The birds in the background have barely stopped chirping. dramatic friday video Comments from Kate, Princess of Wales, revealed her cancer diagnosis and ongoing chemotherapy treatment as her impatience with the verdict was in full swing.
Elite columnists at the New York Times, a powerful news organization that has seen its prestige eroded by the wounds it inflicted on itself in the internet age, have been making headlines for months despite the dismal medical news. As time passed, he became more and more accusatory, almost gleeful. There has been frenzied speculation online about the whereabouts of Princess Kate, who has been missing since Christmas. Their version of the villain was named Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year.
you.
“The real royal scandal is us,” headlined the Times’ top column from book critic-turned-cultural critic Pamela Paul, who accused Kate of falsifying, or worse, photos being published. He expressed the real lesson from the frenzy that intensified as a result of the incident. Middleton and her three children distributed a statement to the press saying Americans should stop stalking public figures when they need privacy. She writes: It should make us feel terrible about ourselves too. ”
If you haven’t performed an Opus Dei-style self-flagellation ritual after reading Paul’s column, the whip was given to Times colleague Jessica Bennett in a quick opinion hit called “The Point.” It will be delivered with new functionality. The article’s headline was “The internet should be ashamed of Kate Middleton.” I always thought that the Simon and Garfunkel-like “internet” felt no pain, but of course, here again, the entity Bennett is really attacking is you. She also supported Kate’s privacy appeal, writing:[t]On the contrary, the people must feel extremely foolish. ”
To be clear, this is a completely bass-heavy interpretation of what has unfolded over the past few weeks. Kate’s news dump on Friday night clearly speaks the truth, but it didn’t happen because people are stupid. It happened because people were smart. At the very least, Kensington Palace — Duchess Kate, her husband, future King William, and his bodyguards — has had conflicting opinions about the princess’s whereabouts, fueled paparazzi speculation, and ultimately It’s smarter than exposing lies. And he put the blame on Kate.
Indeed, the fact that so many columnists from major news organizations have competed to attack “the public” (the people once called “readers” and who are deserted in droves by the mainstream media) suggests that Kate’s place is It is the “truth” that shows what the scandal shows. After all, it was about authority and truth. The reason writers like Paul of the Times still identify with Kensington Palace is that they are comrades, a relationship of trust that is rapidly eroding with people who feel comfortable attacking them. This is because they recognize that it is an organization in decline.
Not surprisingly, columns by Paul, Bennett and others featured the most outlandish conspiracy theories — to be expected in a world of 5.35 billion internet users, and the royal family’s Nixonian PR strategy. It was a time when people were just asking for speculation. They believe that what most people on the internet are saying is true: that Duchess Kate must be more seriously ill than Kensington Palace’s bland and sometimes misleading statements. I ignored the reality that it was revealed.
Earlier this month, the now infamous photo of Kate and her children on Mother’s Day in the UK was released not by the public, but by Prince William himself at Kensington Palace, which attracted worldwide attention. So why should the average person feel so stupid? Major news outlets after it was revealed that the photo had been altered, perhaps significantly? Who then decided to throw Kate under the bus, blaming this debacle on her amateur photoshopping skills, eliminating William from the discussion, much less any credibility?
When Kensington Palace did nothing to disavow the various paparazzi videos and photos of a happy, normal Duchess Kate riding in a car or shopping at a farmer’s market, we actually found ourselves Should we feel terrible about this? That’s what we found out when the real Duchess Kate video was released. It was clearly not her on Friday night. Indeed, watching mainstream news outlets hype TMZ’s shopping video as some kind of “living proof” this past weekend, anyone with a decent working eye could tell that this woman was almost in love with Kate. It was a little shocking to see how dissimilar they were.
Various inconsistencies regarding Team Kate’s schedule and timeline, or initial statements about her condition, and even some of Friday night’s revelations about her cancer diagnosis, appear inconsistent with the circumstances of the disease. I am not going to explain this fact chapter by chapter. It is usually detected and treated. But while I agree that Duchess Kate’s privacy pleas should be respected, the version of absolute privacy for the British royal family currently being promoted by American opinion writers, especially on the internet, is Let’s just say it’s a bit ridiculous back in the day when a lot of speculation wasn’t widespread yet. Happens until the palace lies end.
» Read more: Kate, Katie and the losing battle against disinformation | Will Bunch Newsletter
Prince William is not a private citizen, but his family’s public profile is likely to make him Britain’s next head of state, atop a monarchy that taxpayers support more than $100 million a year. This is because existence is supposed to provide some kind of form. It’s about bringing moral leadership to a country that has so many problems at the moment. Like running for president or being hired as the University of Alabama’s football coach, marrying into the royal family is a devil’s bargain in which you agree to give up some of your privacy. The public doesn’t need Kate’s entire medical file, but was it necessary to lie?
One of the things that really pisses me off about this whole incident is that it has fed into some of the public’s and too much of the media’s rather outdated attitudes toward cancer. I’m still amazed that a public figure can reveal a type of cancer that is so treatable when detected early, and that some media outlets still treat it like a death sentence. Although cancer remains a terrifying disease, the 21st century has seen remarkable advances in detection and treatment, allowing millions of people with the disease to live full and relatively normal lives. Rather than perpetuating unnecessary stigma against cancer, Kensington Palace now has the opportunity to honestly attack it.
But the bigger problem with this debacle is that in an age of growing disinformation, the public has lost all confidence in who or what they can believe, especially given the promotion of nuclear power by new AI technology. That’s what I’m losing. At the same time as Duchess Kate’s bombshell statement on Friday, the first news broke, unstable iPhone video More and more stories are coming out of Moscow about the theater attack by a gunman and arsonist who killed at least 137 people.
Although the graphic footage was authentic, other parts of the terrorist attack were too vague to be recognized. A faction of the Islamic extremist group ISIS claimed credit for the attack, but that alone does not explain why terrorists were able to move so easily in a hyper-policed state. Its leader, Vladimir Putin, has been linked to “false flag” attacks in the past. Indeed, Putin’s government almost immediately and with little evidence tried to link the attack to Ukraine, creating a pretext for launching even more horrific attacks against its neighbors while cracking down on domestic opposition.
Were people on the Internet “very, very stupid” to question Putin’s truth? Of course not, but it’s hard to challenge the world’s lying dictators when supposed “good guys” are also fooling around. A dictatorship rises in an era when the very concept of truth is obliterated. The complete loss of public trust in institutions is a downward trend that began with the Vietnam War and Watergate and began in earnest with the Iraq War. What started out as a tragedy eventually evolved into a farce of fake royal photos. She seems to be there when our signboard is nobody.
I have always clung to the naive belief that my colleagues in the media can be the last bastion of truth. But the only truth I felt after the New York Times called me and 5 billion other people stupid is the reality that I don’t know who to trust anymore.
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