This Week in Gossip #18

Kate Middleton vs. the Associated Press, Chris Evans and Alba Baptista vs. the stans, and Jonathan Glazer versus Zionist losers…

Apologies for the lack of new Gossip Reading Club this weekend. The post-Oscars slump hit me hard! The Academy Awards took up all of our cultural attention, so I won’t get into that here (although you can read my Pajiba summary of the big night!) And then there’s that other story that everyone got obsessed over…

1. Okay, The Kate Middleton Conspiracies Just Got Weirder and Even the Associated Press Can’t Take It

Typical. You spend all week trying to quash the fevered and often hurtful conspiracies surrounding what feels like a relatively mundane situation and failure of PR, only for the people involved to lose their damn minds and make things worse. Come on, monarchy, aren’t you supposed to know what you’re doing?

Over the weekend, Kensington Palace released an image of Kate Middleton with her three kids, all smiling and happy and carefree in a way that was designed to get all the tinhatters to shut up. Of course, the problem with trying to negotiate with conspiracists is that you’ll always lose because every single thing you try to throw at them will be used as “evidence” to their cause. So, with that in mind, you’d think the palace would want to be super careful about the atmosphere and do all that they could to keep things calm. Nope. Not even close!

That image was refused by the Associated Press, who killed the story and advised clients that 'it appears that the source has manipulated the image.' Photoshop isn't uncommon in these circumstances, but this image was so poorly touched up that the AP basically rejected it and are refusing to use it for stories. Even non-experts can look at the photo and see the flaws. Part of Charlotte's sleeve is missing. Louis' hand looks uncomfortably twisted. George seems to have an extra row of teeth? If you’d told me that generative AI had helped in the production of this photo, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.

My theory was that the Palace photoshopped together a couple of images but, either because of a time crunch or lack of care, left these glaring errors. That was kind of confirmed when the Palace’s official Twitter account had Kate (sure) apologize for the image by saying she was, like many amateur photographers, playing around with editing and got a bit carried away. The Associated Press is a major news agency, one of the world's most trusted, and they have strict editorial rules for images like this. For them to reject the Wales clan mash-up cannot help but be a huge slap in the face for the Palace. And now even pro-royal publications like The Daily Telegraph had to run with front page news calling out the doctored photo.

What a mess. All they had to do was release a statement or two at the beginning of this to say that Kate was recuperating in private and happy to receive everyone’s well wishes. Now, the whole ship is sinking. And, again, at the heart of it is someone’s medical privacy, which deserves more than to be turned into a weird creepy theory about BBLs or facelifts or whatever. Some of the jokes have been very funny but watching a ton of supposedly sensible people slip into tinhatting is exhausting. Abolish the monarchy so we won’t have to deal with this jackassery any longer.