Saturday 3 September 2022

The Very Best of Harry & Meghan | Spitting Image / Cool reception to Meghan media blitz suggests US not yet sold on former royals / Harry and Meghan to Touch Down in UK for First Time Since Jubilee


Cool reception to Meghan media blitz suggests US not yet sold on former royals

 

Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, at the 9/11 Memorial in New YOrk lats year.

 


Edward Helmore in New York

Sat 3 Sep 2022 07.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/03/meghan-harry-duke-duchess-sussex-media-blitz

 

Meghan Markle launched a US media blitz last week with a podcast and a lengthy magazine profile, but the somewhat cool reception she and husband Prince Harry are now receiving in America suggests there are still bumps in their road ahead as they seek to establish themselves as bona fide celebrities.

 

The push came with an interview in New York magazine’s the Cut, titled “Meghan of Montecito”, and it touted the launch of Markle’s Spotify podcast Archetypes.

 

Meghan has had no trouble attracting A-list names to sit down with her in the interview series. First up was retiring tennis legend Serena Williams. Second, singer Mariah Carey. The women discussed living under the pressure of the public eye, their racial identities and more.

 

But for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the US media response, which has been relatively neutral to date in the US, came with some barbs of criticism of the way Meghan highlighted her experiences of royal life in Britain. She had, as the Cut noted, “taken a hardship and turned it into content”. Last year the New Yorker warned that the royal couple seemed fixated with a backwards-looking “trauma plot”.

 

“Meghan Markle needs to leave royal trauma behind”, the Washington Post said in an opinion page headline. “In truth, the only way for the Sussexes to build a truly new life, and have a wider impact on the causes they care about, is to stop making themselves the center of the story.”

 

The CNN host Don Lemon commented on the second episode of Archetypes, titled The Duality of Diva, in which Meghan revealed to Carey that the first time she was aware of being treated as a Black woman was when she dated and then married her royal husband.

 

“If there’s any time in my life that it’s been more focused on my race, it’s only once I started dating my husband,” Meghan said. “Then I started to understand what it was like to be treated like a Black woman because up until then, I had been treated like a mixed woman. And things really shifted.”

 

Lemon, who is African American, said: “It is a bit shocking that at thirtysomething years of age, she is just understanding what it’s like to be a Black woman in America. It’s a bit surprising to me.”

 

The conservative tabloid New York Post went further, noting inconsistencies in Meghan’s privilege and her re-airing of the discrimination story she revealed on Oprah last year. The Post put her on its famously punchy front page under the headline “Toddler and tiara” and depicted Meghan as a “spoiled princess”.

 

“For the past three years she’s had a global platform, yet all she does with it is complain that she’s been censored, silenced, shut out. Meghan Markle has been a public downer longer than she was a working duchess,” wrote the New York Post columnist Maureen Callahan. “It’s long past time for a new talking point.”

 

But the attention hardly damaged the podcast’s launch. Meghan’s Spotify series went in at No 1 in the US as soon as it was released, pushing the controversial but highly popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast from the top spot. It was still there as of Thursday, according to latest figures in the trade bible Variety.

 

Meghan and Harry are essentially are still on their transition to a fully fledged US media brand; a process that has been under way since they set foot in the US two years ago. They have to walk a tightrope between leveraging their royal links with an American public that is broadly fascinated with the British institution, while also seeking to carve a path that will eventually allow them to stand as celebrities in their right, having rejected traditional royal life.

 

“Meghan Markle started out in a fairly populated crowd of American television shows, made a complex transition to be being part of the uber-narrative of the royal family, and now she’s making the transition to being an integrated media power-presence,” said Bob Thompson, media professor at Syracuse University.

 

“The potential for becoming a mega-brand is certainly there. We’re in the midst of seeing it, but transitions aren’t always easy and aren’t always pretty.”

 

Maiysha Kai, lifestyle editor at the Grio, a Black-focused news and entertainment outlet, said there may be no other way for Markle and her husband to achieve their stated goal of leaving the royal orbit and achieving financial independence than to revisit their experience of it – even if that is most likely to generate negative headlines.

 

“Her experience in the royal family is the experience most people want to hear about. Of course, I hope there’s new stories to tell in the future, but they would be entirely remiss not to capitalize on this while they can,” Kai said.

 

But America’s celebrity-industrial complex is a strange place, and Meghan is far from the first to seek to leverage a high-profile moment of fame into a broader, long-lasting and highly lucrative celebrity life. A relevant reference point, Kai said, is how the Kardashian family has turned a societally negative experience (Kim’s sex tape) into a multibillion-dollar family empire.

 

“I wouldn’t say that marrying into the royal family is like doing a sex tape, but I would say there is a parallel in turning something into a lucrative positive,” Kai said.

 

Kai acknowledged that the current moment in the Sussexes’ campaign for an American celebrity life was a tough one. “I think what we’re going through is the normal celebrity fatigue. You eat it up and eat it up, and then you’re done,” she said.

 

At the moment, Meghan’s podcast is the main thing US media consumers have to go on when it comes to the couple’s contributions to American life. Future guests are said to include actors Constance Wu and Issa Rae, journalist Lisa Ling and comedian Margaret Cho – all likely to spark interesting conversations on gender, race and identity.

 

Thompson said that, judging by the podcast, Meghan might aspire to be someone who is already the closest thing America has to homegrown royalty: the chatshow queen Oprah Winfrey. But if that is the case, there is a long road and a lot of work ahead for the royal couple.

 

Oprah, Thompson said, “had for a quarter-century a daily talkshow speaking to a huge, undifferentiated mass audience from which she could launch sorties into the rest of the culture – a book club, a magazine, movie roles”.

 

Oprah also had time to learn how to strike a balance between the confessional and personal, and a more neutral role of interviewer as interlocutor between an audience and a celebrity interviewee. “Oprah did it with a degree of skill that didn’t simply hijack the subject back to interviewer,” he points out.

 

And that may take time. Meghan’s plan, Thompson said, was to “carve out a specialized audience. It may be a fragment of what used to be, but you can still do a lot with that”.

 

It is that most American of stories: a beginning with big dreams.

 

Harry and Meghan to touch down in UK for first time since Jubilee

9 hrs ago

By PA News Agency

https://www.winsfordguardian.co.uk/news/national/20898470.harry-meghan-touch-uk-first-time-since-jubilee/

 

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are back in the UK this week for the first time since returning for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

 

Harry and Meghan will appear at events in London and Manchester, as well as jetting off to Germany to mark the one year countdown to the Invictus Games.

 

It is not known what day the couple will arrive on British soil, or if they will visit the Queen in Balmoral, but it is thought unlikely they will bring their children Archie and Lili on the working trip.

 

They will head to Manchester on Monday for the One Young World summit, an event which brings together young leaders from more than 190 countries.

 

Meghan, a counsellor for the organisation, will give the keynote address at the opening ceremony.

 

They will also meet a group of summit delegates doing “outstanding work on gender equality”, One Young World said.

 

The couple will then head to Germany for the Invictus Games Dusseldorf 2023 One Year to Go event Which is taking place on Tuesday, before returning to the UK for the WellChild Awards in London where Harry will deliver a speech on Thursday.

 

Their visit to the UK will be the first time they have been back in the country since the Jubilee celebrations in early June, when they attended the service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral.

 

It comes just days after Meghan’s wide-ranging interview with The Cut in which she said it takes “a lot of effort” to forgive and hinted that she can “say anything”.

 

In the interview, running to more than 6,000 words, Meghan said that “just by existing” she and Harry were “upsetting the dynamic of the hierarchy” before they stepped down as senior working royals.

 

Harry and Meghan’s trip falls in the same week the new prime minister is due to be announced and asked to form a government by the Queen.

 

The monarch will appoint a new prime minister at Balmoral for the first time in her reign.

 

The 96-year-old, who has faced ongoing mobility issues, traditionally holds audiences with outgoing and incoming premiers at Buckingham Palace.

 

But Boris Johnson, who will tender his resignation, and the new Conservative Party leader who will be asked to form a government – either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak – will travel to Balmoral Castle for the key audiences on Tuesday.

 

Security will be at the forefront of Harry’s mind as he travels from his home in California for the high profile appearances.

 

The duke, who quit as a senior working royal in 2020, is bringing legal action over a decision not to allow him to pay for police protection for himself and his family when in the UK.

 

This summer he won a bid to bring a High Court claim against the Home Office.

 

His challenge concerns the February 2020 decision of the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (Ravec) over his security, after being told he would no longer be given the “same degree” of personal protective security when visiting.

 

The royal family has been bracing itself for Harry’s forthcoming tell-all book, which he has vowed will be an “accurate and wholly truthful” account of his life.

 

The memoirs were expected to be published in late 2022 by Penguin Random House but a release date has yet to be confirmed.

 

There will be concern in royal quarters that the duke will delve into his rift with his brother, the Duke of Cambridge, his troubled relationship with his father, the Prince of Wales, his view of stepmother the Duchess of Cornwall and the turbulent fallout of Megxit.

 

Harry and Meghan accused the royal family of racism in their controversial Oprah Winfrey interview last year, saying an unnamed royal made a racist remark about their son Archie before he was born, and that the institution failed to help a suicidal Meghan.

 

Although not confirmed, it is thought unlikely the couple will bring Archie and Lili on the working trip.

 

The youngsters travelled with their parents to the UK for the Platinum Jubilee and Lili celebrated her first birthday at Frogmore Cottage in Windsor, but Archie and his younger sister did not attend any public events.

 

Harry and Meghan kept out of the limelight for the majority of the weekend, with the Queen deciding only working royals should grace the Buckingham Palace balcony during the historic festivities.

 

The Sussexes renewed their lease on Frogmore Cottage earlier this year.

 

If Harry and Meghan stay at their UK base, they will be just minutes away from the Cambridges, who are due to have relocated to their new home, Adelaide Cottage on the Windsor estate.

 

The location of the Cambridges’ new home raises the chances of a private meeting between Harry, Meghan, William and Kate, despite their troubled history.


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