By Madeleine Mankey
Remember when Kate Middleton got married?
She was everything the press ever wanted in a Princess. She was beautiful, elegant, gracious. Her entry to the Royal family was the perfect bread and circuses to an estimated two billion viewers. Her £250,000 Alexander McQueen wedding dress was just enough to distract from the 15 youths killed at Daraa for their graffiti. She was welcomed by the tabloids with open arms and continues to be praised for her maternal radiance and charitable work.
Meghan was sent white powder on her wedding day. She was mocked by the Daily Mail for being “(almost) straight outta Compton”. The Sun deceivingly put an intimate scene from her acting career on their front page with the headline “Harry’s girl’s on Pornhub”. (The Sun has since had to formally apologise for this on their website). The Mail on Sunday claimed that,“the Windsors will thicken their watery, thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA”. If she only knew what would come next.
The treatment of Meghan and Kate by the press is incomparable. The British media act like parents who have long given up on trying to deny their favouritism. From the very start, Meghan was too independent, too black, too left-wing, too American and entirely too much for the tabloids to handle. While Kate’s charity work spoke volumes about her inner grace and benevolent capacity of her soul, Meghan was grasping for attention with her “woke” agenda. While Kate was the epitome of motherly poise, Meghan was selfishly denying access to her newborn by keeping him to herself. While Kate was given a chance, Meghan was all but invited to leave.
So try to comprehend the media explosion that followed when she actually, well, tried to leave.
The British media does not have communication of information at its very heart. If it did, we wouldn’t have Royal news at all. Sources are impossible to trace, quotes have the same validity as playground gossip and, fundamentally, the amount of real news is at a minimum compared to endless quantities of hearsay. And let us not forget the loudest heralders of Royal chitchat are the individuals who have successfully jammed the frequencies with enough white noise about celebrities to help us forget they were all involved in the hacking of a dead schoolgirl’s phone.
That being said, the press write the story of the Royals and always have done. The way we think about Kate and Meghan – and the differences engendered – are entirely down to them. Pretending that the public are desperate for news about our hereditary celebrities is intrinsic to their obscuring of news about Brexit, Iran, or any other number of real newsworthy articles. They have even succeeded in changing the conversation from another Royal’s incriminating connections to a paedophile and sex trafficker on a global scale. That’s the power of print for you.
Moving forward, all that can truly be assessed is the success of tabloids in truly doing this, and how the public can resist a pathetic pitting of princesses together for power. With any luck, Meghan will escape the carnival of humiliation that she has been subjected to since her wedding. If the vindictiveness of the Murdoch press is to be counted upon, however, we can safely say that Canada is not quote out of the internet’s reach. We may have a long way to go yet.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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