Ellie Hall: I started at BuzzFeed News in January 2013 and reported for them until the newsroom shut down in April 2023. Since then, I’ve been freelancing and doing a bit of consulting work.

I’ve been interested in the British monarchy and its history since I was quite young, and I happily volunteered to cover the royal family during my first weeks at the company. From that point on, I was BuzzFeed News’s official royal correspondent. Although I was able to secure accreditation to cover members of the royal family in person during three separate official visits to the United States, BuzzFeed News was not a media outlet on the official press team’s radar for a fair amount of time (the newsroom did get there eventually).

I always tried to cover the royal family in a way that would interest the hardcore followers as well as casual readers, using my own observations and questions to guide my coverage. My biggest royal story was my January 2020 comparison of U.K. media headlines about Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, which was actually something I’d been working on and adding examples to since February 2019. Although I had always covered the royal family, the success of that post encouraged my editors to launch a royal newsletter, The Royal Tea, and give me structured time for stories that were more analytical and more in my own voice than straight-up news posts. From that point on, I covered royal news as it broke, but I also wrote a lot of deep dives, analyses, and looks at aspects of the royal media ecosystem that nobody else was really covering.

Hall: One of the first things to know is that the royal family doesn’t have one big press team working together to set the public narrative. The King and Queen have their press team, Buckingham Palace, and the Prince and Princess of Wales have their press team, Kensington Palace. “The Palace” can be used for either royal household when you’re referring to the royal press apparatus in a story. If Prince Harry is to be believed, there is constant infighting, one-upping, and leaking that goes on behind the scenes — staffers for one member of the royal family will give damaging or untrue stories about another member to the press to make their employer look better. He and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, have made allegations about this system in interviews and he goes into it in detail in his memoir Spare.

Royal press offices rarely go on the record. As former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger noted in this great column that I reference all the time in my work, it’s “unusually difficult” to judge the reliability of royal reporting because “it is a world almost devoid of open or named sources.” You almost never see stories with direct attributions to royal spokespersons, which is one of the big reasons why this “Kate Middleton is missing” saga is so interesting. A Palace spokesperson has gone on the record three times — first in response to a Spanish media report that Kate was in a coma, then in response to the widespread social media speculation about her status, and then once again in response to William’s reaction to the social media speculation.

Instead of going on the record, royal press offices will give briefings and in some situations provide information to a core group of royal reporters — with the caveat that these reporters won’t say that the information came from an official spokesperson. Phrases like “this reporter understands” or “this news outlet can confirm” are very common in stories about the royal family. If you follow royal reporters on Twitter, you can always tell when one of these memos is sent, because within minutes of each other, reporters will tweet a similarly worded update or clarification. We saw this happen last week when news of [British financier and husband of royal family member Lady Gabriella] Thomas Kingston’s death was made public. Later that day, royal reporters started tweeting within minutes of each other that William’s absence from the memorial service was not related to the tragedy. (The fact that Kensington Palace wanted this information to get out has, of course, been deemed highly significant by some conspiracy theorists.)

The only method of contacting the press office that is given on the official website is a phone number that connects you to a royal family switchboard. Emailed requests for comment sent to each office’s primary email address don’t always receive responses. Even if you’ve been vetted by the Palace and added to the official press release listserv, sometimes statements will only be sent to certain news outlets — something that leaves a lot of reporters scrambling to get caught up during breaking news situations. I had an interesting back-and-forth with someone in a royal communications office on one of those days. Royal journalists in the U.K. were reporting something important, citing an official statement that hadn’t been posted online or sent out as a press release. I reached out to the royal press office for confirmation and received a response asking why I was contacting them when all of these other outlets had already reported the news. Thus I found myself writing an email explaining that journalists are supposed to independently fact-check information they don’t receive firsthand, which was a weird experience.

The big question about the saga of Kate’s “disappearance” and every royal controversy is how much control the palace press offices have over the media.

Royal press offices hold a fair amount of control because they act as gatekeepers to the members of the royal family. We know that they at least attempt to wield influence behind the scenes. Royal reporters have confirmed that the Palace press offices have tried to kill false — and true — stories before publication. We also know that on at least one occasion the Palace has preemptively reached out to media outlets to warn them off reporting a particular story. We also learned this week that someone from Kensington Palace reached out to an airline to get them to delete a rude tweet about William when a rumor about him was trending on Twitter.

We know that the Palace has actively concealed royal news from the press and reportedly even lied to reporters about issues concerning the health of royal family members — in November 2020, we learned that William had contracted a severe case of COVID-19 in April 2020. At the time, veteran royal reporter Robert Jobson tweeted about Kensington Palace’s “appalling” decision to lie about the prince’s health, writing, “KP were asked several times by the media whether Prince William had contracted the virus and were told categorically ‘no.’”

TMZ’s recent publication of the paparazzi photo of Kate and her mother driving in Windsor has added a new dimension to the media control discussion. Kensington Palace has let it be known that the photos were unauthorized and no U.K. media outlets have run the images, even the tabloids (although most have written up the fact that U.S. media outlets have published an image of the princess). On Wednesday, veteran royal reporter Emily Andrews said on Twitter that Kensington Palace “exerted huge pressure on the British media NOT to publish the pic,” which she said was proof that the press team didn’t set up the photo opportunity.

Safe to say that the U.K. media response to the photo’s publication isn’t doing anything to dispel the “Palace controls the media” narrative that’s running rampant on social media.

Hall: The media ecosystem surrounding the royal family is unique. The core group of reporters covering the royal family are known as the “royal rota,” and they’re given access to royal events with the understanding that they’ll share whatever news they get at the event with the other media organizations. The justification for it is space and security — you can’t fit a huge press pack into a small room at a charity or food bank a senior royal happens to visit. All rota reporters are from U.K.-based outlets and, as I mentioned earlier, these reporters will sometimes get information from Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace that other journalists don’t receive (there are the official royal press release email lists and then there are WhatsApp groups).

One of Harry and Meghan’s biggest issues with the royal rota system was the fact that the group includes tabloids. These are the outlets that have historically run the most sensational and invasive stories about the royals. They also run the most stories — tabloids constantly churn out royal content on every imaginable topic, no matter how flimsy its apparent source or connection to a member of the royal family.

In this case, the lack of speculative tabloid coverage about Kate’s status is one of the things that people have found suspicious about the current situation. The historically nosy news outlets haven’t theorized about what specific type of surgery she had or the circumstances that led to her medical issue being discovered. Until the TMZ photo was published, there hadn’t been any stories about or photographs of the famously close Middleton family. There’s also a distinct dearth of the fluffy, low-stakes stories about the princess that you usually see in the tabloids (like “What Kate’s doing to relax” or “How Kate’s staying a hands-on mother during her recovery”).

Hall: Social media has been the driving force behind this entire saga, and I cannot emphasize enough how out of character it is that a royal press team went on the record in response to what is essentially gossip.

A few years ago, I had an interesting exchange with a press officer when another royal conspiracy theory was trending online. On Feb. 22, 2022, a celebrity gossip blog called Hollywood Unlocked reported that Queen Elizabeth II had died. The post went insanely viral, and by the next day, rumors of the Queen’s death were so widespread that the whole situation in and of itself was newsworthy. I reached out for comment to Buckingham Palace and they refused to give an on-the-record response, telling me on background that they didn’t want to establish a precedent of responding to online speculation.

It’s been really interesting to watch the discussion of Kate’s “disappearance” slowly spread from the toxic hellhole that is so-called “royal internet” into mainstream pop-culture consciousness on social media, especially on Twitter/X. We’ve reached a point where people who don’t normally follow the royal family are invested in this saga.

It’s worth noting that a lot of the conversation was initially driven by pro-Harry and Meghan accounts, and many of the darker conspiracy theories (the ones described as “deeply sinister and highly libelous” by the Daily Mail) seemed to originate from those online spaces. That being said, these speculations are now part of the global conversation, although they’re fortunately balanced by conspiracy theories that are, if not lighthearted, unserious. The BBLs and Glasgow Willy Wonka photoshops, for example.

While tons of people on Twitter are clearly only following this saga for drama, gossip, and memes, over the past week, you’ve been able to observe a growing group of individuals who at least give the impression that they’re genuinely worried about Kate and want to know that she’s okay. That apparent sincerity is rare when it comes to online discussions about the royal family, and I think it’s one of the things keeping Kate in the public eye.

Hall: I don’t think you can talk about what’s currently going on with Kate without talking about Meghan’s history with the U.K. media. It’s one of the points that keeps coming up in the online discourse — the apparent hypocrisy between the Palace and the U.K. media’s treatment of each woman.

People are comparing the hands-off, privacy-first stance that the press is taking toward Kate with their attitude toward Meghan and the stories that were written about her while she was on maternity leave. I’ve seen a lot of posts remarking on how strange it is that the Palace and U.K. media suddenly care about privacy when they didn’t before now. There’s also a definite feeling among some people that Kate should have to go through this social media and press speculation, because Meghan went through it, it was worse for Meghan, and when she complained, people told her to suck it up.

Regardless of your feelings about Meghan or Kate, it’s a fact that over the past month, the Palace has gone on the record three times — first to counter an article about the Princess of Wales and then twice to comment on social media speculation about her well-being. (If you’d like to see more examples of times when the royal family press teams did or didn’t go on the record for stories about these women, I published a deep dive looking into that question at BuzzFeed News.) Meghan and Harry have both said in interviews that this was something the Palace would not do for them. We also know that the Palace “exerted huge pressure on the British media” not to publish a paparazzi photo of Kate — and so far the press has complied.

Hall: I had a very unique position at BuzzFeed News because I’d been there for a long time and had great editors who trusted my instincts when it came to royal stories. A pattern was established pretty early in my time at the company where I would say “I need to write this royal thing up” and the resulting story would do really well. I had a royal newsletter for my last three years in the newsroom, and that was fun because I was able to do some deeper analysis of royal news and royal media coverage and write for a dedicated audience.

I read all the stories written by royal rota reporters and the major royal reporters on the beat at other outlets. I have an almost 11 year-old Twitter list of royal reporters (and official royal social media accounts) that helps me stay updated. I also keep an eye on celebrity gossip and blind gossip websites, because you can often trace some of the wildest royal rumors and theories back to them.

Also, sometimes there’s just some great, clearly fictitious, content. One of my all-time favorites is a Blind Gossip post from July 2019 that claims Meghan freaked out because she couldn’t find avocados in the U.K. and wanted them flown in from California.

Despite its toxicity, royal social media was helpful when it came to stories because it let me get a sense of the sort of questions people were asking about royal news and what misinformation was circulating. I wrote a lot of posts that explained or debunked things that I’d seen trending on Twitter or popping up on Reddit. I also did some reporting on the royal social media networks themselves — I spent a few months going down the rabbit hole of Meghan Markle hate accounts and found evidence that the duchess’s half-sister Samantha was interacting with some of these people and spreading conspiracy theories. I ended up knocking on her door in Florida for that one. She ultimately didn’t talk to me, but it was an interesting trip. That story has actually been cited a few times (by Meghan’s lawyers) in Samantha’s ongoing defamation lawsuit against the duchess. It’s pretty wild.

Hall: I think a big part of this drama is that over the past few years, people have started to really distrust not just the royal family (as an institution/bureaucracy, not necessarily the individual members) but the reporters and outlets that cover the royal family.

I’m not saying this is “The Crown’s” fault, but it doesn’t help matters that for years pop culture has been dominated by a fictionalized narrative that depicts the monarchy and its employees scheming behind the scenes and manipulating the media, happily throwing certain members of the royal family under a bus in service to the overriding goal of preserving the power of the sovereign. Even without the Netflix series, a lot of people still hold a grudge against the royals because of Princess Diana and wonder about the circumstances of her death. I also feel like a lot of this distrust stems from what Harry and Meghan have said since leaving working royal life. Their descriptions of a back-stabbing, Machiavellian organization in interviews and Harry’s memoir Spare have definitely made an impact on the public’s perception of the monarchy and the royal reporting beat.

So when you have a situation like we’re currently in, if people feel that they can’t trust the institution and they can’t trust the reporters, they’re going to go on what they can see — and, as the timeline [below] shows, what they’re seeing is raising questions. The public can’t help but compare how Buckingham Palace is handling the King’s medical crisis with how Kensington Palace is handling Kate’s. People remember how Kate let herself be photographed leaving the hospital the other time she received inpatient treatment (for hyperemesis gravidarum during her first pregnancy in 2012) and how she met the world’s media dressed perfectly and wearing high heels hours after giving birth. Members of the public are also going to make judgments about what’s going on now based on how the Palace has handled similar situations in the past — and there’s a fairly recent example of the royal family press team allowing the widespread publication of paparazzi-style images of one of its off-duty members (Kate was photographed attending a memorial service for a woman killed by a police officer in 2021).

I don’t think we’d be in this position if Kensington Palace had shared something besides two official announcements and one statement to the press. There’s an information void surrounding Kate’s current status, and the royal press team has left a lot of space to speculate about what’s actually going on. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to slow down anytime soon, either. It will be interesting to see if Kensington Palace eventually caves and gives the public something personal from Kate, be that a statement, a photo taken by her, a picture of her and her kids, something along those lines.

Hall: Concha Calleja is a self-described “writer [and] specialist in profiles, criminology and hunting down those who lie,” the host of the Spanish television show “Fiesta” (which has a reported audience of 900,000) and she’s been one of the most interesting bits of this entire saga. She’s the only prominent reporter (so far) to challenge Kensington Palace’s narrative about the Princess of Wales, and her reporting prompted the Waleses’ press team to take the rare step of going on the record to refute a story.

Calleja came onto the scene soon after Kensington Palace announced that Kate had been hospitalized. She first reported that Kate had actually been admitted to the hospital in December and wasn’t doing well, and then claimed that the princess had to be placed in a medically induced coma. Her credibility, at least in Spain, is such that mainstream outlets quickly picked up both reports.

Her stories might have stayed under the radar if Kensington Palace hadn’t gone on the record with the Times of London to refute the report that Kate was in a coma. Royal press teams don’t usually comment at all, let alone on specific stories, and, ironically, by releasing a statement the Palace drew even more attention to Calleja’s reporting.

In a bold move, following the publication of the Times of London story, Calleja doubled down on her reporting, stating that she trusted her source 100% and claiming that Kensington Palace was upset that she had discovered the truth.

Calleja claims to have covered the royal family for 27 years. According to her website, she has written two books about Princess Diana, one of which is an investigation into the conspiracy theory that the beloved royal was murdered. [Ed. note: Another one of Calleja’s books suggests Michael Jackson was murdered.]

Hall: I think a lot will depend on what happens over these next few weeks before Easter. Right now, questions about what’s going on have been confined to social media, but things could change if the press starts seriously pushing Kensington Palace for more information. I was surprised to see that the cover story of this week’s People magazine (an incredibly sympathetic news outlet as far as royal reporting is concerned) is titled, “Royal Family in Turmoil as Demands Mount for More Transparency: ‘There Is Too Much Uncertainty.’”

I could definitely see a scenario where the Waleses and their press team cave in and post a personal message from Kate or a photo/video of her, but I think the chances of that happening are pretty slim. William’s spokesperson’s comment to People that “his focus is on his work and not on social media” and the belligerent tone of the Daily Beast interview with the couple’s friends indicate to me that the Prince and Princess of Wales themselves are personally very invested in keeping Kate out of the public eye and have no plans to budge on that point.

Then again, there’s always the possibility that one of these conspiracy theories could be true, and if that’s the case, God only knows.

Hall: A conspiracy theory is essentially a bunch of people looking at one series of events and drawing drastically different conclusions.

Trying to track a conspiracy theory in narrative form is difficult, because anything and everything can be assigned significance to bolster whatever story a person espouses. The key event that ties one theory together could be meaningless to another. It’s easier to explain what people find important in each detail if you go point by point.

This method also makes it easier to add context and correct misinterpretation. There are a lot of people down this rabbit hole who are unfamiliar with the way the royal family operates and that knowledge definitely changes how you view some of these points.

Timelines also help you see patterns and make informed guesses about what events prompted what actions.