Katespiracy: is the media to blame?

The Princess of Wales's statement about her cancer diagnosis marked the culmination of weeks of speculation about her whereabouts and well-being.

Prior to the release of her video message last Friday, the royal rumours had become a news story in their own right, with press outlets reporting on the spread of conspiracy theories. But while social media fuelled the "Katespiracy" mania, some critics say the media must accept some of the blame.

'Co-dependent relationship'

Kate Middleton's "continued absence" from public life sparked a "frenzy of ever more deranged internet speculation", said Mary Harrington on UnHerd. "The legacy press vacillated between fawning and the usual barely-disguised rubbernecking", and the internet, in turn, "went bananas".

Arguably, the royal family has "embraced" a level of "symbiosis with the legacy press". Diana, Princess of Wales, "was ahead of her time in grasping" this "symbiotic nature" of the "celebrity ecosystem". Public figures have a "co-dependent relationship with their audiences", said Harrington – and if that were true in the "mass-media age, it has grown still more so in the social media one".

But "until recently", Britain's "relatively fierce libel laws plus the threat of exclusion from the Royal Rota system controlled legacy press reporting". Now, the "globalisation and digitisation of the news cycle" has seen "wilder" coverage from US outlets "routinely" bleeding into the UK, creating a "dissonance that has fuelled digital madness".

British tabloids "pioneered the celebri-fication of the House of Windsor", said Michael M. Grynbaum in The New York Times (NYT). Fleet Street and the royals "are a pair of British institutions whose fates and fortunes have long been intertwined".

Yet in recent weeks, the newspapers "largely showed an unusual level of restraint". Reporters covered "the frenzy of rumours, but mostly in the guise of scolding social media users for spreading conspiracy theories".

They did acknowledge, however, that a level of "blame" lay with the teams at Kensington Palace, who allowed "an information vacuum to develop" in the months since Middleton stepped back from public duties.

'Impossible to pinpoint blame'

We shouldn't "blame" the British press for "the miseries heaped" on the Princess of Wales and her family, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. True, the newspapers "didn't help". Newsrooms could have "simply pretended" conspiracy theories were not swirling, but they were – "and it wasn't driven by us".

Still, it's "impossible to pinpoint precisely where blame should land". A "small handful of prominent online voices" have apologised for weighing in on the story before Middleton addressed the "dirty speculation", but "it would be madness" to suggest they were "the direct cause of anything much", or that "anybody else in particular was".

In the digital age, the "gatekeepers who once controlled the official flow of information – be it palace press secretaries or tabloid editors – are increasingly powerless against the online tide", said Grynbaum in the NYT.

"Perhaps lessons have been learnt on both sides" of this story, said Kate Strick in the London Evening Standard. Kensington Palace's communications teams "will certainly have been reminded of quite how delicate a balancing act" royal news is "in a digital age". With AI and image manipulation tools "rife", they must take "great care" and "mistakes must be avoided".

So-called Katespiracies have "proved that no subject or person is off-limits in the digital quest for the truth", said Strick. But Middleton's "unflinching cancer reveal" is an "urgent reminder" that she has a "right to privacy" and "that perhaps limits are necessary, sometimes".

The internet, said Lord Leveson in his 2012 report into phone hacking, "does not claim to operate by express ethical standards". "Maybe one day" it will, said Rifkind, "but I wouldn't hold your breath". Newspapers "can't fix" this issue. "Only people can."