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Charlie Beckett

March 12th, 2007

Charles: The King (to be) of Spin

1 comment | 1 shares

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Charlie Beckett

March 12th, 2007

Charles: The King (to be) of Spin

1 comment | 1 shares

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Tonight Prince Charles will come under attack from a Channel 4 Documentary for the way that he meddles in affairs of state. If the journalism is as poor as Channel 4’s attack on Global Warming last week, then the heir to the throne has nothing to fear. However, tonight’s blast against our monarch-in-waiting is made by the Channel 4 Dispatches team so should have somewhat higher editorial standards. It has already provoked a very lengthy pre-programme rebuttal. There is an old journalistic adage that the more ‘they’ deny something the more true it must be. Judge for yourself tonight.
But what I think is interesting is that Charles is coming under attack not for his personal life, or the fact that he talks to plants, or even his eccentric and largely conservative views on architecture and the countryside. He is being attacked for his politics.
In my experience most left-wing or liberal journalists who should be natural critics of Charles always fall under his spell. This is partly because he does some jolly nice things like the Prince’s Trust. It is partly because he is at the centre of a very influential network of the Great and the Good which all hacks secretly yearn to belong to. And it is partly because he and his team are good at using the Windsor brand to spin that Charles is a deep and progressive thinker. We can debate the truth of that another day, but when you look at the way that good journalists such as Jonathan Dimbleby and Jon Snow are prone to abandone their usual editorial rigour in the company of HRH, it makes you glad that Dispatches have the guts to question a man whose ideological foilbles and political interferences are generally allowed to go unchallenged and unseen.

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Charlie Beckett

Posted In: Journalism | Politics

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