LONDON — For weeks, British newspapers have been speculating feverishly about who would be most hurt by the claims made by Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, in a highly anticipated six-part documentary series that premiered on Netflix on Thursday.
It turns out to be the papers themselves.
At least in the first three episodes of “Harry & Meghan” available, the biggest villains are not the members of the British royal family, as many expected, but the London newspaper publishers, whom the couple accuse of exploiting them, especially Meghan, out of ruthless pursuit. greed and thinly veiled racism.
“This has always been so much bigger than us,” Harry says of the toxic tensions that led the couple to break from the House of Windsor in 2020 and move to Southern California. “We know the full truth. The institution knows the full truth and the media knows the full truth because they are involved.”
Not only involved, Harry seemed to suggest, but he was primarily responsible for it. Time and time again, “Harry & Meghan” returns to the blame of the news media, who he says haunted his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, until her death and then turned their gaze on his new wife, an American… born biracial actress.
There were vivid old footage of Diana pleading with photographers to leave her boys alone on a skiing holiday. There was a new video of Harry and Meghan being driven around Manhattan, nervously peering out the windows of their SUV at paparazzi chasing them as they once chased his mother.
There was also a sense of how carefully the couple choreographed their new life, from the selfie videos they shot just after the family split to the texts they exchanged in the early bloom of their romance.
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The newspapers responded with predictable contempt. “Netfibs,” Rupert Murdoch’s Sun declared on his website, pointing out perceived inconsistencies in their story. The Times of London said: “William and Kate can breathe easy – for now it’s all the fault of the media.”
“Palace Fury at Megflix,” said The Daily Mail, but how choleric the royal family was is up for debate. The Daily Express claimed the family breathed a “huge sigh of relief when Harry and Meghan’s Netflix show backfired.”
Buckingham Palace had no public reaction to the film; a palace official claimed the filmmakers had not contacted King Charles, Prince William or any other member of the royal family for comment. That contradicted an on-screen message at the beginning of the first episode, which stated: “Members of the royal family declined to comment on the content of the series.”
A Netflix executive said the filmmakers had contacted communications representatives for Charles and William. The palace’s claim grew shaky when officials there later acknowledged receiving emails from someone with a manufacturing company. Unable to verify that person’s identity, they did not respond, according to officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, in accordance with palace protocol.
The sniping was an afterthought, given that the first episodes of “Harry & Meghan” only offer a cursory glimpse into the royal family’s behavior (the last three episodes will stream next Thursday and will likely focus more on the family, as they will relate to the couple’s rancorous separation from the rest of the royals).
Meghan described her first meeting with William and Catherine as stiff and formal, something she initially attributed to the British character. Harry said family members were unsympathetic to the relentless attention Meghan received from the tabloids after she started dating him.
“The difference here is the racing element,” he said.
For now, the series may widen the rift between the couple and parts of the country rather than between them and the royal family. “Harry & Meghan” offers a brutal look at Britain’s colonial and slave trade past. Two prominent black British commentators appearing in the film, David Olusoga and Afua Hirsch, said that legacy inevitably colored the reception Meghan received in the news media.
For some, that was a valuable and overdue discussion. But others complained that it was a caricature of recent developments such as Brexit, and falsely suggested that millions of Britons were motivated by racism. Coincidentally, ordinary Britons whose clips were used in the series almost uniformly praised Meghan’s entry into the royal family as a blow to racial diversity and a modernizing force for an old institution.
Yet there is no doubt that the popularity of the couple, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, has waned in Britain since their acrimonious split with the royal family and departure from the country. Once the most popular members of the family after Queen Elizabeth II, they are now routinely at the bottom of polls.
Much of that may be due to the drum roll of negative coverage the couple is getting in the news media. The broadcaster and former tabloid editor Piers Morgan has been particularly vicious, at one point accusing Meghan of dishonesty, saying harsh treatment by the royal family had driven her to suicidal thoughts — statements she made in a now-famous interview she and Harry gave last year to Oprah Winfrey.
Mr Morgan was then forced to step down from his ITV show, “Good Morning Britain”, after storming off the set following a dispute with a co-presenter over his allegations of Meghan’s dishonesty. But Mr. Morgan is now back on television and his swear words on Twitter against the couple’s performance on Netflix were widely picked up by the tabloids on Thursday.
In a column for The Sun, he dismissed it as a “predictable, cliché-ridden, simperingly sycophantic snooze fest that fueled their tired familiar story of a cruelly oppressed couple driven from Britain by filthy racist media, filthy racist royals family and annoying racist public.”
While the right-wing news media has been relentlessly harsh, left-wing newspapers such as The Guardian have also failed to give their best. The film’s review appeared under the headline “So sickening – I almost brought up my breakfast.”
Lucy Mangan, the reviewer, wrote: “What are we left with in the end? Exactly the same story we’ve always known, told the way we’d expect it from the people who tell it. It’s hard to see who, apart from the media, the villains of the play, will really benefit from this? A period of silence would be welcome.”
Harry and Meghan have each sued newspaper publishers in Britain, with some success. In February 2021, a Supreme Court judge ruled that one of them, The Mail on Sunday, had violated Meghan’s privacy by publishing a private letter she sent to her estranged father.
But settling into a comfortable new life with children in Montecito, California, doesn’t seem to lessen the bitterness the couple feels, nor their determination to challenge past instances of abuse again.
At one point, Harry described in great detail the workings of the royal roster, the rotating cadre of reporters assigned to cover the public happenings of relatives. He derided the title “royal correspondent,” describing it as a way for the newspapers to print unsubstantiated information about the royals with a veneer of credibility.
It fell to Meghan to sum up their ordeal. “No matter what I did,” she said, “they would still find a way to destroy me.”
