Kensington Palace dropped Prince William and Kate’s new video on Monday, where Kate announced that she is “cancer free” and that she completed her chemotherapy. The announcement could have been a written statement alone, but the video was supposed to be something else. As I wrote, it felt like it was a different kind of proof of life, a “proof” of their performatively and awkwardly happy marriage. Just hours after the video release, one of William and Kate’s friends huffed to the Daily Beast: “It’s the reset to end all resets. This is Kate and William as they mean to go on. It’s family first and f**k the haters, f**k the press, f**k Harry and Meghan.” What a message of hope after cancer, right? In any case, the “f–k the press” part of the message seemingly came through loud and clear, and the British press has responded in kind, publishing several high-profile and intensely critical pieces about the stupidity of that video. Well, now another Daily Mail commentator is chiming in. The Mail’s Stephen Glover analyzes the stupidity of the video from a press-access and comms perspective. An excerpt:

And yet I do have a deep concern – not so much about the video itself as about the way in which the Prince and Princess of Wales have taken control of their own image and supplanted the traditional media. This development seems to me potentially dangerous to the future of the monarchy. Let me explain.

Catherine has a passion for photography, and for a long time has been releasing pictures of her family that in a previous generation would probably have been taken by professional photographers, if at all. Unsurprisingly, these pictures are very sympathetic to their subjects, to the point of being idealised. On at least one occasion they have been ‘photoshopped’ – that is to say, doctored to the advantage of the ­photographed children.

On Mother’s Day in March, Catherine produced a picture of herself, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis – all of them looking radiantly beautiful and utterly happy – that aroused the suspicions of ­several photo agencies. The Princess of Wales quickly confessed that she had edited the picture, and apologised. Two weeks later she released a video in which she announced with some dignity that she was in the early stages of treatment after a cancer diagnosis. Until very recently such information would have been given to the public by Royal media advisers in a deadpan way. The video of Kate was certainly moving, carrying as it did such dreadful news, although it threw further doubt on the authenticity of the photograph of two weeks earlier in which she and her children had appeared so blissfully happy.

And now we have a further video in which Catherine, ­William and their children seem utterly delirious – as if they have eaten too many magic mushrooms discovered in their enchanted, dappled wood. At one stage a smiling William even plants a kiss on his wife’s cheek. In a sense the video is intimate as we are briefly invited into the heart of a seemingly perfect family. But, of course, the invitation is entirely on the Prince and Princess of Wales’s own terms. They don’t begin to answer the question that such intimacy is bound to provoke – namely, what exactly was wrong with Catherine, and how long is the ‘path to healing and full recovery’ likely to be?

What is going on is nothing less than a revolution. William and Kate have taken control of their own PR, offering an idealised, almost fairytale ­version of themselves and their family. The traditional media, which might have been expected to ask a few searching questions, are virtually written out of the script…. It’s ironic that Harry has chastised both his father and his brother for having been too close to the Press, although, in reality, William and Catherine are seeking to neutralise it.

…I believe that this is a dangerous ploy. Most of us aren’t TikTok aficionados. More to the point, the British people don’t want a supposedly perfect, make-believe monarchy. They expect members of the Royal Family to be real, grounded, recognisable human beings who don’t inhabit a fanciful world of endless smiles and eternal laughter. In the end, the Royal Family survives, and is justified in the public mind, because it is scrutinised. And that is what the traditional media have done, doubtless not always fairly, but for the most part ­rigorously. If the Royal Family is allowed to repackage itself as a wholly sanitised yet untouchable institution – well, disaster is likely to follow.

Harry and Meghan are richly comic, as well as infuriating, figures as they painstakingly fashion their own image of perfection in California. Yet it doesn’t really matter a great deal what they do because they have become so peripheral to the monarchy. But the Prince and Princess of Wales are the future.

I rejoice that Catherine is getting better. She is a gifted woman, and we are very lucky to have her. We are fortunate, too, to have in William such a balanced and dedicated heir to the throne. But the monarchy will be weakened if the public comes to believe it is being fed a fairytale narrative that has been nurtured by the Prince and Princess of Wales beyond the scrutiny of the media.

[From The Daily Mail]

Basically, William and Kate have already been caught manipulating and editing photos several times this year, so they don’t have the credibility to pull off this hazy, fairytale-royal video. Yes, this is a member of the media advocating for his own profession and trying (in vain) to say that it’s the media’s responsibility to scrutinize William and Kate and independently verify whatever horses-t they push. But aren’t we too far gone for that? The horses have already bolted, you know? So the British media’s pushback this week has come across like they’ve only just realized that William and Kate plan to say “f–k the press” from here on out. The press created these lying monsters and they can’t figure out how to close Pandora’s box.

Photos courtesy of Will Warr/KP.