THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT SNOOKERED THE MEDIA ON PRINCE HARRY

PETER WILBEY, GUARDIAN, UK - This morning, the press devotes page after page to Prince Harry's deployment in Afghanistan. Last night, television bulletins were specially extended to accommodate interviews with this supposedly heroic British army officer. A war which has now been going on for six years, which seems as far away as ever from any kind of victory, and seems harder and harder to justify, suddenly gets a load of favorable publicity - most of all in the papers that usually ignore it.

You couldn't invent a better example of what Nick Davies, in his new book Flat Earth News, calls "churnalism". This is a story generated and controlled, in every detail, by the Ministry of Defence. The stories you read this morning and saw last night revealed what only what officialdom wanted to reveal. What a triumph for the government's spin machine. What a triumph, too, for the spin merchants at Buckingham Palace, who can re-package a man who was previously suspected of spending too much time getting inebriated with hooray Henries in West End nightclubs. All of a sudden, Harry is not just an action hero but also a sort of people's prince, craving normality, living rough and mucking in with the lads in Helmand province without a flunkey in sight to hand him his toothbrush.

And how the British media basks in official approval for its "restraint" and "responsibility" in observing - until some pesky foreigners blew the whistle - a complete news blackout. In return, it is allowed to run propaganda. Sometimes, the media is right to accept requests to suppress news: where lives are at risk in kidnappings, for example, or when national security is obviously endangered. But it should be aware that, every time it agrees to a blackout, it feeds public suspicion that there's a giant conspiracy on a whole range of issues to keep the truth from the people. The device should be used sparingly and only when there will be almost universal agreement that the public interest demands it. Harry's deployment to a war zone was not such a case.