Royal Engagement Diary: When the Absence of Incident Is the Incident and the Press Still Needs to Fill the Page
By Isla Campbell | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Prince William attended a charity reception at a London museum and shook hands with approximately forty people and said several things that were captured in pool photographs and described in press accounts with a level of analytical attention that the content of the event did not independently justify. He wore a suit. The suit was blue. He appeared to be in good health. He spoke to the charity’s chief executive and to several of its beneficiaries and to a young person who had benefited from the charity’s programmes and who he is described as having spoken to ‘at length’ and ‘with visible warmth,’ which are phrases that convey a positive impression of the interaction without being specific enough to be contested.
The question of why this received the coverage it received is more interesting than the event itself, which is the nature of much royal coverage and is the structural reality that royal correspondents navigate daily. The event itself is unexceptionable. The coverage is extensive. The gap between the event and its coverage is explained by the intersection of several factors: the public interest in the monarchy as an institution, the demand for content about specific royal individuals that the reader appetite creates, the professional obligation of correspondents to produce copy from whatever events are available, and the specific way that the absence of incident is itself news when the subject of the reporting is someone whose incidents have generated significant coverage in previous periods.
The Pool Coverage Model
Royal events are typically covered by pool photographers and correspondents who are granted access in exchange for sharing their content with all accredited media, which produces the situation in which dozens of publications run essentially the same three photographs and essentially the same two hundred words of copy from the royal correspondent with the access. The homogenisation of royal coverage is a function of the pool system, which the Royal Household prefers because it allows controlled access while maintaining the appearance of openness, and which the press corps accepts because the alternative is no access at all. The result is coverage that is comprehensive in its reach and uniform in its content, which is a specific kind of information environment that readers experience as thorough coverage of an institution that is actually providing managed access to selected moments.
This is not a conspiracy. It is an institutional communications arrangement that both parties find acceptable for different reasons. The Royal Household gets managed access coverage. The press gets reliable content. The reader gets the impression of full coverage. According to the Royal Household, all media arrangements comply with best practice. According to Private Eye, which has covered the Royal Household with forensic scepticism since 1961, the best practice in question is the practice that suits the Household. Both assessments are accurate. The blue suit was an excellent choice for the occasion. The coverage of the blue suit was extensive. The world continues without fundamental alteration in either direction.
Further analysis at Private Eye.
The Normal Thing and Its Coverage
Isla Campbell, Royal Correspondent, presents the following observation about the coverage of Prince William doing something completely ordinary: the coverage is disproportionate, the public appetite for it is genuine, and the gap between the two is the specific media phenomenon that the Royal Family has been navigating since photography was invented. When a member of the Royal Family buys a coffee, collects a child from school, or attends a normal event that any private citizen would attend without anyone writing about it, the coverage is produced by the gap between the expectation of royal behaviour and the evidence of ordinary human behaviour. The gap is always interesting. It is not always news. The distinction between interesting and newsworthy has been a challenge for royal correspondents since at least the 1950s and remains unresolved. The coverage continues. Prince William has collected the children from school multiple times. Each collection is covered. Each collection is ordinary. The ordinariness is the story. The London Prat covers the ordinariness with appropriate proportion. Bohiney Magazine has considered whether “Prince Does Normal Thing” is satire or journalism and concluded it is both.
The Normal Thing coverage also reveals something about the relationship between the Royal Family and the British public that is genuinely interesting from a constitutional perspective: the public interest in royal normality is simultaneously an expression of affection (we want them to be like us) and a monitoring function (we are checking that they are like us). The affection is warm and real. The monitoring is also real and is the democratic accountability mechanism that the monarchy operates under in the absence of electoral accountability. When a member of the Royal Family does a normal thing in public, the coverage that follows is partly celebration and partly verification. Isla Campbell covers both dimensions simultaneously and finds the combination genuinely interesting, which is either the definition of a good beat or evidence that the monarchy generates more editorial complexity per news cycle than any other British institution.
The coverage of William’s normal public activities also serves a specific function for the monarchy’s long-term public relations project: demonstrating that the future King is recognisably human, accessible, and engaged with ordinary life in ways that his position does not require but that his public standing benefits from enormously. The calculatedly casual school run is therefore not uncalculated. It is a genuine school run that also serves an institutional purpose, which is the specific character of modern royal public life: authentic activities that are also, inevitably, public relations. The authenticity and the strategy are not contradictory. They are simultaneous. This is what Isla Campbell covers when she covers William collecting the children from school, and why the coverage is more interesting than it initially appears.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
