A newspaper editor who works near a major military training base claims she was never aware of the Prince Harry media blackout.

And Belinda Bennett, from the Midweek Herald, admitted that she would have run stories about the prince’s Afghanistan tour if a local soldier or their family member had approached the paper.

The Herald covers the east Devon patch which includes the Royal Marines training centre, in Lympstone, near Exmouth.

Prince Harry was deployed to the war zone approximately 11 weeks ago but a gentlemen’s agreement between all media organisations meant this was never reported.

It was only after an American website reported the deployment last week that photographs, film footage and copy from journalists entrenched with Prince Harry were published.

Belinda told holdthefrontpage: “We’ve got a marine commando centre in our patch.

“If a marine had come in and said ‘Look, here’s a picture of me and Harry’ we would have used it.

“We were talking in the office and someone said that regional press was in on the secret but we had no idea.

“Obviously, we get a lot of service personnel living and working on our patch and anybody could have come in.

“If we had known about the blackout we would have agreed to it.”

Comments

Brodie Bruce (06/03/2008 20:40:38)
If she was any kind of journalist, would she not have contacted the MoD for a statement before running the story? She then would have found out about the agreement. Or maybe the Midweek Herald publishes stories before checking their sources

Southern Journo (07/03/2008 20:14:13)
The Royal Marines are actually part of the Royal Navy – and not the Army as it says in the intro to the story – or did I miss something?