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Front Burner Transcript for March 13, 2024

Host: Jayme Poisson

JAYME POISSON: Hi, I'm Jayme Poisson.

JAYME POISSON: Kate Middleton is one of the most photographed people in the world. And for the last several months, she's been missing. Sort of. Kensington Palace has said that the Princess of Wales would be out of the public eye for a number of months. But that hasn't temper on speculation about whether or not something more is going on, which really reached a fever pitch this week when a bunch of news agencies dropped kill orders on a photo the palace released of Kate and her kids.

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ANCHOR: This photo of the Princess of Wales and her children has now been pulled from circulation by several of the world's biggest photo agencies over concerns that it has been manipulated.

JAYME POISSON: So today, we have heard your requests. We are going to do this story. I'm talking to Ellie Hall. She spent a decade as the royal correspondent for BuzzFeed News until it shut down last year. She's a freelance reporter now, and she's been following this whole saga very closely, even writing the definitive timeline of events for Nieman Lab. We're also going to talk about something the Palace PR team might not truly get, that people love to entertain themselves with misinformation these days.

JAYME POISSON: Ellie, hey. Thanks for coming on to do this.

ELLIE HALL: Thank you for having me.

JAYME POISSON: All right. Here we go. Here we go. So I just… I feel like I need to timestamp this conversation, because who knows what might happen overnight. So you and I are talking on Tuesday at noon eastern time. And let's start at the very beginning in January, when we first learned that Kate Middleton had undergone surgery. What was the official word from the palace about what was happening? How long would she be gone from her duties?

ELLIE HALL: So everything started in terms of the very first date we have here, specifically on January 17th, when Kensington Palace, which specifically is the press team, the arm of Prince William and his wife, we call her Kate Middleton. It's just them. So they announced that she had had planned abdominal surgery at the London clinic and would be out of commission. We would not see her again until after Easter.

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ANCHOR: A source at Kensington Palace confirms her condition is noncancerous, providing no additional details.

ELLIE HALL: She has postponed all of her engagements, everything. She was going to be in the hospital for 10 to 14 days, and then her recovery would continue at home.

JAYME POISSON: Right. And just to be clear, we have no idea what the actual abdominal surgery was.

ELLIE HALL: No.

JAYME POISSON: Okay.

ELLIE HALL: That's one of the things that, especially as stuff starts to develop, it's one of the things that people keep coming back to. The only thing we know is that it's a planned abdominal surgery. And what's more, we know that Kate herself wants to keep this information out of the press.

JAYME POISSON: All right. And so around the same time, well, actually, on the same day, right, that Kensington Palace announced that Kate is recovering from the surgery, Buckingham Palace, so the King's press office, announces that King Charles would be in the same hospital for a prostate condition.

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ANCHOR: 75-year-old King Charles will have a procedure next week for an enlarged prostate like thousands of other men, the palace notes.

JAYME POISSON: And we later learned that he has an unspecified kind of cancer.

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KING CHARLES: In recent weeks, I have been most deeply touched by your wonderfully kind and thoughtful good wishes for my health, and in return, can only continue to serve you to the best of my ability throughout the Commonwealth.

JAYME POISSON: I'm curious, like how do we see the royal PR machines treat Kate's illness versus the King’s? Their different press offices.

ELLIE HALL: Yeah. So once again, that's a key thing to understand throughout this entire saga. The royal press Office isn't one big team working together to set one narrative. There are two separate teams. When the Queen was alive, there were three separate teams. And according to Prince Harry in his memoir Spare, there's some infighting that can happen between these groups, and it's not uncommon for staffers on one team to give some information to the press that makes someone on the other team look bad. So that's what you need to keep in the back of your mind throughout this entire thing. As the health crises started unfolding, Buckingham Palace made it very clear from the beginning that they were going to be taking a different approach than the one that Kensington Palace was taking. Each step of the way, Buckingham Palace has been making a point to be more accessible to the public than Kensington Palace. We, and I know we're going to get to this, but we didn't see Kate for a very long time. We saw the king exit the hospital. We saw his wife, Queen Camilla, visiting him. And in the statement that Buckingham Palace released saying that the king did have cancer, they made what I think is a brilliant PR move. They specifically said that they were releasing this news about the King's diagnosis to prevent speculation. But then they didn't say what type of cancer he had. I have always felt that the prevent speculation dig was something right at William and Kate's press team, because by that point, these rumours about what was really going on with Kate were already beginning to circulate.

JAYME POISSON: You mentioned Camilla was visiting Charles in the hospital, and I feel like it's probably worth us mentioning here that William was only seen visiting Kate once. And I bring this up because this is going to be another one of those breadcrumbs, right, when we get to the wild theories circulating around this.

ELLIE HALL: 100%.

JAYME POISSON: Okay. So just park… we’ll just park that for a couple minutes. So after the palace says Kate left the hospital, a period of time goes by. There is some speculation, right? The fact that she hasn't been seen. And then Prince William pulls out of the memorial service for his godfather, late King Constantine of Greece.

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ANCHOR: Kensington Palace has said his absence was due to a personal matter. The Prince of Wales called the Greek Royal Family to inform them of his absence. King Charles did not attend either, as Queen Camilla led the members of the Royal Family at the Windsor Castle service. Meanwhile, Kensington Palace has given an update on Kate's health, writing, the Princess of Wales, who was recovering from abdominal surgery, continues to do well.

JAYME POISSON: What do you think that unleashes? It seemed to me like this really kind of opened up a bit of a floodgate.

ELLIE HALL: Oh yeah. So this was on February 27th, and this is when I looked at my Twitter feed, or X feed as it is now, and just went, oh man, oh man, this is going to get a whole lot worse now, because there have been rumours bubbling under the surface, in part because of some foreign media reports, and also just people who follow the Royal Family were picking up on some of these discrepancies. But when at the very last minute, William, who was supposed to give a reading, his name was in the program for the memorial service to give a reading, all of a sudden drops out, the first thought on everybody's mind was, oh my God, something's happened to Kate. What's wrong with Kate? Is Kate back in the hospital? Is she in serious condition? And the palace would rather tell reporters, give them some background information than go on the record and say specifically, oh no, this is what William was doing. They made it known that it had nothing to do with Kate. Nobody believed them. This was the jumping off point. This is where the memes started. This is where chaos ensued because no one trusted the press office, and everyone thought that William, whatever it was, it had to do with his wife.

JAYME POISSON: You know, there are so many things that kind of thicken the plot here. But one of the things is that there is this host of a Spanish television show who is this self-proclaimed royal watcher, right? And she is reporting on Kate's health, and she's challenging Kensington Palace’s narrative about her health, right? And what has she been saying? And how does Kensington Palace respond to those claims?

ELLIE HALL: So we've talked about the press offices. One of the things that is sort of just a way that the royal press offices operate is they do not like to go on the record. It is far easier to get someone on to give you information either on background so you can't cite it. That's why in royal stories, you'll see language like this reporter understands, or this news outlet can confirm. That's important to keep in mind, because there's this Spanish journalist named Concha Calleja, who soon after the first announcement is made that Kate has had surgery, she goes on to her show, one of the biggest shows in Spain, and says that the palace is lying, that Kate actually was first hospitalized in December and she is not in good condition right now. She's been hospitalized on and off since December 28th and the palace is lying. She straight up says that. Then the day before an announcement is made that Kate has left the hospital and gone home, this same journalist says, oh no, actually, Kate's in a coma and she's still in the hospital. Don't believe whatever the palace is telling you.

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ANCHOR: So-called royal expert, Concha Calleja, sensationally revealed that doctors had to act quickly in saving Kate's life and took drastic actions, including intubating her.

ELLIE HALL: Then Kensington Palace throws gasoline on this fire of this calm room because they go on the record with the Times saying that this coma claim is total nonsense.

JAYME POISSON: Right.

ELLIE HALL: Yeah. Normally, Palace Press offices don't address specific claims. You know, it's the Streisand effect. If you talk about something, you're going to attract more people to that idea just to see what it is you're saying didn't happen.

JAYME POISSON: Right. And now the idea is in the UK Times.

ELLIE HALL: 100%. So now, people start really paying attention to it. People start, you know, keeping an eye on this journalist. And something that is also out of the ordinary, normally, when a big institution, particularly the Palace, goes on the record and says, no, this isn't true, most of the time, the reporter or the news outlet that, you know, makes these claims, they all kind of pull back because, you know, I don't know if I have the credibility to back this up under such scrutiny. Not this Spanish reporter. She says that she touched a nerve with the palace very next day on her show and says, I trust my source. I stand by this 100%. They're lying. Kate is in a coma.

JAYME POISSON: All right. So that I think takes us to March 4th. And Kate has not been seen in public since December 25^th. We’re at day 70. And that's when we get this grainy photo from TMZ, the celebrity site in the US, that the Palace says is Kate with her mother, Carole Middleton, in a car. And what is the reaction to this photo?

ELLIE HALL: So just when you think things couldn't get worse and things couldn't get weirder in terms of worse from the Palace PR point of view, this image comes out. Immediately, people start cross-examining every little detail of this picture.

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REPORTER: Who is this? Really? Kate Middleton, Pipa or a body double?

[cameras clicking]

ELLIE HALL: And to be fair, the Kate in the passenger seat doesn't look like a Kate that we've seen very often. Her face is a little full, she's wearing sunglasses, and people immediately start saying, oh, that's not Kate. That's not Kate. That has to be her sister, Pipa, or this is a body double or this is a wax figure. We do not recognize this person as Kate. This is not a good, you know, proof of life photo. And the palace immediately puts pressure on the UK media to not run the photo. And the palace makes it known that this was an unauthorized image. And as many people point out, that sort of begs the question, are these other paparazzi images that have been released of the Royal family in the past that have been published in the UK, were those authorized? And a lot of people think that the Palace might have set this up as a proof of life photo for Kate, but Palace completely denies it, says this was unauthorized. This was a random paparazzi. But again, everyone starts speculating, okay, well, but who told the paparazzi that they were going to be there? Who put them in that location? The information that the palace gave to media organizations about how this photo of Kate was taken, they said that she and her mother had just dropped the children off at school. A few days later, this report comes out that Prince William has taken the children to and from school every single day since Kate's had her surgery. So all of these, all of these differing warring stories being given to the press, all of these different theories floating about it, it's been fun.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah. The details that people have dug into here, it's quite something.

JAYME POISSON: Okay. So you mentioned just when things couldn't get worse, we see the grainy car paparazzi photo, and then things actually do get even worse than that, it seems. On Sunday, Kensington Palace releases a photo. I think it was on Instagram, right?

ELLIE HALL: Instagram and Twitter.

JAYME POISSON: Okay.

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ANCHOR: A family photo from Mother's Day that is hoped will calm some of the more extreme gossip about the princess's recovery. An informal image with her three children in Windsor. Her husband, the Prince of Wales, was behind the lens.

JAYME POISSON: And I'm wondering, just describe the photo for me.

ELLIE HALL: So it's an adorable photo. And my very first thought when I saw this was there's absolutely no way that, as they say, Prince William took this.

JAYME POISSON: Why? Sorry. Why? Why do you think that he couldn't take that?

ELLIE HALL: It's perfectly set up. I don't know, maybe I'm a little too harsh on him. Normally, the photos we get of the Royal Family, or specifically of the Wales family, are either taken by Kate because she, as will come up later, she's a pretty keen amateur photographer, is what the press always says when they refer to her hobby. But it's Kate sitting. She's got her two younger children, Charlotte and Louis, right by the arms of her chair. And her oldest son, the future King George, is leaning over her with his arms around her neck. Everybody is giving a big toothy grin. Kate looks healthy. Her face does not look puffy the way it looked in that grainy paparazzi image. She looks like the Kate we're used to seeing, and does not look like someone recovering from surgery, you might say. Many women immediately pointed out that she's wearing skinny jeans. You know, I don't know. If I had had abdominal surgery, perhaps I wouldn't wear skinny jeans, but that's not my call. That's her. Maybe they're very comfortable for her. And it looks like business as normal when you look at it at first. And then you look a little closer, there are pretty visible signs of editing in this image when you zoom in.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah, it's like Charlotte's calf on her sleeve, right? And I think it was Prince Louis’s fingers people are starting to point out.

ELLIE HALL: Yeah, the pattern of his sweater. If you look at Louis’s sweater, it's all lined up. And then all of a sudden, it's no longer in line going from his chest to his arm, blurry around Charlotte's hair. I think the Daily Mail found 16 weird things. There's a lot there.

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FIRST ANCHOR: Now, if Kensington Palace wanted a picture to paint a thousand words, instead, it's posed a thousand questions.

SECOND ANCHOR: Kate’s zipper and hair were misaligned. Charlotte's hair had an artificial pattern, and a portion of Charlotte's sleeve is missing.

THIRD ANCHOR: The corner of her skirt is oddly pointed. In the background behind Prince Louis’s legs, the white step is a clear break and a jagged gap where there should be a straight line, and the list goes on and on.

JAYME POISSON: This tips from just people on the internet talking about it to newswire services like the Associated Press issuing a kill order. So basically, they were saying that the photos should be withheld and withdrawn from publication because the photo has been manipulated.

ELLIE HALL: This was big.

JAYME POISSON: It's a rare thing to do.

ELLIE HALL: Yeah.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah, especially for a photo issued by Kensington Palace.

ELLIE HALL: Oh, 100%. You know, and there's an argument to be made here that this is, you know, a symptom of a broader issue.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah.

ELLIE HALL: The Royal Family, they give out these photos to the press. We refer to them as handout photos. It's part of the deal that was made, you know, after everything that went down with Princess Diana. The press leaves the kids alone. William and Kate will take photos of their kids. Normally, the press just takes this image and publishes it.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah. And I'll just say for our listeners, like the AP, for example, has rules around this. Like they cannot run pictures that have been edited or manipulated in any way, any pictures. And so just talk to me a bit about what happens next. There's kind of this vacuum. There's no response from Kensington Palace. And then there's a statement that gets posted from, well, they say it's from Catherine, and she's saying she's the one that edited the photo.

ELLIE HALL: Things just keep getting crazy. You think they can't and then they do. So we're at the stage now, late Sunday, early Monday, where all of the world's major wire agencies have pulled the photo from distribution. Every single one has looked at it and said, there's too much editing going on here. This image has been manipulated beyond what we're comfortable with. Everyone goes to Kensington Palace, like you said, begging, begging for answers. Absolutely no comment until a tweet goes up on Monday, ostensibly from Kate, saying, like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.

JAYME POISSON: I think people will already know, or at least could guess from the trajectory of this conversation, that that only really again adds flames to the fire that is just wild speculation that we're going to get into in a minute. But Ellie, here's my question. If there was just some small edits on this photo, why not just release the original photo?

ELLIE HALL: That is the question. That's the question everyone is asking, because you would think it would be easy to clear up. One theory that I've seen around quite a lot is that this might be a mash up, a compilation of lots of different images to get the best expression from the kids, the best smile. So people have been saying, okay, it won't be a perfect picture, but why don't you just give us the best version? The palace will not. The palace has made it quite clear they are not going to do that. That in itself has raised a whole bunch of questions. Also, the fact that this photo was ostensibly taken by Prince William. Why are you throwing Kate under the bus?

JAYME POISSON: There are also theories, right, that it wasn't even a photo taken recently, that maybe it was her face used from a Vogue cover shoot, or maybe these photos have been taken in November. All sorts of people with all sorts of thoughts right now on what happened to that photo, right?

ELLIE HALL: It's out of control. I will say this.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah, it is. It's out of control. I think that is.

ELLIE HALL: The Vogue one has been pretty disproved by the good folks at Bellingcat, who if you're not following Reporter World, they're great. Like if you need something fact checked or debunked, you go to Bellingcat.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah.

ELLIE HALL: They are the experts.

JAYME POISSON: Although, they usually do spend most of their time on like Russian attempts to poison dissidents. So leaning into royal matters, it's like really wild.

JAYME POISSON: Let's move on to, really, a plethora of theories that have been percolating online about the whereabouts of Kate. Before we do that, I just… I do want to say and take a pause here that on the internet, there are a lot of people taking sort of delight in these series, which is something that I want to ask you about specifically in a moment. But it is very possible here that something very sad is happening, that the princess is actually recovering from a very difficult surgery or something else very painful is going on, right?

ELLIE HALL: Oh yeah. I mean, abdominal surgery is supposedly one of the hardest to recover from. I'm not seeing online, we demand to know what's wrong with her. We demand to know her health status. We demand to know when exactly her first day back at work will be. Most of the feeling, and yes, there are the jokes, there are the memes, but a lot of people are really feeling if they're telling the truth about this and Kate is well and Kate's on the mend, why did these weird things keep happening? Are they trying to cover something up? Why are we seeing this photoshopped image? And then yesterday, we haven't touched on this yet, but Kate was photographed, but in another paparazzi style image, riding in a car with her husband, William. And hey, this image, there is no problem with it being released to everybody. The UK press, the American press, that image went out very quickly.

JAYME POISSON: Right.

ELLIE HALL: You can't see Kate's face. You just see her profile.

JAYME POISSON: It’s just the back of her head. Yeah. And in this information vacuum, there have been a lot of theories flying around. And just give me a sense of where people have been taking this.

ELLIE HALL: It's getting weirder and weirder by the day. You have a lot of people who are going off the Spanish journalist’s theory about Kate actually being in a coma. The day of the memorial service, news came out that a member of the extended Royal Family was dead. It later emerged that he had died by suicide, which is very sad, and I know the Royal Family is grieving for this. Some people have connected that to all of this. We have people who are raising speculations about the state of William and Kate's marriage. Is this all supposed to be some sort of soft launch for a separation? Why did the photo of Kate on Mother's Day not show her wearing her rings? Was that something significant? Things are getting kind of dark in some spaces of the internet, and more and more people are wondering if Kate is okay. And you look at the history of women who've married into the Royal Family, it doesn't always go that well for them.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah, lots of those. And then there's lots of jokes as well, though, right? Like I see people…

ELLIE HALL: Yes. And some of them are funny.

JAYME POISSON: And I see people talk about how, you know, she went to go get like a Brazilian butt lift or, you know, lots of jokes like that.

ELLIE HALL: Lots of bangs.

JAYME POISSON: Or she's growing her bangs out. Yeah.

ELLIE HALL: Yeah, she's growing her bangs out.

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FIRST UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Say what you will about getting your news from Twitter, but where else am I supposed to learn that Kate Middleton hasn't been seen for months because she is recovering from a BBL and growing out some bangs whilst working at the Willy Wonka Experience in Scotland?

SECOND UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: At least the Royal Family is being clear in saying Kate Middleton didn't get a BBL, she doesn't have bad bangs and we're waiting for them to grow out, didn’t get plastic surgery. At least they made it clear on that.

JAYME POISSON: You know, I think probably at minimum, to come out of this whole affair will be a fascinating case study and PR that will be studied for years to come. But I do want to end this conversation sort of talking about the delight that many people are taking in this in a way, right, and joking about it. And I wonder if it's something that the Palace PR machine truly understands, because I think this is actually a very good example of what we're seeing in all sorts of places right now that people, especially people who are online a lot, they find this disinformation a real form of entertainment.

ELLIE HALL: Oh yeah.

JAYME POISSON: And what do you think about that?

ELLIE HALL: I mean, I think that's completely true. As much of an issue as misinformation is, there's something innately human and that speaks to the storyteller within all of us that really, really loves an information vacuum. Yes, these are real people. But given the level to which they're covered by the press, it can get easy to forget that. And you can really sort of just dive into their public personas and make up jokes, make up theories based on that. And I've seen a lot of people say that, you know, this entire saga has made parts of social media interesting and fun again because everyone is following it. You have this genuine sense of worry for Kate, and then you have the wow, isn't it sort of nice to have this big public scandal, this big information void that we can theorize about all day long and make jokes about? And I think that what we're seeing there is one reaction that centres the humanity of the Royal Family and another one that doesn't. And that's been really interesting to see those dynamics play out online.

JAYME POISSON: All right, Ellie, thank you so much for coming on and doing this with us. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

ELLIE HALL: Thank you for having me.

JAYME POISSON: All right, that is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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Royal mystery: What's going on with Kate Middleton? - Transcript

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