Privacy and Public Figures
No, I don't feel terrible now.
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.
Those who live by publicity, die by publicity.
Also, too, I follow the royal family only to the extent I can’t avoid it, but haven’t I seen headlines that after the dust settled the paparazzi had little to do with Diana’s death? I vaguely recall hundred miles per hour and drunk driver.
I disagree. A 42 year old who finds out that she has cancer deserves time to process that information and talk to her kids without the bullshit that accompanied this. Her husband is the one in line for the throne.
I learned this morning that the Queen mum–Elizabeth’s mother–survived two bouts of cancer, which was not public information until after her death.
The obsession of the media, fueled by an irrational public appetite for gossip, needs to stop.
The British tabloids are way, way over any line of decency. I knew a British Surgeon who also had the second level position under a Minister for a time (Vice Minister? Assistant Minister? Spare Minister?). He was a top tier surgeon, a specialist, but he still saw patients one or two days a week as what we call here a General Practitioner or Internist. I was surprised he found time to do it when he was in Government and he said that it kept him grounded, but there were some disturbing sides to it. He recounted how he had been told by Party members to never see a female patient alone, especially new ones. So his female nurse always knew to follow such patients into the examining room. The caution wasn’t about spies or people looking to get leverage over him, but instead he was told it was a fairly regular practice of the tabloids to wire up a prostitute and send them to various politicians in the hopes of luring them into hanky panky. He felt that it had been tried on him at least a couple of times, with voluptuous and sexily dressed new patients showing up with vague symptoms and seeming to be in a rush to get out as soon as she realized the nurse was staying, and then no follow up. And despite decades of practice, he had not seen anything like that before, and then two during his relatively short time in the government.
@Jen: I’m with you. The idea that simply because someone is rich or famous they don’t deserve basic human decency is just bizarre.
In a just universe Helen Lewis would die on the toilet whist engaged with a horrendous dump. I find it rich that a bigot like her would scold anyone about medical privacy. She’s a woman hell bent on torturing trans people and removing their access to medical care. Fuck her and the toilet she rode in on. Fuck the Atlantic too.
@Beth:
I understand your anger, but the Princess of Wales has no control over Helen Lewis. And Kate is suffering from a possibly fatal illness.
I don’t care about the English royal house. Of course, anyone who gets cancer has a measure of my sympathy, crown or commoner. I hope that Kate has prompt and comfortable healing, and I wish the same for all.
The people in charge of public relations for her would’ve been smart to be transparent from the start. This news is not containable. The gossip, rumor, and conspiracy mills could have been preempted.
Fools want fame, wiser people are happy with money. Fame belongs to the audience, money belongs to you. And the IRS.
@Slugger:
More information could have been released. Like what cancer and what stage. This would cut down the speculation. As a cancer survivor I can understand the patient’s choice not to provide all the details.
No matter how much information is provided, you can’t stop the talking heads from writing or saying things on a topic they know almost nothing about. As a character in a unfinished story of mine says-
“The talking heads don’t know shit, and they are making it up as they go along.”
I mean, you all understand why she didn’t want this to come out, right? She’s got young children at home and once it’s out not only do they know, but their parents can’t even try to manage it. The media will be full of endless discussions about it.
@MarkedMan: Doesn’t seem the chosen path more protective of the kids than getting ahead of the bullying weeks ago would’ve been. Kate was unseen since mid-December; speculation did not reach fever pitch levels till the past two weeks. Does it take three months to explain that mommy is being treated for cancer?
Much of British media is toxic. Diana, Meghan, and Kate being hyperprivileged royals is not an excuse for vile, unethical free for alls — phone hacking, bribery for medical records, racist double standards, deadly car chases, and unfettered conspiracy mongering are not okay.
As in the US, deterioration of UK press coverage is correlated with Murdoch acquisitions in Britain from the late 80s. Speaking of cancers.
Repellant media antics are all the more reason to pre-empt tabloid fodder, like Charles with his quick health disclosures. Kensington Palace (the official home and offices of the heir) and Buckingham Palace (the monarch’s main home and offices) are separate, with separate staff.
The Prince and Princess of Wales may have attendants relatively inexperienced in PR at an elevated level, as their charged moved up in status and attention with the Queen’s passing. The ever-changing social media landscape is another wild card. So. Growing pains. They’ll learn.
@Bill Jempty: If you spent 15 seconds in any of the toxic waste dumps of a “Royals” subreddit you’d know nothing they’d have said would have ever been enough. It was frickin crazy and that started right after the announcement that she was having surgery and going on leave.
It just got worse and worse and worse. Conspiracy theories that would make Q proud, body doubles, domestic violence, I can’t even. And even now they are still blaming KP and the fact that somehow W&K are “lazy” and they wouldn’t have assumed the worst of them if they just had worked harder in the past–instead of looking at themselves.
Whenever someone points out that they said she was on leave until Easter, they start moving the goalposts, but what it ends up with is basically, “We’re bored and curious and we want to know NOW! Don’t care how, we want to know now!”
No one is entitled to someone else’s private medical information. I don’t care who she is.
Our country lacks empathy and this is just more evidence.
The Royals are England’s pet humans, and need to make the sporadic appearance as part of that. It’s the job she signed up for.
(Whether it’s a really tacky job or not is immaterial, she married into it knowingly, and there were lots of other options than Royal Family)
Kate didn’t have to announce anything about her cancer, just not release a doctored photo and trigger speculation.
Maybe keep a backlog of spare photos, updated frequently enough that no one says “that’s her from 3 years ago!” Stripped of metadata, of course.
Kate Middleton and Lloyd Austin: Compare and contrast.
I would argue there is very little privacy allowed for public figures. And quick disclosure is best for a easily distracted public.