United Kingdom: A princess reveals her cancer diagnosis
“Shame on the ghouls who spread lies and rumors,” said Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. After weeks of speculation over her prolonged absence from public view, Kate Middleton was bullied last week into announcing publicly, in a kind of proof-of-life video, that she has cancer. The abdominal surgery she had in January revealed a malignancy, the Princess of Wales said with quiet grace, and she’s now undergoing preventive chemotherapy. She and Prince William had kept the news quiet, she explained, so they’d have time to reassure George, Charlotte, and Louis, their three young children. We realize now that they must have been waiting for the Easter break, so the kids wouldn’t be mobbed by paparazzi at school. “A wave of shame should be washing over” all those who claimed that the princess must have had botched plastic surgery or that she was divorcing Wills over his rumored affair. Kate was simply taking time to recuperate, and the mob wouldn’t let her. “‘Something’s up, she’s lying, it’s weird,’ they cried.” In the end, she felt she had to reveal her diagnosis “in the hope that it might scotch their lies and blunt their pitchforks.”
It won’t, though, said Mary Harrington in Unherd. The frenzy erupted after Kensington Palace released a photo of Kate and her children that was revealed to have been photoshopped— ostensibly by Kate herself. Now the internet conspiracy theorists won’t believe anything the palace says. Already, Kate’s new video has been “picked over for signs of AI fakery and dissected by doctors on CNN.” Someone even created a deepfake of Prince Harry’s wife, Meghan Markle, announcing an illness, just “to prove it can be done.” Clearly, something fundamental has shifted in the royal family’s ability to control its own press. The globalization of the news cycle “has seen royal coverage from the wilder U.S. media landscape” bleed into the British one. “In our defense,” said Sarah Laing in the Toronto Star (Canada), the palace bungled its PR inexcusably, by releasing the doctored photo and by constantly changing its story: At one point, Kate was said to be busy working on a “special project.” No wonder the internet went nuts. “The line between Beatlemania and the Salem Witch Trials is a fine one.”
Social media is a “sewer, occupied by faceless rats intent on infecting others with their disease of hatred,” said Camilla Tominey in The Telegraph. The way online trolls have ravaged the princess is “sickening beyond belief.” They have reveled in her misery, subjecting her to “an unbearable level of scrutiny and intrusion” while she was coming to terms with “the worst news imaginable.” Have we learned nothing from “the tragedy of Princess Diana?” asked Matthew Syed in The Times. William’s mother was hounded literally to death by paparazzi prying into her personal life; she died in a 1997 car crash while speeding away from photographers. Thirty years later, people who don’t even believe the outlandish rumors circulating online about Kate are nevertheless “breathlessly amplifying” them, as if it’s a game they’re playing. But there are real people involved, suffering real harm. I hope the princess gets better. “I hope we do, too.”