The Prince and the Jackass

For years, the media lambasted Prince Harry for being a drunken layabout and not living up to the honor and dignity his title has historically implied. Then he joined the military, hoping to regain his respectability, and volunteered to go on combat duty in a warzone, but when it was too heavily covered in the news, they pulled his deployment out of fear that he'd become a magnet for ambitious enemy fighters trying to snag a high profile hostage. Finally, Harry gets his wish to be deployed into a hostile environment, wanting not to take unfair advantage of the circumstances of his lineage (whether it was eventually to become a PR stunt or not, it's still a very bold PR stunt), and they sent him to Afghanistan. The entire British news media, globally notorious for their hounding of celebrities, agreed to keep their mouths shut about it, despite the fact that it would be a huge story. And then after ten weeks of doing his job just like any other guy, Matt Drudge breaks the story and now they've got to get him out again, because now he and everyone around him have bullseyes on their backs. Thank you, Matt Drudge, for showing the world (once again) that there really is a level of short-sighted, narcissistic showboating and dishonorable gutter journalism lower than that of the British tabloids. You've really made your mark.

This is, of course, not even getting into the Obama photo. Drudge generally flies under my radar: I ignore him at all costs, because I think he's a sleaze. But the Obama photo got my attention and annoyed me. It was obnoxious, to be sure, but when you run for president, you have to expect that the morally vacuous among us will be throwing cheap shots. So he was in the back of my mind more than usual, and I was a little on edge about him. Right after that, he puts soldiers in more danger than they need to be in, just because it will throw him a few extra bucks and drive up his hit counter. It's not that this is any worse than anything else he runs on his site, it's just that this time I actually paid attention.

A friend who also loathes Drudge (and referred to him as a "fat, smarmy weasel" and later a "jerkoff stain") suggested in private conversation about this that for once, I was actually coming down on the side of censoring the press, but I honestly don't think that's it. There is a difference between suppression and discretion. This is a story that has no appreciable value to anyone, other than to make Drudge richer and indulge the public celebrity fetish. There is an appreciable detriment in announcing to the world the whereabouts of the highest profile rich kids in the Western world and making him a target for the enemy fighters all around him. There is an appreciable detriment in forcing the British Army to take a soldier out of his unit, when they had gone to great trouble already to keep his presence there quiet. This isn't just a reputation at stake, these are human lives. In talking with the military, the press came to a gentleman's agreement that this wasn't vital public information and there was no pressing need to report it, so they didn't. Matt Drudge decided that he wanted to go out for a nice dinner, so he blew the story without a second thought about the consequences.