Harry's Crusade
.docxTask 1. Browse the Internet and find information on the following items:
Crusade - any one of the wars that European Christian countries fought against Muslims in Palestine in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries — usually plural/ a major effort to change something — usually + for or against;
The High Court - is a name for a variety of courts, often with jurisdiction over the most serious issues. For countries with a civil law system, the term 'high court' usually refers to appellate court dealing with first stage of appeal from a trial court, serving as an intermediate body before appeal to the constitutional court, court of cassation, supreme court, or other highest judicial body.
Your Honour – judge.
Across the pond - is an idiom that typically refers to the United Kingdom and the United States being on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. This expression is an understatement, often used as a humorous reference to the approximately 3,500 miles (5,600 km) between the coasts of each country.
KC - is widely recognised as one of the leading barristers at the Commercial Bar and is particularly renowned as a trial advocate. The Legal 500 describes him as “an outstanding trial advocate” and “a fearless and fearsome cross examiner”; and Chambers Global describes him as having “a superb mind” and as “wonderful with clients and very courageous in court."
Leading barrister - refers to an accomplished and highly skilled lawyer who is considered to be at the top of their field. They have a strong reputation, extensive experience, and are often sought after for their expertise and legal knowledge.
“thumbgate” story (suffix -gate) - The use of the suffix –gate following a relevant word to refer to scandals (such as Irangate, or more recently, Bridgegate) has long been a media trope. Most people are already aware of the origin: Watergate, the shorthand used for the scandal in which the offices of the Democratic National Committee were burglarized, with an investigation later revealing that the burglary was covered up by high-level officials in the administration of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon. The name Watergate refers to the name of the office complex, located in the Foggy Bottom district of Washington, D.C., consisting of office buildings, apartments, and the Watergate Hotel.
Eton parade commander at Eton cadets - is a public school in Eton, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1440 by Henry VI under the name Kynge's College of Our Ladye of Eton besyde Windesore, making it the 18th-oldest school in the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC). Originally intended as a sister institution to King's College, Cambridge, Eton is particularly well known for its history, wealth, and notable alumni (Old Etonians).
News of the World - was a weekly national "red top" tabloid newspaper published every Sunday in the United Kingdom from 1843 to 2011. It was at one time the world's highest-selling English-language newspaper, and at closure still had one of the highest English-language circulations. It was originally established as a broadsheet by John Browne Bell, who identified crime, sensation and vice as the themes that would sell most copies.
Don Quixote meets Fear and Loathing in Montecito + tilting at the tabloids, cheered on by sycophantic aides who puff up his vanity and his addled notions of honour, duty and love
his memoir Spare - is a memoir by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, which was released on 10 January 2023. It was ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer and published by Penguin Random House. It is 416 pages long and available in digital, paperback, and hardcover formats and has been translated into fifteen languages. There is also a 15-hour audiobook edition, which Harry narrates himself.
the Murdochs - Members of the Murdoch family are prominent international media magnates and media tycoons with roots in Australia and the United Kingdom, along with their media assets in the United States. Some members have also been prominent in the arts, clergy, and military. Five generations of the family are descended from two Scottish immigrants to Australia: the Reverend James Murdoch (1818–1884), a minister of the Free Church of Scotland and his wife Helen, née Garden (1826–1905).
The News International phone hacking scandal was a controversy involving the now-defunct News of the World and other British newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Employees of the newspaper engaged in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of stories.
the Maxwells - "CROOK of the century" is only one of several nasty brands being applied in the British press to the late Robert Maxwell,whose far-flung publishing empire is now in a financial free fall. The accusers in this case, according to the Sun newspaper, are pensioners of the Daily Mirror who learned that more than $900 million in pension and other funds may have been skimmed from Mr. Maxwell's Mirror Group Newspapers. They are not alone in their complaints. A lengthy queue of aggrieved creditors and employees is now forming around the remains of his tangled and massively indebted enterprises. Expect some time to elapse before the unsnarling is completed. But even at this early stage, the scope of the financial mess and scandal he left behind is enough to take your breath away.
the Rothermeres - Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, PC (26 April 1868 – 26 November 1940) was a leading British newspaper proprietor who owned Associated Newspapers Ltd. He is best known, like his brother Alfred Harmsworth, later Viscount Northcliffe, for the development of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Rothermere was a pioneer of popular tabloid journalism, and an enthusiastic proponent of closer links between the UK and Nazi Germany of which he was a prominent British admirer.
Musk - is a business magnate and investor. Musk is the founder, chairman, CEO and chief technology officer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, chairman and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$232 billion as of September 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $253 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in both Tesla and SpaceX.
Zuckerberg - is an American business magnate, computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He co-founded the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), of which he is executive chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder.
Bezos - is an American billionaire business magnate, media proprietor, and investor. He is the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. With a net worth of US$160 billion as of September 2023, Bezos is the third-wealthiest person in the world and was the wealthiest from 2017 to 2021, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.
Task 2. Explain and translate the following expressions:
To start off / to become a blank canvass
To do some particular task or action as a means of beginning some process. To instruct, cause, or compel someone to begin on something or to begin doing something as an initial starting point. A person or thing that has nothing of substance or permanence within or imprinted upon him, her, or it, such that it can be easily filled with entirely new things. Refers to a painter's canvas that has yet to be painted on.
Начать с чистого листа;
To play up to something
To treat someone or something very well so they will like you. To try to win the favor of one, especially in order to gain an advantage.
Подыграть чему-либо;
To take smb for a (royal) ride
To con, swindle, or deceive one.
пoдшутить, пoтeшaтьcя нaд кeм-л., paзыгpaть кoгo-л.; дуpaчить, нaдувaть, ввoдить в зaблуждeниe кoгo-л.
To shake the cage
To challenge a social system in order to instigate change. Plays off the ideology that people are caged or imprisoned by The Man.
Выбить землю из-под ног
To be a laughing stock
A person who is the subject of mockery after a blunder.
Быть посмешицем;
To see behind the curtain
In secret; concealed from public view or knowledge.
Заглянуть за занавес/за кулисы;
To wield a power
-
Владеть властью, держать в руках власть
To bring smth to heel
To force someone to obey one's wishes or commands; to make someone act in accordance with one's authority.
Заставить повиноваться;
In its heyday
In, at, or during the period of one's greatest success, power, vigor, etc.
В период расцвета
On one’s (sorry) tod
Without or not near to anyone else; on one's own; all alone. A shortening of the Cockney rhyming slang "on one's Tod Sloan," referring to a once-famous American horse jockey who fell into disrepute in the early 20th century and died penniless and alone. Primarily heard in UK.
В совершенном одиночестве;
To plough one’s own furrow
To do something in isolation; to act without the help or influence of others. Primarily heard in UK.
Пойти своим путём.
Task 3. Read the article paying attention to the lexis in bold. Add it to your glossaries.
Harry’s crusade: the Prince vs the press
The Spectator
10 June 2023
by Freddy Gray, deputy editor of The Spectator
Self-pity is one hell of a drug. On Tuesday, a day late, Prince Harry appeared in the High Court to ‘give evidence’ against the Mirror. The only testimony he was willing to provide, however, was his familiar gloop about the pain he suffered growing up rich, famous and royal. He can’t help himself, poor boy, and we should probably stop indulging him. We won’t, though.
In a 49-page witness statement, the Duke of Sussex tried once again to make peace with himself by blaming the press for everything. ‘You start off as a blank canvas while they work out what kind of a person you are and what kind of problems and temptations you might have,’ he declared. ‘I ended up feeling as though I was playing up to a lot of the headlines and stereotypes that they wanted to pin on me mainly because I thought that, if they are printing this rubbish about me and people were believing it, I may as well “do the crime”.’
It’s not my fault, Your Honour – the media made me this way. Harry admits to suffering from paranoia. It’s possible he thought that he must be the one on trial – after all, on the same day, across the pond, an American federal court was considering whether his visa application should be made public, given that he has admitted to taking drugs.
What’s more likely is that, in his egotism, Harry has come to regard any kind of publicity, even an appearance in a civil court case into phone-hacking, as a therapeutic exercise – another chance to talk through his demons and air his many grievances. It doesn’t work, of course, because the reason Harry needs so much therapy is because of all the publicity he’s received. He’s hooked in what psychoanalysts call a ‘negative reinforcing loop’.
What’s certain is that Harry is being terribly advised. His legal team appear to be taking him for a royal ride. He has been enlisted as just the latest star character in a show laid on by media lawyers, who for the past ten years have been feasting on a staggering amount of money from hacking fees. The tabloids have tended to pay up rather than go to court, writing huge cheques to hundreds of celebrities and their hangers-on.
The Sun alone has been paying out an average of £100 million a year for the past ten years. ‘Eighty-five per cent of the money has gone to the lawyers,’ says one senior source at News UK. That would mean 850 of Murdoch’s millions have gone to the lawyers. To keep the money pouring in, the law firms need to recruit claimants to say they were hacked. Shake the tabloids’ cage, they’ll pay up.
In this case, however, the newspaper group has not settled. The matter has gone to court, and a legal trial demands a higher standard of evidence from the complainant. It’s far from clear that Harry is passing the test. Under cross-examination from the Mirror’s lawyer, Andrew Green KC, he seemed at times shockingly uninformed about the evidence he himself had submitted to the court. Harry is used to telling ‘his truth’ to biddable journalists such as Tom Bradby on ITV or Anderson Cooper on CNN. When challenged about the more difficult matter of ‘the truth’ by a leading barrister, his recollections fell apart.
Consider, for instance, the story of Harry breaking his thumb playing footer at school, which the Mirror reported on 11 November 2000. In his witness statement, Harry said that ‘the level of detail [in the report] is just surprising’, suggesting that the paper must have intercepted his private communications. What other explanation could there be?
Mr Green then asked Harry if he had ever expressed any concerns to the Press Association, a news agency, about the injury to his thumb. ‘I have not,’ replied Harry, adding that he was unaware that PA had reported the story first. Mr Green also asked if he had complained to other papers who had reported the ‘thumbgate’ story, including the Edinburg Evening News. ‘No I haven’t, because it’s not systemic within the Edinburg Evening News, I believe… unlawful information gathering.’ Why did he think that? He later admitted he ‘didn’t even know there was an Edinburg Evening News’.
Or take the birthday party story, which the Mirror reported on 16 September 2002 under the headline ‘No Eton trifles for Harry’. In his statement, Harry admitted that he had already been ‘obliged’ to describe his birthday celebrations in an interview ‘which had been repeated in this article… although I am not sure how much of it is reported here’. Inevitably, the claim collapsed under the slightest scrutiny. When Mr Green put it to Harry that he was the source of the information reported in the Mirror he flubbed: ‘I see the similarities, of course,’ he said, before adding defensively that the timing was ‘suspicious’.
It was also pointed out to Harry that a three-line story in the Mirror about him becoming a parade commander at Eton cadets was not in fact obtained through skulduggery (as he claimed) but had been announced in a palace press release the day before. Harry fell back on the same word: ‘suspicious’. What is more rum is that he is convinced (or has been persuaded) that such a story is a good example of possible hacking.
On his first day in court, Harry told Mr Green: ‘There’s a difference between public interest and what interests the public.’ It is a line he also used in his witness statement because he thinks it clever. Yet he became a blank canvas again when asked what he thought might constitute a public interest story: ‘I’m not sure, other than speculating,’ he said. ‘A life-threatening injury. I’m sure there are others.’ He’s clearly given the matter a lot of thought.
None of this is to say that the Mirror didn’t snoop on Harry’s calls. The paper has admitted to and apologised for hacking on its front page. It has paid £100 million in settlements and legal fees. But the Prince was not sent in to court with any proof: just a catalogue of suspicions and petty grievances. ‘I was often teased as a result of this article,’ he says, on the thumb story. ‘I was a bit of a laughing stock,’ he says, in relation to the Mirror’s report that he had caught glandular fever. ‘I was extremely worried I was going to be expelled,’ he says about the story that he was using drugs while a pupil at Eton.
Which brings us to the real story behind the stories: the complaints of the Duke of Sussex and other celebrities against various newspaper groups aren’t about phone-hacking per se. They’re about making very well-paid lawyers even richer and enabling angry famous people to sue media companies to smithereens to placate their rage while convincing themselves that they are making the world a better place. In fact, the slebs are relitigating the past: there is no allegation of newspapers hacking after 2011.
Harry is no longer a working royal. His attempts with his wife to branch into the entertainment industry through Netflix shows and books have not made him more popular, to put it mildly. But he’s now discovered what he feels is his true vocation: to be the chief antagonist of the vile British press. Earlier this year, promoting his book on ITV, he said that he was ‘moving the mission of changing the media landscape in the UK from being personal to my life’s work’.
His father, he revealed, had warned him that this was ‘a suicide mission’ – but brave, self-liberated Harry is not afraid. ‘Having spent ten years in the army,’ he added, ‘I learned a set of values, and if I see wrongdoing, I will be lured towards trying to resolve it… I have seen behind the curtain.’ What he has perhaps not seen is that he has arrived on this battlefield 15 years too late. The News of the World has closed, the guilty have been punished.
There is something tragicomic about Prince Harry’s crusade. It’s Don Quixote meets Fear and Loathing in Montecito. He keeps tilting at the tabloids, cheered on by sycophantic aides who puff up his vanity and his addled notions of honour, duty and love. But everybody else can see that the soldier-duke is deluded.
The public acknowledges the trauma Harry suffered as a child, of course. People sympathise with the grief he feels for his mother. But as Harry and his wife keep fishing for empathy in ever more deranged ways, that pity turns to revulsion. After Harry and Meghan attended an award ceremony together in New York last month, for instance, an unnamed spokesman for the couple issued a headline-grabbing statement claiming that, on leaving the event, they had been involved in a ‘near catastrophic’ car chase with the press for two hours. Anybody who has ever driven through Manhattan instantly spotted the hyperbole: ‘relentless pursuit’ is simply not possible in the centre of that city. Why did the spokesman so conspicuously try to evoke the memory of Diana’s death?
It’s often the people most obsessed with ‘fake news’ who talk the most rubbish. Two years ago, Prince Harry accepted a job with the Aspen Institute as a ‘commissioner on information disorder’ – a syndrome from which he seems to be suffering acutely. His hatred of the press is pathological. In his memoir Spare, he calls journalists ‘ghouls’ and ‘jackals’. ‘Centuries ago, royal men and women were considered divine,’ he writes, with a telling resentment. ‘Now they were insects. What fun, to pluck their wings.’
Blinded by animus, Harry cannot see that the Great Tabloid Supremacy has always been something of a myth. People have never been so gullible as to believe every-thing they read. And if the press barons – the Murdochs, the Maxwells, the Rothermeres – did once wield a power so great as to make them almost unaccountable, that time is over. That sort of influence now rests with the tech chiefs – Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and co – and even they don’t know what to do with it.
Harry is telling himself (or has been told) that he’s bringing newspapers to heel. In truth the press is already on its knees: the Sun now sells about 700,000, a fraction of its sales in its heyday. The Daily Mirror’s circulation is vanishing too. Gallant Harry didn’t slay these giants. The internet did.
At least Don Quixote had a sidekick in Sancho Panza. Harry seems a lonelier figure these days. He jets from his children’s birthday parties across the Atlantic to London to appear in court or attend the coronation on his sorry tod. After the publicity blitz – and critical panning of – the Harry & Meghan show on Netflix, Meghan seems to be ploughing her own media furrow once more: she’s filed a trademark for ‘the Tig 2.0’, a possible reboot of the lifestyle blog she wrote before she met her prince.
Maybe Harry and Meghan are learning something a lot of married couples understand: working together is hard when it’s all me me me.
Task 4. Answer the questions.
What is the general tone of the article? Quote the parts where the deputy editor’s attitude to the issue is manifested.
Why is Prince Harry suing the Mirror and what evidence does he give in support of his claims?
The only testimony he was willing to provide, however, was his familiar gloop about the pain he suffered growing up rich, famous and royal. In a 49-page witness statement, the Duke of Sussex tried once again to make peace with himself by blaming the press for everything. ‘You start off as a blank canvas while they work out what kind of a person you are and what kind of problems and temptations you might have,’ he declared. ‘I ended up feeling as though I was playing up to a lot of the headlines and stereotypes that they wanted to pin on me mainly because I thought that, if they are printing this rubbish about me and people were believing it, I may as well “do the crime”.’
It’s not my fault, Your Honour – the media made me this way.
According to the writer, what does Prince Harry regard as his “true vocation”? Does he believe him?
Harry is no longer a working royal. His attempts with his wife to branch into the entertainment industry through Netflix shows and books have not made him more popular, to put it mildly. But he’s now discovered what he feels is his true vocation: to be the chief antagonist of the vile British press. Earlier this year, promoting his book on ITV, he said that he was ‘moving the mission of changing the media landscape in the UK from being personal to my life’s work’.
Why does the author seem to believe that the “‘near catastrophic’ car chase with the press” mentioned by Prince Harry’s spokesman is a hyperbole?
What does the writer think of the power of the press today?