Prince Harry, Meghan Markle want to use the media on their own terms

Media

Prince Harry, Meghan Markle want to use the media on their own terms

Published

3 years ago

January 9, 2020

Harry Miller

The relationship between Britain’s royals and the media is awkward, mistrustful — and seemingly inescapable. But now, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry want out.

After years of growing tension with the press, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have announced plans to quit their senior royal duties, move part-time to North America, seek financial independence and withdraw from regular media scrutiny.

In a challenge to the press, the couple slammed the country’s long-standing arrangements for royal media coverage, saying they preferred to communicate directly with the public through social media.

The British press was stung by the snub, reacting Thursday with articles, columns and editorials that ranged from disappointment to fury.

The Daily Mirror said in an editorial that the couple’s failure to tell Harry’s grandmother Queen Elizabeth II about their plans “shows shocking disregard for a woman whose entire life has been ruled by a sense of public duty and honour.” The Times of London accused Harry of “petulance and hot-headedness,” while the Daily Mail said the couple wanted “the status of being ‘senior’ royals but the privacy and freedom of being private citizens.”

The Sun and the New York Post described the departure as “Megxit,” a play on Brexit, Britain’s impending departure later this month from the European Union.

Harry and Meghan’s shocking announcement drew comparisons to the abdication of the queen’s uncle King Edward VIII, who gave up the throne in 1936 so he could marry divorced American Wallis Simpson. Once again, waspish commentators noted, an American woman has caused a ruction in the Royal Family.

But the relationship between royals and the media has changed dramatically in the intervening decades. Before the abdication, the romance between Edward and Simpson was headline news in the United States but went largely unreported by a deferential British press.

The trauma of the Second World War and the social revolution of the 1960s demolished that tradition of deference to royalty and the establishment. For decades, the U.K. media has proclaimed its reverence for the Queen while treating the travails of her family as fair game, from the divorces of three of her four children to second son Prince Andrew’s troubling friendship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

After Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, the media charted every twist in the marriage: the births of sons William and Harry, Diana’s glamour and charity work and the slow public crumbling of the relationship.

Charles and Diana both used the media as a weapon as their marriage foundered, giving TV interviews to present themselves in a sympathetic light. But Diana — a global megastar, followed by paparazzi wherever she went — was never fully in control of the media attention. She was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 while being pursued by photographers.

In the wake of Diana’s shocking death, the palace and the press reached an uneasy truce. The British media left young William and Harry alone in exchange for carefully staged interviews and photo opportunities as they grew up. That practice has continued with the three young children of William and his wife Kate.

Harry, however, still blames the media for his mother’s death, and since meeting his wife — the former actor Meghan Markle — he has become less willing to play the game.

In 2017, the prince accused the media of directing “a wave of abuse and harassment” at the biracial Markle, including “racial undertones” in articles. Last year the couple launched a lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday newspaper over its publication of a letter written by Markle. Harry said he feared “history repeating itself … I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.”

Yet using the media has been a key part of Harry and Meghan’s strategy, just as it was for Diana. When they wanted to make their unhappiness public, the couple gave an interview to a sympathetic journalist from broadcaster ITV.

In that interview, Markle, an American, said that “very naively,” she had been unprepared for the intense media scrutiny she would receive once she married into the British Royal Family.

“I never thought that this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair,” she said.

Prince Harry and Markle now want to use the media on their own terms, dropping out of the “royal rota” system that organizes media coverage of the royal family’s public events. On a newly launched website, they said the system hampered their ability to “personally share moments in their lives directly with members of the public (via social media).”

They said that in the future, they would “engage with grassroots media organizations and young, up-and-coming journalists.” They also slammed the “misconception” that the British media’s royal correspondents were “credible sources” of information.

Freddy Mayhew, editor of the Press Gazette, a newspaper industry trade publication, said the royal couple was aiming for a “much more controlled, much more private” approach to the media, drawing on Markle’s experience as a U.S. television star.

“I think they are perhaps seizing an opportunity with the decline of print media to break away,” he said. “That’s something they couldn’t have done before, when papers were at their full strength. But now that a lot of it is moving online, there’s the ability for people like Harry and Meghan to take control of what they put out there.

“It’s a brave new world,” he noted.

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Media

OPEC denies media access to Reuters, Bloomberg, WSJ for weekend policy meets

Published

4 hours ago

June 2, 2023

Harry Miller

VIENNA, June 2 (Reuters) – OPEC has denied media access to reporters from Reuters, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal to report on oil policy meetings in Vienna this weekend, reporters, Bloomberg and people familiar with the matter said on Friday.

The three media organizations are among the world’s leading suppliers of financial news and information. They report on the outcome of policy meetings between OPEC and its allies, where ministers make decisions that impact the price of the world’s most traded commodity.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies is a group known as OPEC+ and includes top oil producers Saudi Arabia and Russia. Ministers from the group, which pumps more than 40% of the world’s oil supply, are scheduled to gather on Saturday and Sunday for regular biannual meetings.

OPEC staff declined on Friday to give media accreditation to Reuters journalists to cover the event. The staff handling media accreditation at one of Vienna’s luxury hotels said they could not issue accreditation without an invite. They did not comment when asked why Reuters reporters received no invites.

OPEC has not responded to requests for comment from Reuters this week on why it has not invited or accredited Reuters reporters for the meet.

“We believe that transparency and a free press serve both readers and markets, and we object to this restriction on coverage,” a spokesperson for Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters Corp (TRI.TO), said on Friday.

“Reuters will continue to cover OPEC in an independent, impartial and reliable way in keeping with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.”

A reporter from Bloomberg was also denied accreditation on Friday, a person familiar with the matter said.

A Bloomberg spokesperson confirmed on Friday the company has not been given accreditation to cover the OPEC meeting.

The Wall Street Journal did not respond to a request for comment.

Reporters from the three outlets, many of whom have been covering OPEC meetings for years, did not receive invitations from OPEC ahead of the meeting.

Without accreditation, journalists cannot enter the OPEC Secretariat where the ministers meet, or attend press conferences during the event.

Reporters at other media outlets including trade publications Argus and Platts received accreditation on Friday. Argus confirmed its reporters have been accredited and will attend. Platts did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Reporting by Alex Lawler, Dmitry Zhdannikov, Ahmad Ghaddar, Julia Payne, Maha El Dahan; writing by Simon Webb; Editing by Marguerita Choy

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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OPEC denies media access to Reuters, Bloomberg, WSJ for weekend policy meets – Yahoo Canada Finance

Published

6 hours ago

June 2, 2023

Harry Miller

VIENNA (Reuters) – OPEC has denied media access to reporters from Reuters, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal to report on oil policy meetings in Vienna this weekend, reporters, Bloomberg and people familiar with the matter said on Friday.

OPEC has not responded to requests for comment from Reuters this week on why it has not invited or accredited Reuters reporters for the meet.

“Reuters will continue to cover OPEC in an independent, impartial and reliable way in keeping with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.”

A reporter from Bloomberg was also denied accreditation on Friday, a person familiar with the matter said.

A Bloomberg spokesperson confirmed on Friday the company has not been given accreditation to cover the OPEC meeting.

The Wall Street Journal did not respond to a request for comment.

Reporters from the three outlets, many of whom have been covering OPEC meetings for years, did not receive invitations from OPEC ahead of the meeting.

Without accreditation, journalists cannot enter the OPEC Secretariat where the ministers meet, or attend press conferences during the event.

(Reporting by Alex Lawler, Dmitry Zhdannikov, Ahmad Ghaddar, Julia Payne, Maha El Dahan; writing by Simon Webb; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

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Social media restricted in Senegal amid political unrest – NetBlocks

Published

18 hours ago

June 2, 2023

Harry Miller

NetBlocks metrics confirm the restriction of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Telegram and other social media platforms in Senegal on 1 June 2023. The measure comes amid widespread protests over the sentencing of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko.

⚠️ Confirmed: Metrics show the restriction of social media and messaging platforms including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube in #Senegal; the incident comes amid protests over the sentencing of opposition figure Ousmane Sonko

📰 Report: https://t.co/2ckQPxJ5j3 pic.twitter.com/MuohanLeCP

— NetBlocks (@netblocks) June 1, 2023

Real-time network data show the restrictions in effect on Senegal’s leading mobile provider Orange (Sonatel) with restrictions subsequently also observed on Free (Tigo). The study is taken from a sample size of 4000 measurements from 120 vantage points across Senegal. Unrelated platforms have remained available without restriction. This class of disruption can be worked around using VPN services, which are able to circumvent government internet censorship measures.

What’s happening in Senegal?

Ousmane Sonko, a prominent opposition figure in Senegal, has been sentenced to two years in jail on charges of “corrupting youth,” leading to widespread protests in Dakar and other major cities. The court acquitted Sonko of rape and death threat charges but found him guilty of immoral behavior towards individuals younger than 21. The sentence could potentially bar Sonko from running in the upcoming presidential election. Protests have broken out in response to the verdict, with Sonko’s supporters claiming the charges are politically motivated and part of a plot to stymie his political career

Senegal has a history of using social media restrictions to control protests. In 2021, NetBlocks found that authorities limited access to social media and messaging apps, in addition to measures targeting traditional media.

Senegal’s government has also faced a series of activist cyberattacks over the treatment of Sonko, which brought down several state websites and online platforms hosted on the government ADIE network earlier in the week.

NetBlocks recommends against the use of network disruptions and social media restrictions, given their disproportionate impact to fundamental rights including freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.

Methodology

Internet performance and service reachability are determined via NetBlocks web probe privacy-preserving analytics. Each measurement consists of latency round trip time, outage type and autonomous system number aggregated in real-time to assess service availability and latency in a given country. Network providers and locations are enumerated as vantage point pairs. The root cause of a service outage may be additionally corroborated by means of traffic analysis and manual testing as detailed in the report.

NetBlocks is an internet monitor working at the intersection of digital rights, cyber-security and internet governance. Independent and non-partisan, NetBlocks strives to deliver a fair and inclusive digital future for all.

[ press | contact ] Graphics and visualizations are provided for fair use in unaltered form reflecting the meaning and intent in which they were published, with clear credit and source attribution to NetBlocks. Intellectual property rights are protected including but not limited to key findings, facts and figures, trademarks, copyrights, and original reporting, are held by NetBlocks. Citation and source attribution are required at the point of use.

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