Royal thoughts of the week (1)

The way magazines and newspapers report about royal families online, especially in the United Kingdom, gets more and more irritating. Royalty seems to be a kind of theme everybody has an opinion about, yet it isn’t exactly easy to actually understand royal families and monarchies. One has the royal correspondents, royal journalists, royal photographers and royalty watchers, people that actually know quite a bit about the theme. And then you have the people that are not at all interested, and in between a group of people that finds the world of monarchies fascinating, but mainly because of one person or one specific reason, for example because they prefer a republic. And it also includes a whole lot of media without royal knowledge, that just write about royalty to attract readers and create lots of fuzz online for nothing.

In general I have nothing against people having different opinions, but nowadays they often seem to be based on a huge amount of online articles, that aren’t exactly accurate. Now the coronation of King Charles III of the United Kingdom is nearing – three months – there is a lot of speculating about how it will be organized, who will and who won’t attend, etc. It leads to numerous articles online with the words “could” or “might” etc. in the headlines. Some are good and serious, most of them are just clickbaits, just meant it seems to attract visitors or irritate people. When writing a reaction under such an article by the British newspaper Daily Mirror on Twitter, I received lots of likes. It seems I am certainly not the only one not appreciating such kind of articles.

Pen writing
© Hudsoncrafted / Pixabay

I was also involved in a Twitter discussion last week about the Duchess of Sussex and was accused of xenophobia – hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign – and probably a few more phobias and isms. I deleted my original tweets, that I myself thought were rather general, as it turned out they attracted a few reactions that I didn’t appreciate. Because it was about Meghan, it was apparently already a phobia or ism. It is easy to attack someone because of a few sentences of text on social media, without actually knowing the person or completely understand what someone writes, as I mainly write for other royalty watchers. Furthermore Twitter isn’t exactly the place for a good discussion.

When saying that “we were all willing to give her a chance”, I didn’t mean to express hatred. I think many people were happy to see Prince Harry and Meghan being happy with each other. I just wanted to say that lots of people were sceptic whether a divorced American actress – that she was of mixed-race to me wasn’t an issue at all – would fit into the British royal family, as she wasn’t the standard choice for a royal. But nor were people like Queen Letizia of Spain (divorced journalist), Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway (single mother) or Princess Sofia of Sweden (former reality show star), and they all did excellent, despite of all the concerns in the beginning.

It turns out now Meghan at least didn’t really fit in, and I already wrote about that in the past. There are millions of reasons why that could be the case, and certainly mistakes have been made, not only by the couple, but also by the court, the royal family, the media. Just think about all these unwanted articles I mentioned above. A lot of people however turn out to have very strong opinions about what exactly happened, even when we can’t know for sure. We only heard the story the couple told themselves, and occasionally a reaction from the media, nothing about the other side of the story. What I am quite certain about, is that the British monarchy urgently needs modernization, without leaking stories to the media. But that is something I already said ages ago, long before Meghan even appeared on stage. I just find it a pity that it nowadays is clearly impossible to express your opinion about the theme on social media without being attacked by one side or another.

2 thoughts on “Royal thoughts of the week (1)

  1. With social media saturation, “listening skills” are rarely in evidence. To me, it is mostly a mob of talking people who are all trying to be the loudest.

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