Where is Kate Middleton and what the heck is really going on? For Nieman Lab, Ellie Hall dissects the oddities in how Kensington Palace PR and press outlets have handled Kate Middleton’s mysterious and ongoing absence from the public eye, complete with a detailed timeline of unfolding events.
Royal press offices rarely go on the record. As former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger noted in this great column that I reference all the time in my work, it’s “unusually difficult” to judge the reliability of royal reporting because “it is a world almost devoid of open or named sources.” You almost never see stories with direct attributions to royal spokespersons, which is one of the big reasons why this “Kate Middleton is missing” saga is so interesting. A Palace spokesperson has gone on the record three times — first in response to a Spanish media report that Kate was in a coma, then in response to the widespread social media speculation about her status, and then once again in response to William’s reaction to the social media speculation.
In this case, the lack of speculative tabloid coverage about Kate’s status is one of the things that people have found suspicious about the current situation. The historically nosy news outlets haven’t theorized about what specific type of surgery she had or the circumstances that led to her medical issue being discovered. Until the TMZ photo was published, there hadn’t been any stories about or photographs of the famously close Middleton family. There’s also a distinct dearth of the fluffy, low-stakes stories about the princess that you usually see in the tabloids (like “What Kate’s doing to relax” or “How Kate’s staying a hands-on mother during her recovery”).
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