a line in The People's piece claiming that one of the lap dancers was a "tall, statuesque blonde that bore a passing resemblance to Chelsy". However, this, Harry said, was simply not true, so it hardly illustrates information gathering whether legal or illegal. It more likely illustrates that habit of Britain's tabloid newspapers of simply making up lurid details to embellish their stories.
We should not be surprised as, in fact, this is how all newspapers work. Stories are overwhelmingly written from official handouts or press releases, supplemented perhaps by the paper's own stock of historical newspaper cuttings. Many of the stories Harry claimed could only have been sourced by illegal means, turned out to be from these kinds of innocuous sources.
Additionally, around half of the 'exclusives' Harry offered as proof of illegal information gathering, turned out not to be exclusive at all, but rather recycled from other media earlier in the week. Take, for example, the Sunday Mirror exclusive entitled: 'Hooray Harry's dumped' (Nov 11 2007, the headline playing on the term 'Hooray Henry') included details the prince thought could only have been obtained by illegal means.
The Duke questioned how the newspaper could have known "exactly where I was" after being photographed going into a nightclub to "drown my sorrows" after splitting from his then girlfriend. He told the court: "I'm not entirely sure how anyone would have known we had broken up". However, it was pointed out that the News of the World had already run the story with the Sunday Mirror simply following it up the very same night.
In fact, overwhelmingly, the tabloid stories, flamboyantly splashed across their covers and center-spreads, turned out to be largely recycled material either from other tabloids, from reputable news agencies, or from official press releases. What Harry's court case reveals is not so much a clandestine and illegal network of journalists spying on public figures and hacking their phones, as a very lazy newspaper culture that relies on tidbits of genuine information from easily obtained public sources (such as publicists and other news media) which is then supplemented by speculative and colorful editorializing.
Indeed, one of the key revelations in the trial came from the mouth of the Daily Mirror's news editor for "royal" stories, Jane Kerr, who said that often her filed stories had extra details added by the paper's then editor, Piers Morgan (58) - and she would not know where he had got the details from. As Morgan was close to the then Prince Charles's deputy private secretary, she supposed he was adding factual information from such personal contacts… But for all she knew, he might just have been just making up lurid details. After all, many front page British tabloid stories have been brazenly fictitious. Like, for example, The Sun's front page on 13 March, 1986, which carried the sensational headline: 'Freddie Starr Ate my Hamster'.
The story went on to detail that the celebrity, Freddie Starr (76), had been staying at the home of his friend Vince McCaffrey after a show in Manchester, and asked McCaffrey's girlfriend, Lea La Salle, to make him a sandwich. When she refused, Starr grabbed her pet hamster (called Supersonic) sandwiched the rodent between two slices tof bread "and started eating it"!
Not surprisingly, The Sun report added, La Salle was "sickened and horrified" by the incident, which she would "never forget".
But was it, well, true? Not at all. Years later, Starr, a vegetarian since his teens, wrote with tangible exasperation in his 2001 autobiography: "I have never eaten or even nibbled a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole or any other small mammal."
However, the paper didn't make it up. There's a revealing postscript to the hamster story that reveals a lot about how the tabloid press really works. The Sun was fed the ridiculous tale by Max Clifford (74), Starr's own publicist, whose job it was to get the celebrity into the papers. The controversial spin doctor admitted to the Leveson inquiry in 2012 - a judicial public inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press - that he had encouraged The Sun to run the ridiculous report in order to drum up publicity for his client's upcoming tour.
So, the moral of the story is that the menace of Britain's tabloid newspapers lies not so much in the true information they gather (by whatever means, and they're notoriously lazy) as in the rubbish they will print when asked. Put another way, the real problem is the gullibility and appetite for colorful nonsense of the readers.
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