The Sun prints naked Prince Harry photos

The Sun has made the decision to publish the naked pictures of Prince Harry that have been all over the Internet over the past couple of days. The question is should they have done so?

The back story is whilst letting his hair down in Las Vegas he went back to his suite with a group and got involved in a game of strip billiards. One imagines that’s very similar to strip poker but somewhat harder to hide your privates whilst bending over the green baize.

Apparently a nubile young lady was in a similar state of undress and someone in the room had a mobile phone with a camera and caught the Prince in his birthday suit. I imagine Prince Harry isn’t too pleased with whoever decided to take and leak the pictures, but too late now.

Anyway the pictures have been published and anyone with an Internet connection that wishes to has probably already seen them. The only difference is that now they’ll be on the news stands in the morning for those without access to the Internet.

I’m not going to go into the rights and wrongs of a young single man letting his hair down and stripping off. Most of us have probably done things which sounded like a right old jape at the time and regretted them later. We’re not generally newsworthy or in the public eye though so no one cares.

What matters is should the press be printing the pictures? In fact should we be free to stick them up on Tamebay (we won’t, not our kind of thing but if we wanted to should we be free to do so?). Since the Leveson Inquiry kicked off the media have been somewhat reticent to publish anything that could land them in trouble. The question is where does privacy end and public interest start?

Do you think the press, both the traditional media and new media such as blogs, should be free to report on events that are of public interest and already in the public domain, or should the right of privacy over-rule and maybe there are stories we could write but are banned from writing even if you want to read them?

Here’s The Sun’s Managing Editor David Dinsmore explaining why they’ve decided to print the pictures: