The British royal family has been a font of gossip and scandal for decades — centuries, even. But the last few weeks could only have happened in our very online era. As you know — or as Jennifer Weiner put it last week, "unless you've been under a rock with your hands over your eyes" — Catherine, Princess of Wales, had largely disappeared from public view after abdominal surgery in January. The palace did at one point release a photo, but, well, the less said about that the better. People, to put it kindly, missed her. Or maybe more accurately, people who were used to regular updates on the life of possibly the most famous woman in Britain had trouble parsing "privacy, please." But as Tina Brown, who chronicled the Diana years as editor of Vanity Fair in the 1980s and early '90s, writes in a guest essay this week, "In all the raucous, salacious and often cruel rumormongering about Catherine, almost no one considered that behind the scenes something tragic was unfolding." Indeed, on Friday, after Catherine disclosed in a video message that she has cancer, the internet — at least the parts of it that still can — felt ashamed of itself. Breaking bad news is always hard. Most of us can be grateful that we'll never have to find out what it's like to break bad news to millions of strangers who feel it is their right to know us. As Brown writes: "The fascination of the crown will always be the tension between a venerable institution and the human beings who are trapped inside it." Will Catherine's disclosure change anything? Maureen Dowd is not so sure. And, as Pamela Paul wrote on Friday, "Right now Kate Middleton is sick, and the hope is, with proper medical care, she will get better. What, we must wonder, would it take for a culture sick with its own wolfish appetite for self-exposure to try to get better, too?"
Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Opinion Today: Catherine is battling more than cancer
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