Everyone edits photos for their own use. Editing photos intended to be released to the news is strictly forbidden.
Feels like a Streisand Effect going on. Let’s say she had a hysterectomy. If there was a brief announcement when she got the surgery there would be a brief flurry of reporting. No annoucement means months of speculation. Eventually the story will get out anyway.
It seems pretty compelling to me, unless he actually subtly edited the background to match the cover pic. But he’s not the only one to point that out
Absolutely this is the Streisand Effect on crack. The whole thing was of no interest to me, but then that Photoshop job and the utterly preposterous excuse have me fascinated. Apparently I am not alone in this.
My response on Twitter was “Well, congratulations to Richard III. Who was just promoted to SECOND worst attempt to cover up nefarious goings on with the Prince of Wales’ family”
And to Michael Scott, who was just promoted to second-worst…well, read the caption:
Exactly
I don’t really care about Kate and William, but it was really stupid to release an edited photo. If they wanted to publish a proof of life image, there are a bunch of good ways to do that. If they wanted privacy, they shouldn’t have released anything at all.
I’ve read some stuff about the British tabloids. I don’t think Americans understood just how toxic they are. They pound away at their targets every single day, and will use lies if they can’t get any facts. Just like Fox News, you might say. Rupert Murdoch bought up the papers decades ago and pioneered his techniques there. He didn’t get worse with Fox, but toned it way down.
I don’t care about the royals but what Murdoch created was massive institutional bullying on a scale unimagined in modern society. This is the result when you decide that people are bugs to be publicly dissected.
Nobody should ever marry a royal again. Seriously. The tabloids will break you.
Tubal ligation is an outpatient procedure most of the time, and hysterectomies can be too, depending on how and why they’re performed.
As for her having more children, I was shocked to hear she was pregnant with Charlotte, and even more that she was expecting Louis, because she had that most feared of pregnancy complications, hyperemesis gravidarum, ALL THREE TIMES. IMNSHO, she’d be NUTS to want another child!
I went down a rabbit holt recently and looked up pelvic exenterations, and sacrectomies (warning: do not Google these procedures if you are squeamish) and while I’d heard of them, I’ve never known of anyone who had one and any hospital I worked at certainly didn’t perform them either, but today, it occurred to me that her operation might well have been this drastic, even though the Palace denied that she had cancer. I guess those could be performed for benign conditions, but I couldn’t imagine it.
Maybe the rules are different today but in the past editing a photo for publication was strictly forbidden.
I recall a photo of a marathon runner who had collapsed just before the finish line and was in anguish. She had an EMT next to her who had a walkie-talkie in her hand. As it happened the angle the photo was taken at made it look like the antenna was jutting out of the woman’s chin. So, they erased the antenna. Seemed innocent enough but it became a big deal. Where is the line drawn? The consensus seemed to be just don’t edit the photo for publication (if it is news…if it is advertising then do whatever).
We’re just shooting fireflies. It seems it’s not known so speculation is a futile effort.
I don’t care what it was.
If I was British and cared for the Royal family I’d be worried for the length of time she was hospitalized and has been off her Royal duties(job?) and her personal health. Because I care about people.
It’s all for naught. My thoughts don’t matter.
I think the Photoshop pic was not a good idea. Who ever it came from. I have a feeling some palace (official?)person decided it was okay to do it to stop talk and the press barrage.
I listened to Harry’s book while walking, and while parts of its were dull, and I got tired of him talking about freezing his wanker, what I was really interested in was the symbiotic relationship between the tabloids and the royal family. I had no idea how closely they worked with each other. I found it disturbing.
Exactly right. The modern British gossip publishers are genuinely evil on an industrial scale. They routinely break the law in their ruthless hunt for new fragments of rumor to inflate and people to destroy. It’s a horrifying collection of some of the nastiest people on the planet, cheerfully feeding the endlessly hungry maw of a truly awful public demographic, and they have the collusion of some equally nasty co-conspirators inside the palace system.
To the very limited extent I care about this (or any) celebrity scandal, it’s to recognize the abject stupidity in being caught trying to manipulate an image to support a cover story, because that’s going to energize the British tabloid horde like giving an addict a wheelbarrow-load of fully loaded meth pipes.
Wow, with all the bruhaha about this, I thought maybe she switched her children’s faces around or something equally weird. Instead, she made some changes I’d probably never pick up on.
(I just assumed that most photographs in news pubs were edited in some form or other.)
It’s complicated.
There is a ‘Sovereign Grant’ which comes from the UK Treasury (so could be argued to be tax funded), which amounts to something like 40 million pounds, which sounds like a lot (it would be a lot if it landed in my account), but that equates to about £1.50 (a little over a dollar) per taxpayer per year. Or in other words, I spent more on a bar of chocolate yesterday than I paid to directly fund the Royal Family’s disposable income this whole year.
There are a lot of less-quantifiable and less-direct costs though - Treasury grants for the upkeep of palaces and such, but I believe the majority of the income of the Royal Family comes from profit on land and properties in the Crown Estate (leases and rental income, etc) - the Crown Estate owns about half of the seashore around England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and most of the seabed out to 12 nautical miles offshore, so any company wanting to put up an offshore wind farm, for example, has to lease the seabed from the Crown Estate. There’s a lot of that sort of thing, onshore as well as marine.
(This might sound weird and overbearing, but for example Crown ownership of the intertidal zone of most beaches actually means that they are available for unrestricted public access - in general, you can walk on most accessible beaches in the UK and nobody gets to yell ‘git orff my laaaand!’ at you).
Well, it’s 25% of the income from the Crown Estates (managed by trustees reporting to Parliament) - the other 75% of the income goes to the Treasury, i e., the same pot as our taxes. There is other income from the mediaeval estates of the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall.
It could be argued that that’s all capital and income that should all be accounted as government(taxpayers’) property, but the only way our taxes paid contribute to the monarchy and family is in the opportunity costs for government and public services of special arrangements for royal events and any special tax concessions.
Disentangling how what’s counted as their private wealth may historically have derived from what is now counted as Crown Estates is beyond me, but that’s pretty substantial in its own right.
AFAIK, the palaces, art collections and treasures are managed by trustees.
I’m not sure the distinction is so clear. If you are going to remain in, or marry into, the British line of succession, there is an arguable view that you are claiming such a special and privileged entitlement that there is at least some extent to which you are making your personal life an objectively relevant topic for public discussion.
The reproductive actions of the heirs to the British throne actually affect which person has reserve powers over the government of the UK – amazing as that may seem in what is supposedly a modern democratic society.
Having said that, of course 99.9999% of the interest in the UK’s royal family is just the usual prurient interest that sticky beaks have in other people’s affairs. But I don’t think the point is quite so clear as you state.
I am in the camp that this is much ado about nothing. The Princess of Wales had surgery. She chose not to disclose all the details. She needs time to recover and be in her family. All this is enough fodder for conspiracy theorists, who don’t know her, to read into it all manner of details. I would just respect her privacy, and not worry about photoshopped pictures - as said above, it happens all the time (I remember when digital cameras were a new thing. At the wedding of the Wessexes, the family group photo that was chosen from the proofs had Prince William show a grin that was judged unsightly, so they photoshopped his head onto it from another one of the proofs, and it was out in the open. The details mentioned above seem minor in comparison. Everyone edits photos. Well, not me, because I don’t really showcase mine.)
I think its quite possible that she looks like shit right now, and can’t have an ugly picture released, opening herself up to truly malicious mockery. Illness can ravage your features: it can make a person look haggard or bloated. Can you imagine getting really sick and seeing “Kate the Cow’ or 'Kate the Crone” headlines? I bet she can.