Sending out a doctored image was a bad PR move from the palace, which keeps struggling to balance transparency and optics in the post-Elizabeth era.
The Kate Middleton photo debacle is an unforced error from a person usually seen as picture, and princess, perfect.
Yes, Catherine, Princess of Wales, apologized on social media Monday for “any confusion” over the image manipulation that led five major news agencies to recall the family photo the royals had shared hours earlier. Yet all the #WhereIsKate speculation that has gone viral recently is about more than Middleton’s “amateur” photo editing. It’s rooted in questions of privacy and shortsighted palace media strategizing.
Understanding the furor starts with its origins. On Jan. 17 came the announcement that Kate had been admitted to a London hospital a day earlier for a “planned abdominal surgery” and would likely be recuperating “until after Easter.” The princess wanted her personal medical information to remain private.
The same day brought other unexpected royal health news: King Charles III would be hospitalized for a prostate procedure. The next month, Buckingham Palace announced that Charles, 75, had cancer and would not appear in public while undergoing treatment.
Although Charles was soon photographed leaving the hospital and has appeared in social media posts shared by the palace, Kate’s convalescence has been conspicuously image-free. Gradually, discussion of her absence morphed from chatter online, including among conspiracy theorists, to mainstream hypothesizing.
