I think we are living in a century of poor journalism, when newspaper editors and journalists tap into public opinion and manipulate opinion by feeding us stories about our favourite “heroes” and “villains”
Fairy stories rely on black & white heroes and villains - the main characters are either all good or all bad.
It’s rare that real life people are like that, so most of the newspaper outlets which report gossip about the Royal Family as “news” will go out of their way to find or create stories which portray their current “villain” in a bad light and, just for good measure, they try to minimise any news about any good thing they have done by reporting it in a way which uses negative or mocking language and by including reminders of all the bad things about them which they have previously reported on.
I have seen the press do this to different members of the royal family at different times - it’s like an infectious disease, once one media outlet starts doing it, the others follow suit - and the more outraged the public get, the more they share the stories with other folk, so the journalists look for bad stories to report to keep them fired up.
I have seen newspaper journalists and press photographers who are now retired being interviewed in documentaries and openly admitting their editors used to tell them to go out and “find stories” which makes X looks bad or puts “Y” in a favourable light. Some have also admitted that the stories weren’t always true or that their source wasn’t very reliable - but if you are not naming names and keep the source and narrative vague enough, without the kind of facts which can be checked, how can anyone check if it’s true.
And, of course, now they have social media to help them. Having fired up the crowd with “palace backstairs gossip” from “un-named sources”, the newspapers can now pick up any comments from Twitter and report them as “News”, even though they have never been fact-checked and they are often just an opinion of someone who knows no more about the truth of the situation than the general public does.
Then, when another member of the RF blots their copy book and the press decide it may be more lucrative to hound them instead, they shift focus - if it suits their purpose, they can even turn yesterday’s “villain” into today’s “hero” or vice-versa.
I remember one retired press guy saying that his editor had instructed him to go for stories to make Princess Anne look bad, then after a long time of doing this, the Editor called him in and told him he’d decided it was time to give her a break and could the journalist now look for stories to put her in a favourable light - so much for unbiased reporting of “News”!
That is why I discount the gossip in the newspapers when they use headlines like
“**X is furious about Y”
then in smaller text, “a source said”
I am suspicious and cautious when the Press use phrases like
“it has been reported”
“it has been claimed”
“an unnamed source has told us”
I take all this stuff with a pinch of salt and only believe the bits that can be factually verified or are backed up by a named source who is in a position to verify it.
