As intrigue mounted last week over a then-missing, now recently appeared Kate Middleton and her Photoshopped picture, British-owned tabloids directed their ire toward a familiar target: Meghan Markle.
To an unpracticed observer, it would be difficult to blame the disappearance of Princess Kate from the public eye on her sister-in-law, but the tabloids are nothing if not resourceful. Page Six reported that Prince Harry and Meghan’s inner circle were mocking Kate’s botched Photoshop and sneering that Meghan would never have made such a mistake. Meanwhile, Meghan and Harry, alleged the Daily Mail, were nothing but a pair of hypocrites. They had used Photoshop on their own pregnancy announcement pictures, and so had no leg to stand on when it came to criticizing Kensington Palace for Photoshopping Kate’s Mother’s Day/proof-of-life picture.
Harry and Meghan swiftly went on the defensive and denied it all. The only alteration they had made to their photo was to render it in black-and-white, they announced, and they never said Meghan wouldn’t have made that kind of mistake. (Though let’s be real: with the amount of time Meghan spends curating her Instagram? She wouldn’t have.) The couple has otherwise declined to comment on the controversy, which is probably wise. There’s little chance of a win for them in getting themselves involved.
In a sense, though, they always were involved. The story of Kate’s disappearance took off to begin with because very online fans of Meghan sat up and took notice. As royals reporter Ellie Hall laid out in Nieman Lab at the beginning of March, early conversation about Kate’s disappearance from the public scene was driven by pro-Meghan and Harry accounts in the royal-watcher internet communities where royal haters and fans alike watch and discuss the movements of the royal family with avid fascination.
“It’s one of the points that keeps coming up in the online discourse — the apparent hypocrisy between the…
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