"What are we going to do now?"
The Harry-Meghan South Park and Media Dilemma
Everything we have heard about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leaving the Royal family comes down to them feeling the Institution/Buckingham Palace didn’t push back enough against “lies” by the “British Press”, Daily Mail commenters and profiles on Twitter. To hear them tell it, the scorn they received was an exclusively British media problem.
A key part of the Sussexes narrative is they had to leave Britain for the safety of America due to the U.K's “hostile” media, yet that narrative of British tabloid exceptionalism is conditional on the America media treating them better. Since the Oprah interview, a different story has slowly emerged of a growing willingness to mock or criticize them, within a wider cross section of American society.
Three years after the fact?
Hollywood Bible Variety is saying in regards to Their Truth: “Given that they’ve beaten this horse to death, perhaps this one-trick pony is due for the glue factory.”
The Atlantic, a left-leaning publication, when reviewing their show said “I can’t help but suspect that, deep down, they know they will never have as good an opportunity to monetize their fame again, and so litigating their beefs with the Windsors and the press in spectacular fashion is their equivalent of a 401(k).”
Newsweek, a not conservative news magazine makes the great point that his book was a boon to the tabloids. They are now able to his musings to dig and investigate and publish stories about him they normally wouldn’t have been able to. The book Prince Harry was handsomely paid for opened the door and confirmed things that were suspected. They also call him out for blaming the British Press for his Las Vegas photos.
Late Night Talk Show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel are mocking the hell out of him including this kinda offensive bedtime story called “The Prince and the Penis”. Seth Meyers just wants him to shut up.
Radar Online had two psychologists come out and diagnose him as suffering from “paranoid delusion” and “not in his right mind” (Can we pause for a millisecond. If these narratives were copied in British tabloids like the Daily Mail, armchair psychologists diagnosing the fifth in line to the throne as paranoid and delusional, what do we believe the landscape would look like? It’s unheard of.)
Now, South Park, a very popular show lampooned them mercilessly last week based on their own decision to release a critically panned docuseries and “Waaaugh”, Prince Harry’s book against his family.
So where do they go from here? Do you think they are having second thoughts about the choices they’ve made now that that his estranged family and aides in Buckingham Palace can’t as easily be blamed for this long spate of bad press?
-L.S.