Don’t blame ‘stupid people on the internet’ for palace’s Princess Kate lies

The background birds had barely stopped chirping in the dramatic Friday video from Catherine, Princess of Wales, revealing her cancer diagnosis and ongoing chemotherapy when the rush to judgment took full flight.

The elite columnists at the New York Times — the powerful news organization that’s watched its authority erode in the internet age, often from self-inflicted wounds — were almost gleeful, despite the downbeat medical news, in pointing the finger of blame for months of increasingly feverish online speculation on the whereabouts of Princess Kate, missing in action since Christmas. The villain in their version was Time’s 2006 Person of the Year.

You.

“The Real Royal Scandal is Us,” blared the Times headline over its lead column from book critic-turned-cultural scold Pamela Paul, who said the real lesson from the frenzy that escalated when a doctored, or worse, photo of Kate Middleton and her three kids was handed out to the press is that Americans should stop hounding public figures when they deserve privacy. She wrote, “Kate’s terrible news shouldn’t just make us feel terrible for Kate; it should also make us feel terrible about ourselves.”

If you weren’t performing an Opus Dei-style self-flagellation ritual after reading Paul’s column, the whip was turned over to her Times colleague Jessica Bennett in its new feature of quick opinion hits called “The Point.” This one was headlined: “The Internet Should Feel Shame Over Kate Middleton.” I always thought that “the internet” — like Simon and Garfunkel’s rock — feels no pain, but of course, the entity Bennett is really attacking here, again, is you. She wrote, also endorsing Kate’s privacy plea, that “[t]he public, in turn, should feel very, very stupid.”

Let’s be clear: This is a completely bass-ackward interpretation of what’s played out over the last few weeks. The apparent truth-telling of Kate’s Friday night news dump didn’t happen because people are stupid. It happened because people are smart. Smarter, at least, than a Kensington Palace — Kate, her husband-who-would-be-king Prince William, and their army of protectors — that alternatively dissembled about the princess’ whereabouts, encouraged paparazzi speculation, and finally put out a photographic lie and made Kate take the blame for it.

Indeed, the fact that so many columnists for leading news organizations raced to attack “the public” (formerly known as “their readers,” who are deserting the mainstream media in droves) is “a tell,” showing you what the Kate whereabouts scandal was ultimately about: authority, and the truth. Writers like the Times’ Paul still identify with Kensington Palace because they realize they are kindred spirits: diminished institutions whose bond of trust with the people they feel comfortable attacking is rapidly collapsing.

Not surprisingly, the columns by Paul, Bennett, and others seized on the most out-there conspiracy theories — to be expected in a world of 5.35 billion internet users, when the royal family’s Nixonian PR strategies all but begged them to speculate. They ignored the reality that what most everyday people were saying on the internet — that Kate must be more seriously ill than the bland and occasionally misleading statements from Kensington Palace — proved to be the truth.

Why should the public feel very, very stupid when it wasn’t the public but Kensington Palace that earlier this month released the now notorious British Mother’s Day photo of Kate and her children, allegedly snapped by William himself, that was spiked by the world’s major news organizations after it became obvious that the picture was altered, perhaps substantially? Was it “the internet” that then decided to throw Kate under the bus by blaming the fiasco on her amateur photoshopping skills — removing William, not to mention credibility, from the discussion?

Should we actually be feeling terrible about ourselves when Kensington Palace did nothing to disown the various paparazzi videos and photos of a happy and normal Kate riding in cars or shopping at a farmers’ market which — as we learned when the video of the actual Kate was released on Friday night — clearly were not her. Indeed, it was a little gob-smacking last weekend to watch mainstream news outlets hype the TMZ shopping video as some kind of “proof of life” when anyone with a reasonably working set of eyes could see this woman looked almost nothing like Kate.

I won’t go chapter and verse on the various inconsistencies from Team Kate about scheduling, timelines, or its initial statements about her condition, or the fact that even some of Friday night’s disclosures about her cancer diagnosis seemed at odds with how the disease is normally discovered and treated. But I will say that while I agree that Kate’s plea for privacy should be respected, the version of absolute privacy for Britain’s royal family now being pushed by these U.S. opinion writers is a little absurd, especially when a lot of internet speculation didn’t even happen until after the palace’s lies.

» READ MORE: Kate, Katie, and our losing war on disinformation | Will Bunch Newsletter

William is not a private citizen, but in all probability Britain’s next head of state, at the top of a monarchy that their nation’s taxpayers support to the tune of more than $100 million a year because his family’s public presence is supposed to provide a form of moral leadership to a Great Britain that’s experiencing more than its share of problems right now. Like running for president or getting hired as a football coach at the University of Alabama, marrying into the royal family is a devil’s bargain where you agree to surrender some of your privacy. The public doesn’t need Kate’s entire medical file, but did it need to be lied to?

One thing that truly annoys me about this whole affair is that it played into some seriously outdated attitudes, from some in the public and way too many in the media, about cancer. I’m still amazed when a public figure reveals an early detected and highly treatable form of cancer and some reports still treat it like a death sentence. Cancer is still horrible, but the 21st century has seen remarkable advances in detection and treatment, which means millions of people with the disease are living full and relatively normal lives. Kensington Palace had an opportunity to attack cancer’s unnecessary stigma with honesty — instead of perpetuating it.

But the bigger problem with this fiasco is that, in an age of growing disinformation, given a nuclear power boost with new AI technologies, the public has lost all faith in who or what can be believed. It was striking that in the same hour as Kate’s bombshell announcement on Friday, the first news flashes and shaky iPhone videos were emerging from Moscow about the theater terror attack by gunmen and arsonists who killed at least 137 people.

The vivid videos were real, but everything else about the terrorist attack was murky beyond recognition. A faction of the Islamic militant group ISIS claimed credit for the attack, but that didn’t explain how terrorists moved around so easily in an overpoliced security state, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, has been linked in the past to “false flag” attacks. Indeed, the Putin regime almost immediately, and with little proof, sought to connect the attack to Ukraine, ginning up an excuse to launch even more horrific assaults against its neighbor while clamping down on dissent at home.

Were people on the internet “very, very stupid” for questioning Putin’s version of the truth? Of course not, but it’s harder to challenge the world’s lying autocrats when the supposed “good guys” are fibbing, too. Dictatorship rises in times when the very concept of truth has been obliterated. The public’s total loss of faith in institutions is a straight downward line that started with Vietnam and Watergate and shifted into high gear with the Iraq War — beginning as tragedy until it finally devolved into the farce of fake royal pictures, when our figurehead is not what she seems.

I’ve always clung to a naive faith that my colleagues in the media could be the last bastion of truth-telling. But the only truth I feel after the New York Times called me and five billion other people stupid is the reality of not knowing who I can believe in anymore.

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