The birds in the background have barely stopped chirping dramatic friday video As people rush to judge, Catherine, Princess of Wales, reveals her cancer diagnosis and ongoing chemotherapy.
The New York Times is a powerful news organization that has watched its authority erode in the Internet age, often through self-inflicted damage. There has been feverish online speculation about the whereabouts of Kate Middleton, missing in action since Christmas. Their version of the villain was Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year.
you.
“The real royal scandal is us,” the Times headline read, with book critic Pamela Paul blaring in her main column. Middleton and her three children were handed over to the media to show that Americans should stop harassing public figures at a time when they deserve privacy. She wrote: “Kate’s terrible news shouldn’t just make us feel bad for Kate; it can also make us feel terrible about ourselves.”
If you didn’t engage in an Opus Dei-style self-flagellation ritual after reading Paul’s column, the whip was handed to her colleague at The Times, Jessica Bennett, in a post titled “The Point.” of quick views click in the new topic. The article was titled: “The Internet Should Be Ashamed of Kate Middleton.” I’ve always thought that “the Internet” — like Simon and Garfunkel rock — couldn’t feel the pain, but of course, Bay The entity Nate is really attacking here is you. She also supported Kate’s privacy request, writing, “[t]The public, in turn, should feel very, very stupid. “
Let’s be clear: This is a completely inferior explanation for what has happened over the past few weeks. The obvious truth about Kate’s Friday night news dump didn’t happen because people are stupid. This is because people are smart. At the very least, it would be smarter than Kensington Palace — Kate, her husband, future king Prince William, and their army of protectors — to either conceal the princess’s whereabouts, encourage paparazzi speculation, and finally spill the beans. A photographic lie and holding Kate accountable.
The fact that so many columnists from major news organizations are competing to attack “the public” (formerly known as “their readers” who are abandoning the mainstream media in droves) is “a telltale sign,” shows you Kate scandal of whereabouts. Ultimately it’s about: authority and truth. Writers like The Times’s Paul still identify with Kensington Palace because they realize they are kindred spirits: The trust relationship between these institutions and those they feel they can easily attack is rapidly crumbling.
Unsurprisingly, columns by Paul, Bennett and others captured the most bizarre conspiracy theories – as is to be expected in a world with 5.35 billion internet users and where the royal family’s Nixonian PR strategy all but demands speculation . They ignored the reality that what most ordinary people were saying on the internet – that Kate’s condition must be more serious than Kensington Palace’s bland and occasionally misleading claims – turned out to be the truth.
Why do the public feel very, very stupid when it’s not the public but Kensington Palace that earlier this month released a now-infamous British Mother’s Day photo of Kate and her children, purportedly taken by Prince William himself , this photo received worldwide attention. What happens to major news organizations after they discover that an image has clearly been altered, perhaps significantly? Did “the internet” decide to blame Kate’s fiasco on her amateur Photoshop skills, thus removing William from discussion, let alone credibility?
Should we really feel bad about ourselves when Kensington Palace does nothing to deny the various paparazzi videos and photos of Kate happily and normally driving her car or shopping at the farmers market? As we learned when a video of the real Kate was released Friday night — it’s clearly not her. In fact, it’s a bit of a stretch to see mainstream news outlets trumpet the TMZ shopping video over the weekend as some kind of “proof of life” when anyone with a straight eye can see that this woman looks almost nothing like Kate Jaw-dropping.
I won’t go into a chapter-by-chapter discussion of the various inconsistencies in Kate’s team’s scheduling, timelines, or initial statements about her illness, or even how some of Friday night’s revelations about her cancer diagnosis seemed at odds with the reality of the disease. The truth is usually discovered and treated. But I will say that while I agree that Kate’s request for privacy should be respected, the version of absolute privacy for the British royal family that these American opinion writers are now pushing is a bit ridiculous, especially when a lot of the internet speculation isn’t even happening. Until after the lie in the palace happened.
» Read more: Kate, Katie and our losing war on disinformation | Will Bunch Newsletter
Prince William is not a private citizen, but is likely to be Britain’s next head of state, at the top of a monarchy that British taxpayers support in excess of $100 million a year, as his family’s public presence should provide a form of support for what is currently happening. Ethical leadership in a Britain experiencing more problems. Like running for president or being hired as the University of Alabama football coach, marrying into royalty is a devil’s deal and you have to agree to give up some privacy. The public doesn’t need all of Kate’s medical files, but does it need to lie?
One thing that really annoys me about this whole thing is that it promotes some seriously outdated attitudes about cancer, from some in the public and too many in the media. It still amazes me when a public figure exposes a cancer that is caught early and is highly treatable, yet some reports still treat it as a death sentence. Cancer is still scary, but significant advances in detection and treatment in the 21st century mean that millions of people with cancer live full and relatively normal lives. Kensington Palace has an opportunity to honestly attack the unnecessary stigma of cancer without perpetuating it.
But the bigger problem with this fiasco is that in an age of increasing disinformation, as new artificial intelligence technologies take hold, the public has lost all confidence in who or what can be trusted. Shockingly, the first news flashed around the same time Kate announced her bombshell news on Friday, iPhone video shakes Moscow is reporting a terror attack on a theater by gunmen and arsonists that left at least 137 people dead.
The graphic video is authentic, but everything else about the terrorist attack is blurred beyond recognition. A faction of the Islamist militant group Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, but that doesn’t explain how terrorists can operate so easily in an over-policed security state that the group’s leader, Vladimir Putin, has said in the past has been linked to “false flag” attacks. Indeed, Putin’s regime almost immediately tried, with little evidence, to link the attack to Ukraine, seeking an excuse to launch more horrific attacks on its neighbor while suppressing domestic dissent.
People on the Internet are questioning whether Putin’s version of the truth is “very, very stupid”? Of course not, but it’s much harder to challenge the world’s lying dictators when the so-called “good guys” are also lying. When the concept of truth is obliterated, dictatorship arises. There was a complete loss of public confidence in institutions, starting with the Vietnam War and Watergate and continuing with the Iraq War, which began as a tragedy and ended as a farce of fake royal photos, and our puppets Not much. It seemed to her.
I had always naively believed that my colleagues in the media might be the last bastion of truth-telling. But after the New York Times called me and half a billion other people stupid, the only thing I felt was that I didn’t know who else I could trust.
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