In the wake of Kate Middleton’s revelation that she has cancer, The Atlantic published two columns arguing we should be ashamed of ourselves for speculating about her health.
Helen Lewis (“I Hope You All Feel Terrible Now“):
For many years, the most-complained-about cover of the British satirical magazine Private Eye was the one it published in the week after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. At the time, many people in Britain were loudly revolted by the tabloid newspapers that had hounded Diana after her divorce from Charles, and by the paparazzi whose quest for profitable pictures of the princess ended in an underpass in Paris.
Under the headline “Media to Blame,” the Eye cover carried a photograph of a crowd outside Buckingham Palace, with three speech bubbles. The first was: “The papers are a disgrace.” The next two said: “Yeah, I couldn’t get one anywhere” and “Borrow mine, it’s got a picture of the car.” People were furious. Sacks of angry, defensive mail arrived for days afterward, and several outlets withdrew the magazine from sale. (I am an Eye contributor, and these events have passed into office legend.) But with the benefit of hindsight, the implication was accurate: Intruding on the private lives of the royals is close to a British tradition. We Britons might have the occasional fit of remorse, but that doesn’t stop us. And now, because of the internet, everyone else can join in too.
That cover instantly sprang to mind when, earlier today, the current Princess of Wales announced that she has cancer. In a video recorded on Wednesday in Windsor, the former Kate Middleton outlined her diagnosis in order to put an end to weeks of speculation, largely incubated online but amplified and echoed by mainstream media outlets, about the state of her health and marriage.
Kate has effectively been bullied into this statement, because the alternative—a wildfire of gossip and conspiracy theories—was worse. So please, let’s not immediately switch into maudlin recriminations about how this happened. It happened because people felt they had the right to know Kate’s private medical information. The culprits may include three staff members at the London hospital that treated her, who have been accused of accessing her medical records, perhaps driven by the same curiosity that has lit up my WhatsApp inbox for weeks. Everyone hates the tabloid papers, until they become them.
[…]
This news will surely make many people feel bad. The massive online guessing game about the reasons for Kate’s invisibility seems far less fun now. Stephen Colbert’s “spilling the tea” monologue, which declared open season on the princess’s marriage, should probably be quietly interred somewhere. The sad simplicity of today’s statement, filmed on a bench with Kate in casual jeans and a striped sweater, certainly gave me pause. She mentioned the difficulty of having to “process” the news, as well as explaining her condition to her three young children in terms they could understand. The reference to the importance of “having William by my side” was pointed, given how much of the speculation has gleefully dwelt on the possibility that she was leaving him or vice versa.
Charlie Warzel (“We’re All Just Fodder“):
It was always going to end this way. The truth about Kate Middleton’s absence is far less funny, whimsical, or salacious than the endless memes and conspiracy theories suggested. In a video recorded and broadcast by the BBC, the princess says she has cancer, and that she had retreated from the public eye to deal with her condition while attempting to shield her children from the spotlight. Instead, she had to contend with the internet giggling about whether she’d had a Brazilian butt lift.
[…]
In my least charitable moments, I see this toxic dynamic as the lasting legacy of social media—a giant, metrics-infused experiment in connectivity that has had a flattening, pernicious effect. In 2021, I interviewed Elle Hunt, a journalist who’d tweeted an innocuous opinion about horror movies one evening and woke up to find she was trending on Twitter, her feeds choked with thousands of furious replies and threats. When I asked her to describe the experience of becoming Twitter’s main character for the day, she summed it up thusly: “You’re repurposed as fodder for content generation in a way that’s just so dehumanizing.” Three years later, these words resonate even stronger. What Hunt described to me then as “a platform failure,” feels to me now like a learned behavior of the internet, where people, famous and not, are repurposed as fodder for content generation.
The cycle repeats itself endlessly. This afternoon, the memes about Middleton shifted—from jokes about her whereabouts to jokes about how awful it was that everyone had been making fun of a cancer patient. Feeling bad about the memes tweets immediately became a meme unto themselves. Despite the tone shift, the reason for these posts is the same: They’re a way to take a person and repurpose their life for entertainment and engagement. If this sounds exhausting and depressing, it’s because it is.
I pay about as little attention to the British royal family as is possible for someone who consumes as much news as I do. So far as I can tell, I have blogged about Middleton precisely once, a June 2012 post titled “Queen Updates Order of Precedence and Who Must Bow to Whom” rolling my eyes at the silliness of it all.
Regardless, while I obviously wish the 42-year-old mother of three all the best in the face of her diagnosis, I would contend that she has no expectation of privacy in such matters. She’s a bright, college-educated woman who willingly and knowingly married a man in line to be the King of England. She chose life in a fishbowl and the health of a future Queen of England is actually the business of the UK taxpayers who fund her lavish lifestyle.
Even so, there should obviously be limits on the conduct of the press. Chasing their limousines around on motorcycles to obtain photographs is obviously way over the line. Ditto enticing hospital staffers to steal private medical records.
Comics and pundits are in a different category, bound mostly by the ever-changing boundaries of good taste. Suggesting without evidence that a couple is on the verge of breaking up strikes me as on the wrong side of that line.
Still, speculation wouldn’t have been necessary had the palace been more forthcoming. Their public relations team is shockingly bad given how long they’ve been in business.
