Prince Harry pictures: Sun was right to publish, says Elisabeth Murdoch

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Daughter of Rupert Murdoch says it would be sad if newspapers could not publish something so freely available on the internet
Fri 24 Aug 2012 06.45 EDT

Rupert Murdoch's daughter has defended the Sun's right to publish pictures of Prince Harry naked, saying it would be "sad" if newspapers could not print something that was so freely available on the internet.

Elisabeth Murdoch said the Sun's decision to publish, 24 hours after it acquiesced to the demands of St James's Palace not to proceed, was not the "death of integrity".

"It would be very sad if you lived in a world where you can't publish that picture," she said on Friday, adding that she herself had gone online to "check out" the photos when they first emerged on the US showbiz website TMZ.

"We have all seen the pictures online. If newspapers can't participate in that, it asks questions of where print and online go."

Murdoch, who is chair of the TV production company Shine, which is owned by News Corp, was talking in a formal question and answer session on Friday morning at the Edinburgh International TV Festival after giving the festival keynote speech on Thursday night.

She said she felt the prince had been stitched up by the young woman who snapped the shots of him cavorting naked in Las Vegas. "I feel sad for him – take the mobile phones away; he's a young guy having fun."

Around 60 complaints have been made to the press watchdog about the Sun pictures.

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) said all the complaints came from members of the public and none had come from St James's Palace or any other representatives of the prince.

The palace said it had no further comment on the matter.

The Sun's decision to publish had come after Prince Charles's aides threatened legal action against newspapers if they published the images, even though they had already been circulated online.

One of the two pictures of Harry naked is splashed across the paper's front page with the headline: "Heir it is!", a day after a male reporter and a female intern posed in a mock-up.


It added: "The photos have potential implications for the prince's image representing Britain around the world.


The grainy mobile phone pictures of the prince's antics were first published online by TMZ early on Wednesday.



The Sun's managing editor, David Dinsmore, said the paper had "thought long and hard" about whether to use the pictures and said it was an issue of freedom of the press rather than because it was moralising about Harry's actions.




Former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott said: "The Sun's actions proves that as of this morning, self-regulation is now dead. This [story] is not in public interest, it is in the self-interest of Murdoch to earn money by breaching the privacy of anyone he wants, to sell his newspapers.

"The argument that just because it is all over the internet is spurious at least. There are lots of offensive images and extreme material on the web which international papers don't print."

But Louise Mensch, a Conservative member of the culture committee, said: "There is a clear, demonstrable public interest: the royal family receives money from the civil list; Prince Harry in inviting people to his room [had] the expectation of privacy so there's questions of judgment and questions of security."