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There aren’t many people sticking up for New Idea at the moment, the venerable Australian Womens’ magazine that broke the story of Prince Harry’s deployment. Indeed, news in the antipodes suggests that Blighty’s newspapers have gone to town on the “foreign press” that have put the Prince’s life in danger by putting it about that the “bullet magnet” is at large in Afghanistan.

The obvious point to be made is that in an age of globally networked media, it’s very, very difficult to restrict flows of information. The mechanisms by which information circulates clearly exceed the capacity of any particular nation state’s regulators to suppress a story. (Recently I saw a TV doco about how the US media cooperated in keeping FDR’s polio secret throughout the presidency - that’s literally inconceivable now, and that’s arguably a very goog thing) This is true with or without the presence of the “gentleman’s agreement” that was apparently in place in the UK, which meant that outlets would report the story only when Harry was home free.* If it breaks anywhere, it’s broken everywhere.#

Whether or not you believe New Idea’s claim that they just didn’t know that the story was embargoed (I am actually inclined to accept that this is true, otherwise they would have made more of a fuss of it), it’s unrealistic to expect overseas media not to run with a story when they find it. And after that, the floodgates are open - consumers in Britain can read the story on the online organs of overseas outlets, and the purpose of keeping it under wraps is utterly defeated.

And after all, we might ask ourselves, if the situation were reversed, what would The Sun do?

*This gentleman’s agreement seemed in fact to involve a deal whereby parts of the British media would get a sweet, “embedded” story in exchange for their temporary restraint. Where’s the incentive for overseas media in this arrangement? Another reason the story might be hard to nail down.

#The surprising thing is that New Idea ran the story in January - presumably not long after Harry was deployed - and it only really broke in recent days, when the Drudge Report picked it up. What that shows is that some are more equal than others when it comes to breaking stories in the online news environment. More on this soon, when I talk about Matthew Hindman’s Voice, Equality and the Internet.

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