Blowing Up the Rumor

PRINCE PHILIP AND THE PROFUMO SCANDAL, shrieked the tabloid London Daily Mirror from the top of Page One. The astounding suggestion that British royalty was involved in the shameful mess was almost a guarantee that the paper would be bought and the story read to the last word. The trick was a familiar one to British readers, wise to the ways of the brazen innuendo, the veiled hints of Fleet Street's popular press. Hemmed in by archaic libel laws, the scandal sheets are almost always read for the information they do not actually print--the stories that are suggested by the juxtaposition of columns or a long headline that just happens to run across the accounts of two otherwise unconnected events. All the Mirror really had to say about the Prince was that the rumor was "utterly unfounded."

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