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What the royal family doesn't understand about PR in 2024
The Duchess of Cambridge walks around Ballymena, Northern Ireland on February 28, 2019. She has recently disappeared from the public eye after having abdominal surgery.
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The Duchess of Cambridge walks around Ballymena, Northern Ireland on February 28, 2019. She has recently disappeared from the public eye after having abdominal surgery.
Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Let me get this out of the way right now: I have yet to see anything that has persuaded me that anything is “going on” with Kate Middleton other than what the palace originally said: She had abdominal surgery, the recovery is involved enough that she needs months away from her work, and that’s the story.
But the absolute clown show that has been the palace’s handling of spiraling speculation about her has made the whole thing worse and underscored that whatever command they once had over “controlling the narrative” has deserted them. I’m not sure they have a Kate problem, but I think they have a massive, pressing comms problem. There are several foundational pieces of advice about the current media environment that the palace — “the firm,” as we’ve now heard it called so often — either does not understand or has not accounted for.
You will not stop Reddit and TikTok from speculating, so do not try.
The term “conspiracy theory” is overused at this point. A conspiracy theory involves seemingly disconnected parties working in undisclosed tandem to keep something secret. What’s more relevant to this story is something I would call recreational conjecture.
“She’s dead,” “She’s missing,” “She’s in a coma” and “She’s planning to get a divorce” are the kinds of things that don’t even qualify as rumors, exactly; they are flights of fancy done for entertainment and social interaction. While some ideas like this show up in more traditional media, their multipliers and magnifiers are social spaces like TikTok and Reddit. People in those social spaces who most enthusiastically engage in this do not require supporting evidence for recreational conjecture, nor does factual refutation reliably stop them. Putting out pictures, statements, strategic leaks — there’s no point. There is always a way to take a piece of evidence, put it next to your pet theory, and pound it with a hammer until it seems like it fits together. Trying to keep people from speculating on TikTok is like trying to stop it from raining.
Do not feed amphetamines to a dragon you are hoping will fall asleep.
It is impossible to stop recreational conjecture in its tracks. It is possible, however, not to spur it on. The release of the Mother’s Day photo is the most obvious misstep in this entire debacle. In retrospect, it’s just a mom and her kids — they didn’t say it was a photo from right now. They didn’t say it was meant as some kind of proof of life. But it should have been clear to any clever PR person that it would be taken that way and closely scrutinized.
It’s too late in the game to pretend that a nice photo is just a nice photo. That cycle of speculate-and-post, speculate-and-post-again, thrives on new “evidence.” That means the best thing to say is nothing. Keep repeating: we told you she was having surgery and wouldn’t be working in public until Easter. We told you she was having surgery and wouldn’t be working in public until Easter. We told you … you see what I mean? Yes, the speculation rages, and yes, it’s terrible, and yes, it probably really hurts. But if the reason people are so curious is that they haven’t seen her recently, and if you aren’t going to change that fact, the best you can do is deprive the cycle of oxygen — at least oxygen that comes from you.
People are bored out there.
Look, internet “sleuths” can be a real problem. They have misidentified people as having committed terrible crimes. They have screwed with people’s lives. But there’s another category of people relevant to this story: the bored basics who may not be into sleuthing, but they know what Photoshop disasters look like. They’ve been looking at YouTube videos, Tumblr accounts and the r/PhotoshopFails subreddit for ages. It’s been 35 years since Oprah’s head was depicted on Ann-Margret’s body on the cover of TV Guide. People are onto this stuff, and the current roiling debates about AI have only fed these media-authenticity hobbyists.
It would be one thing if the Mother’s Day photo had taken highly advanced forensic examination for people to determine that it had been substantially manipulated. It did not. This was an easy one. People have time. They’re out there analyzing the reliability of eye shadow swatches. They’re out there examining how people on Instagram make themselves seem rich. If you put a pretty obviously (and clumsily) edited photo out, people will look at it extremely carefully, especially if there is already wild speculation swirling out there. This was very, very, very easy to see coming.
Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C
— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) March 11, 2024
As a story evolves, your strategy has to evolve, too.
Think of it like this: The more you are already being questioned about hiding the truth, the more definitively anything you release must clarify what the truth is, or else it’s not worth putting it out at all. That’s why the photo of her in the car with William — again a photo of her as far as anyone knows! — will not help and will make everything worse. Does that look like the shape of her face? Sure! Does that look like someone who is recovering from surgery and isn’t ready to be photographed, which is exactly the story they’ve been telling from the beginning? Sure!
Prince William and Kate smile following their marriage at Westminster Abbey on April 29, 2011.
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Prince William and Kate smile following their marriage at Westminster Abbey on April 29, 2011.
Chris Jackson/Getty Images
However, will a photo of the back of someone’s head slow all this down at this point? Absolutely not! No! I know a lot of people who, like me, initially were inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the most mundane explanation of all this: Surgery can be very taxing, especially abdominal surgery, and the attention on her is so intense that she probably didn’t want to be seen until she felt 100% ready. But the more weird stuff happens, the more some people start to wonder what on earth is going on. When you have shaken people’s faith in anything you say, just stop talking.
Today’s hero is tomorrow’s target.
It can feel like the palace effectively managed the public perception of Harry and Meghan (with some help from Harry and Meghan), and by doing so, like they burnished and boosted William and Kate as better and more worthy royals. But it doesn’t really work that way. If you have two couples and they are placed in parallel (because the men are brothers — Diana’s sons — and because of the splashy weddings), there doesn’t have to be one winner and one loser. Everybody can have a turn in the figurative dunk tank, and it’s going to be just as awful every time. Gossip abhors a vacuum to a degree nature can only aspire to, so it’s a grave mistake to count on gentle treatment just because somebody else received the opposite.
Andrea (left), Pablo (center), and Martin Langesfeld (right) hold a photograph of their daughter and sister, Nicky Langesfeld and her husband Luis Sadovnic, at a park in Doral, Fla., where the city named a street Nicky Langesfeld Place to honor her memory, Martin says, “as a reminder that she’ll be here with us forever.” Nicole “Nicky” and Luis were two of the 98 people killed when the Champlain Towers South condominium building collapsed in Surfside on June 24, 2021.
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Meredith Nierman/NPR
SURFSIDE, Fla. — Just around the corner from where a beachfront condominium collapsed five years ago, there’s a makeshift memorial: a plastic banner strung up on a wood frame, with the names of the 98 victims, ranging in age from a year-old infant to a 92-year-old grandmother.
“It’s an unfortunate reminder of how big this tragedy was,” says Martin Langesfeld, locating the name of his sister Nicky, 26, and her husband Luis Sadovnik, 28. “It’s more than just names. It’s stories. It’s families.”
Two-thirds of the 12-story Champlain Towers South building collapsed just after 1 a.m. on June 24, 2021. It started when the pool deck caved in. Seven minutes later, as many of the occupants were sleeping, the tower began to fall.
Five escaped, and three were rescued from the rubble with severe injuries by first responders. Search teams evacuated residents in the remaining part of the building, which was demolished 10 days later for safety reasons.
Search and rescue personnel work in the rubble of the 12-story, beachfront Champlain Towers South condominium that crumbled to the ground on June 24, 2021 in Surfside.
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Hundreds were left without a home and belongings, and the state was forced to grapple with how it regulates structural safety.
Langesfeld is among those who’ve been pushing to improve what they consider a lax system of building oversight. His sister and brother-in-law were newlyweds, who had moved into the condo together just a few months earlier.
“A dream place, home, where you feel you’re safest is where they were killed,” he says.
He’s also frustrated there is no permanent memorial honoring the victims, while a new luxury condo is going up on the land where Champlain Towers once stood.
“It’s been almost five years and there’s no development for the memorial,” he says. “And the development for the new building is very well underway.”
The North Tower of the Champlain Towers condominium complex stands on April 27, overlooking the vacant site where its sister building, Champlain Towers South, collapsed on June 24, 2021. The collapse resulted in 98 deaths and remains one of the largest structural failures in U.S. history. A new luxury condominium complex, the Delmore, is slated for construction on the empty lot.
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Technical findings released Monday by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded the problem started about three weeks before the collapse when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck failed, causing cracks to grow and loads to shift to connections that were not strong enough to support them.
Investigators found “severe and widespread deviations in the building’s original structural design from the codes and standards of the day,” and that the building’s construction in 1981 deviated from the design drawings. Investigators will issue a final report later that includes recommendations for changes to standards, codes and practices to improve building safety.
To date, no one has been held criminally responsible.
But in a complex civil lawsuit, more than 30 defendants contributed to a $1.2 billion class action settlement reached just a year after the collapse to address wrongful death, personal injury and property loss claims.
“I think what was apparent to all parties, legal parties, is that it was an enormous loss,” says Coral Gables attorney Rachel Wagner Furst, co-lead counsel representing the Surfside victims.
None of the settling parties admitted liability or wrongdoing, but Wagner Furst says the litigation pointed to many factors that contributed to the scope of the disaster beyond the condo board, which was singled out in the initial lawsuit for not heeding warning signs and deferring repairs on the 40-year-old building.
She notes, “Companies and individuals who had serviced the Champlain Towers South condominium building in the years before the collapse that had arguably or allegedly failed in some way to provide proper maintenance advice or counsel, including the security company that had staffed the front desk of the building and was on duty at the time that the alarm ought to have sounded.”
Attorney Rachel Wagner Furst served as co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for the victims of the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, which resulted in a $1.2 billion settlement.
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The Surfside collapse was a wake-up call for condo associations and regulators around the country.
In the immediate aftermath in South Florida, some two dozen properties were evacuated for safety concerns. Most eventually were able to return after repairs.
The state responded by passing more stringent regulations, including new mandates for structural inspections and requiring condo associations to maintain a minimum level of reserve funding for structural upkeep.
“The Florida legislature pushed the burden to create safe housing stock in Florida onto the people who are least able to bear it, which is the Florida consumer,” says Ft. Lauderdale attorney Donna DiMaggio Berger who specializes in condominium law, and founded a group that lobbies on behalf of the more than 50,000 community associations in Florida.
She says developers also should share in the burden.
“If we wind up with the safest housing stock in the country. Bravo, well done,” she says. But “safe buildings start with the people who build them and repair them.”
Construction cranes line the skyline along the beach in Surfside, Fla., on April 27.
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No matter how well-intentioned, the building reforms could have unintended consequences, says Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
She says some buildings have been taken over by people who want to turn them into more expensive, luxurious developments.
“There’s tremendous pressure that people can’t afford these things and so they’re forced to sell,” she says. “We call it ‘condo vultures,’ and it is at our peril.”
Levine Cava says she understands that people want to live “the good life” in South Florida, but there must be balance.
“We know we live in paradise,” she says. “We also know that we need to have people of all means in our community.”
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava says her community was severely changed by this tragedy, “the pain is still very real. Many people have moved on with their lives and others are still suffering greatly.”
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That’s long been the conundrum in Florida, a trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when people flocked to the Sunshine State.
And it’s evident in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, which is becoming an ultra-wealthy enclave with a wall of condos lining the Atlantic, and more under construction. The area is adjacent to swanky shopping malls and private islands where tech titans have waterfront estates.
The Champlain Towers South property itself is soon to be home to the community’s latest luxury development, The Delmore. Billed as “expansive mansions in the sky,” the sales price of the units starts at $15 million; penthouses go for more than $150 million.
“Each penthouse has its own private pool, and that’s a glass-fronted pool that gets the view to the ocean,” says developer Jeffery Rossely, pointing to the layout on a scale model in a posh sales gallery.
Jeffery Rossely, a developer at the Dubai-based firm Damac Properties, points to a model of a luxury property called The Delmore.
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Marisa Peñaloza/NPR
Rossely is with Damac Properties, a Dubai-based firm. This is the company’s first residential project in the U.S. Damac was the only bidder with a $120 million cash offer for the property.
“It was obviously at the time a tragic opportunity, but the courts had already ordered sale of the property,” Rossely says. “The money was required to compensate the victims.”
But the project has not received a warm welcome in Surfside. At town meetings he says his company has been accused of having blood on its hands.
A sign welcoming visitors to Surfside, Fla., stands directly across the street from the former site of the Champlain Towers South condominium. Today, a new luxury residential development called The Delmore is under construction on the empty lot where the tower once stood.
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“I didn’t understand why there would be angst for someone coming in and paying that money upfront,” says Rossely.
But in retrospect, he concedes, the project needed a different approach.
“We should have spent a bit more time on due diligence, on community reaction, rather than on the physical property itself,” Rossely says. “We went through what I would call the traditional due diligence. Maybe we should have gone through emotional due diligence, as well.”
The question now is whether people will want to live in the new building. There are no buyers yet in the pre-sale phase.
Meanwhile, the town of Surfside will light a torch at 1:15 a.m. on Wednesday, just outside the development’s fence, to remember the Champlain Towers South victims five years after the collapse.
News
Trump says proof of his allegations that vandals cut Reflecting Pool paint will be provided in court
Washington — President Trump on Monday said proof will be provided in court of his allegations that vandals “cut” a massive slit in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which he claims is the reason the paint is peeling on the recently renovated but algae-plagued project.
In an exchange with CBS News senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe, Mr. Trump insisted that vandals, rather than questionable craftsmanship, are responsible for the enduring problems following the $14.7 million sealant job. The president claimed vandals cut a 350-foot slit in the pool between the World War II Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial. Five people have been arrested for vandalism related to the Reflecting Pool, and five additional individuals were issued federal citations, according to the U.S. Park Police, although neither the company behind the project nor the U.S. Park Service has said a cut slit was responsible for the peeling.
Asked if he had proof, such as photos or video, that vandals used a knife to cut a massive slit in the pool, Mr. Trump responded: “Well, let’s put it this way, when you have a 350, I think it’s 350, not 250, when you have a 350-foot slit, from one end to the other, you think that’s proof? You think that’s proof?”
O’Keefe noted that reporters had been to the site and found no evidence of a slit.
“Well, you’d have to go see the Parks Department. They’ll show it to you, or see, see the secretary, but I saw it,” Mr. Trump said, likely referencing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. “They cut it, they cut it very violently. The same thing with the floor, they cut it, and then they lifted it. They pulled it, and that’s what it is.”
After defending the project, the president said, “We also have pictures.”
O’Keefe asked the president for evidence of his claims.
“Yeah, at the right time you’ll see it,” Mr. Trump said. “You’ll see it in court. You’ll see it in court, but all you have to do is call the Parks Department, call the Department of Interior.”
The president also suggested someone may have placed fertilizer in the water to create the algae that teams have been attempting to clear.
“If you put fertilizer in the water, you get algae, but somebody said they might have put fertilizer, they did something to create the algae,” the president said, again without providing evidence for his claims.
CBS News has reached out to the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior. So far, there’s been no response.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which received a no-bid contract to install the sealant on the floor of the Reflecting Pool, told CBS News there are “some areas” that “require repairs.”
“These areas are a very small part of the massive 7-acre project, and do not indicate a failure of the liner,” the company said. “These repairs can not be made until the pool is drained. As soon as it’s feasible for the park, the pool will be drained and AIC will be back to make those needed repairs as part of the warranty.”
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