William’s masterclass in playing the press and maintaining privacy
From u/canellelabelle on X @ canellelabelle Unarchived link
TL;DR
William got injunctions to stop press publishing the grainy pap photo of Catherine.
They issued their own (photoshopped) image. (Catherine supported him by issuing the apology).
The press issued the Kill order to the photo so the press can’t publish it.
W&C own the copyright to the original and only photo.
70m+ people have seen it on Twitter
Full article text:
The masculine Jawline and broad shoulders match the defiant and headstrong attitude indeed. Nature never makes a mistake📷 In the Past 24 hours the press finally went to Head with Prince William and it was a long time coming📷
Since his youth, William has evaded the press. With Catherine, they hoped they finally had the weak link; they now realised: Only Iron cuts Iron. Catherine is as headstrong, private and loyal as William is📷
So after 2 months of literally harrassing this man in articles and hate campaigns for a picture of HIS wife and getting nothing, the paparazzis supported by the World press, decided to invade the couple's privacy and capture some intrusive shots.
The World press wanted to publish them but Prince William, via palace lawyers, exerted tremendous pressure on the british press, AP, Reuters, Getty and AFP, to NOT publish the illegal pictures📷 That was a massive win for William that annoyed them to no end. Thus, they expected something Big in return..like the rights to Catherine first picture📷
To their dismay, the Wales pulled another historic blinder: Not only did they not get advance notice of the picture, but Prince William himself took the picture of his family, in the intimacy of their Windsor home, and Catherine edited it and posted it with her personal message for mother's day📷
That was a massive play; The press was robbed of their oportunity to make huge money by having rights to the picture and Now the picture was getting huge exposure on the Wales pages without any need for the world press. They got played on BOTH hands📷
So the World press decided to teach William a lesson and decided to retaliate with all their might, issuing a discrediting "Kill notice". They DEMANDED that not only the picture be pulled from their publishing papers but that the Wales DELETE THEIR OWN FAMILY picture from THEIR OWN SOCIAL MEDIA over THEIR OWN EDITING. They even put a community notes on X and restrictions on instagram against the picture📷📷📷
This crucial moment in the history of publishing house is where William officially BROKE the world press📷 The Fact that they were so livid at his continued evasion despite, their very public bullying tactics, that they had to out their own game is a Win📷 We witnessed the world press band together over "editing" issues, to bully a Man into serving his own wife on a silver platter for their consumption because she makes them big money📷
What happened next is another lesson in evasion tactics: Catherine once again took to X clarifying that she made the edits to their picture and politely apologising for the confusion while wishing everyone a good Mother's day as she had. One would think, "oh she caved". Not quite📷she pulled another blinder. Catherine is not asleep, she is fiercely backing William📷 The Press did not want an explanation, They WANTED W&C to hand them the Original of the picture so they would finally publish it and make money of it📷 William and Catherine said "Meh"📷
The same Picture with the same edits, William's now iconic picture of his wife and family, is the ONLY clear picture of Catherine. It is STILL UP, the community note and restrictions have been removed. It is Now the ONLY source of the picture. No one made money off It. The pic has now over 72 million views in 24 hours on X📷
So All in All, who pulled the blinder and came out victorious?📷 Prince William is still in control of his Wife's privacy as the world still doesnt know anything about Catherine's diagnosis or what is truly going on; The press is still mad and was still burned on both ends: No pap pictures published and no first pics of Catherine published📷
THESE are the defiant actions and the defiant face of the son who has learned from his mother's mistakes; from witnessing her trials with the press to losing her in a paparazzi car chase and swore to himself: 'Never Again'📷
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author: WorthSpecialist1066
submitted: March 12, 2024 at 09:03AM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit
disclaimer: all views + opinions expressed by the author of this post, as well as any comments and reblogs, are solely the author's own; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the administrator of this Tumblr blog. For entertainment only.
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The most powerful moment of the coronation of King Charles III was not the gold glittering off carriages or epaulettes — not the pomp and show and signifiers of power.
It was precisely their opposite: when Charles shed his gold robes and stood in a thin white shirt, his frail humanity implied.
Then a screen was erected around him and, shielded, he had a private consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who dabbed anointing oil with his hands on Charles’s bare breast.
"This was the most solemn and personal of moments,” Buckingham Palace said.
Charles was bare before God, in privacy, God being one of the last beings with no need to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
The Princess of Wales looked on as the screen shielded her father-in-law.
By contrast, she was at that point the most magnificent she had ever been, swathed in layer upon layer of regality, the dress, the robes, the hanging chains, headpiece and ribbons all serving to move the viewing gaze — subjects in every sense — from our awareness of Catherine Middleton with her everyday human DNA and towards the shared fiction of her transcendent queenliness.
Less than a year later, this moment is remembered with new and terrible power.
It is spring again, but it’s a time of hard Lenten moral reflection for us as a nation, in relationship to our royals, as well as an ever more voraciously unprivate modern celebrity culture.
Both the King and the princess have cancer, the latter’s disclosed by Catherine in an unprecedented video address on Friday, March 22.
Catherine’s speech was something of a plea bargain in which she traded not only her customary silence but her most personal of health ordeals in order to put an end to toxic rumours swirling online that had become in tone like an unruly mob rattling at the palace gates.
Or rattling at the figurative locks on her medical notes, with three workers at the London Clinic, where she and the King were treated, suspended and under investigation for allegedly trying to access her records (hers, it is important to note, the King’s were unmolested).
📷: Getty Images
What was so powerful about the anointing of the King was the sacredness of that space in which he could be fully human away from observation and judgment.
There should be another one-on-one consultation that is sacred, where anyone, from King to princess to pauper, can expect to be shriven in total privacy, and that is the sanctity of the medical room.
It used to be that priests were our only bound confidants, we could trust them to be privy to all our spiritual ills.
Now doctors are our secular priests: bound by law and ethics to enshrine confidentiality at the heart of the patient relationship.
As a result, our medical privacy in an age of oversharing and online surveillance feels both stranger and more necessary.
If we knew our every GP-inspected rash was to be posted on TikTok for the nation, many of us would quite literally die of embarrassment.
The King’s appointment behind the three-sided screen can now be viewed through the lens of royal illness.
The lavishly embroidered panels and expensive white shirt now replaced by the flimsy three-sided ward screen on wheels and thin hospital gown that can humble us all.
But it also enacts a principle at the very heart of becoming the monarch.
The medical-like screen is erected in the coronation to tell us there are some places the public cannot go; to tell us that there are sacredly personal moments in which a person, any person, however swathed in our projections of power, needs to be nakedly human.
Otherwise, they will go mad. We need to make sure the screens are erected around Catherine now.
Much is said, quite a lot of it by Prince Harry himself, of the dangers of the wives of the princes repeating the tragic history of their mother, Princess Diana, hunted by photographers.
He remains phobic to any hint of tabloid persecution or paparazzi chase. But this is a sideshow, even an anachronism in 2024.
He and others have not recognised how the “chase” has changed. Who needs paparazzi when there are a billion citizen hacks ready to take pictures with their phones, in case a convalescing woman nips to a Windsor farm shop with her husband?
Instead, the appetite now is not to see but to know.
The royals used to have a contract with the public: we pay for them, and in return, they give us their presence.
Nearly all of their official job is to do with surface: to show up, to put in appearances at a set number of functions, whether at the opening of parliament or the opening of a leisure centre.
But now parts of the online mob seem to be staging a coup. We want more than the surface, we want to puncture the skin barrier of the royal family and occupy from the inside.
The “fans” have become an invasive virus. The royal analogy is often that they are trapped in a gilded zoo. This new model, instead, casts the royals more as lab rats.
When Catherine disappeared from view in January after announcing a “planned abdominal operation,” the response from internet truthers was one of irate entitlement.
They are now the 1980s tabloids: ravening for intimacies and making stuff up when thwarted.
This wasn’t the boomer generation, who are both more respectful of the royals and more private about their own health.
It was the fortysomething mothers frustrated when they can’t track the phone location of everyone in their life; or the twentysomethings on Snap Map.
Both desperate for their personalised new Netflix season of “The Royals” to drop.
Catherine presents with such stoicism and dignity, it is easy to forget where this new invasiveness started: when she was pregnant with Prince George in December 2012 and hospitalised for extreme morning sickness.
While she was sleeping on the ward, a radio station in Australia rang the hospital switchboard pretending to be the Queen.
They broadcast the nurse’s comments about Catherine’s “retching.”
One could only find this prank funny if Catherine had already — a young, wretchedly ill, pregnant woman — been dehumanised.
George is now ten and his mother hospitalised again, and in that decade, the physical security of ill royals may have tightened but their claim to bodily autonomy seems to have weakened.
Some say Kensington Palace “brought it on themselves” by their wish for discretion; this claim is duplicitous.
The late Queen Elizabeth II became increasingly debilitated in her final years with not much detail ever given; just as her father, King George VI, died without disclosing his lung cancer.
I’m glad that the British do not subject their heads of state to the same publicised medical reports as the president of the United States; one shouldn’t have to present a stool swab to sit on the throne.
No, instead the apparent justification of all those clicking and posting conspiracy theories “worried for Catherine’s welfare” was this sinful truth.
As a beautiful, 42-year-old mother of three, her drama was more box office than the ailments of those older, a pound of her flesh was worth more.
Pity, Susan Sontag said in her 1978 book Illness as Metaphor, is close to contempt.
Back then cancer was still taboo. Those around the patient, Sontag says, “express pity but also convey contempt.”
Ask any cancer patient and they will say they don’t want pity: it is too isolating, it sets them apart, an unwanted privilege.
This is why the video plea of Catherine was one of affinity, rather than pity or privilege.
Last year, she sat in robes in Westminster Abbey at the coronation of her father-in-law, next to her future king son and future king husband.
In her video address last week, she sat on a classically English garden bench, pale, alone and in jeans, as bare of pomp as any royal can be.
No mention of kings or titles, just Diana’s ring on her hand.
Rather she gave an appeal, parent to parent, human to human, about her “huge shock” and her care for her “young family.”
And, finally, her kinship with anyone who lives in a vulnerable human body susceptible to a democratic illness like cancer, “you are not alone.”
Or, to paraphrase Richard Curtis:
“I’m just a girl, standing in front of a public, asking for some time to endure gruelling chemotherapy."
NOTE: Additional photos have been included in this article.
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