LONDON — In a news town that lives and dies by the scoop, this was one of the juiciest stories around: Prince Harry, Queen Elizabeth II's fun-loving, redheaded grandson, was going to war on the front lines of Afghanistan.
But wait, the Ministry of Defense said. Hold off on reporting it for a while -- three long months, to be exact. You can have not only the story, but the works: interviews with the prince in his rough desert troop quarters; video of him peering at Taliban positions and man-handling a machine gun; thoughtful comments from him about how the queen gave him the news he was going to war, what it felt like to go without a royal shower for four days.
From the hallowed BBC to the raucous tabloid Sun, from the liberal Guardian to the conservative Telegraph, the news media agreed. Prince Harry would have his war in secret.
The news blackout lasted 10 weeks.
But secrets, in the end, have a short shelf life in the news business. A hint trickled out on a German website Wednesday, and by Thursday the U.S.-based website Drudge Report was all over it. "Prince Harry Fights on Frontlines in Afghanistan: 3 Month Tour," Drudge proclaimed, sending British editors flying to remake the next day's pages.
On Friday, the Ministry of Defense announced that Harry was coming home -- the flood of news had compromised his safety and that of his fellow troops, it said.
Following the huge splash of stories, with a gritty, camouflage-clad Harry on nearly every front page, a new skirmish broke out. Was the embargo an act of collective censorship in exchange for the right to print military propaganda at the end? Or, as the broad majority of the British public seemed to think, was a press corps former Prime Minister Tony Blair famously described as "feral dogs" exercising rare restraint?
"I was amazed it lasted as long as it did," said Graham Dudman, managing editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun, which normally would rather chew off its own foot than make a deal along with competitors.
"This is the most fiercely competitive newspaper market in the world, and there's nothing one paper likes more than getting one over on a rival. But in this case the line held," Dudman said. "And that's because you're dealing with soldiers' lives over there. This isn't a story about some two-bit, here-today, gone-tomorrow celebrity. And it's not just about Prince Harry. It's about all the troops out there risking their lives for Britain every minute of every day. Are we to sacrifice their safety for the sake of a newspaper story? The answer was, we weren't."
