How the Kate photo saga ballooned into a crisis

Kensington Palace isn’t just the home of the Prince and Princess of Wales. It is a carefully managed brand under the parent company of the British Monarchy, which has a millennium of practice spinning a good yarn.

Kensington Palace isn’t just the home of the Prince and Princess of Wales. It is a carefully managed brand under the parent company of the British Monarchy, which has a millennium of practice spinning a good yarn. That’s partly why so many people find the palace’s PR strategy around the Case of the Missing Princess hard to comprehend. See here: Public speculation over Kate’s whereabouts and health has ballooned into a social media frenzy of conspiracy theories and memes. Kensington Palace’s attempts to quell that speculation have only made it worse at times – particularly, after it released a Mother’s Day image on March 10 (the Brits do Mother’s Day early), showing the princess and her three children in a photo they say was taken by Prince William that same week. This was supposed to be the photo that put the growing rumors to bed — definitive proof that all is well in the House of Windsor. Instead, it turned everyone with an internet connection into an armchair Photoshop expert and badly damaged the palace’s credibility. Just hours after it was released, major photo agencies issued “kill notices,” after finding that the image had been manipulated by the source. The princess later acknowledged that she had edited some parts of the photo, “like many amateur photographers” do from time to time.