Royal family, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle need media to survive?

Royal family, including working and non-working royals, needs the media to survive and maintain their popularity among their people, according to experts.

A well-known historian Sir Anthony Seldon in Reporting Royalty, states: "There will always be a media. There might not always be a monarchy."

Some other experts have also shared their thoughts and opinions, on the fraught relationship between the royal family and the Fourth Estate, suggesting that the royal family needs the media the most.

Sir Anthony believes that it is the female royals who are well aware of how the media works, and none more so than Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales. 

He claims: "Kate plays the media to perfection,” he says. “Unlike Diana. There’s total poise and command, no victimhood. There’s something very knowing about her."

He argues that "Camilla too gets it, far more than Charles. She’s savvy, predictable, and not needy. As Charles ages, she’ll become increasingly dominant, a master craftsman sculpting and defining the Carolean Age."

Sir Trevor Phillips, a broadcaster, is unimpressed and says the press has been utterly self-serving in rehabilitating her.

Phillip writes: "The transformation of Queen Camilla from ‘most hated woman in England’ to a book-loving, doughty campaigner for women’s rights carries a whiff of media hypocrisy."

"The woman herself has barely changed, but our fickleness is on full display now that editors know that she’ll be there for the long haul."

The newly crowned King also needs media support. The 74-year-old was buoyed by saturation coverage of his coronation but he has been a central character in his family’s descent into media soap opera over the past 40 years.

A pivotal moment in the fracturing of Palace-press relations came with the 1985 decision to grant ITN exclusive access to Charles and Diana for a year, according to a former BBC court correspondent Michael Cole.

The  arrangement reportedly undermined the royal rota system designed by Buckingham Palace to ensure even-handed treatment of the media.

The rota was an example of the late Queen’s media savvy in not handing out royal scoops. “She knew that it would, firstly, annoy those not granted the exclusive, and, secondly, create aggressive competition for exclusives,” writes Cole.

It was fought in the newspapers with planted stories. "The PR war between Charles and Diana was in full flow and as far as tabloid editors were concerned it was open season,” according to former royal correspondent for The Sun, Charles Rae.

A “new breed” of royal press officers decided that "no comment was no longer going to cut it", he says.

"The time for the monarchy to worry would be when the media were no longer interested. That would mean the show was over." Kate and Camilla have work to do, according to the experts.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who stepped down as senior working royals and relocated in the US in 2020 to live a life of their choice, also attracted media with their stunts and controversial moves.