Today's Sun quotes me on the royals. News outlets often quote me; almost as often the quotes are mangled or made-up. I never ask for corrections; the volume is far too great & the damage at face value vanishingly slight. But is it? A few thoughts... 
Let's take a look at where the Sun got its quote. It isn't fully fabricated & the Sun isn't the first offender. It comes from an interview I gave to a documentary maker some years back. It's something I said, not something I wrote. It isn't about or in response to current events
Ground zero is probably a piece in the Express that covers the documentary and makes clear this is a discussion about the young Prince Charles. A subsequent chain of articles removes the quote ever further from that original context
Here's the context in which the Sun quotes me. This sort of thing happens all the time, and at least the quote is based on something I actually said. So pretty harmless, right? Except that cutting & pasting a quote into another context is as much a lie as making up a quote
Royal "news" is full of guff. For years tabloid press assumed they could make up what they liked about small stuff because royals wouldn't push back. Many lies made it into broadsheets too high-minded to do their own royal reporting but not so high-minded as to check properly
Conventional wisdom says the royals don't sue because this risks infringing their privacy and also for the same reason I don't protest all the misquotes, that the volume of guff is too great. Recently Harry & Meghan have challenged that conventional wisdom theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/o…
Here's how else conventional wisdom is wrong. Another reason royals haven't pushed back is that they have much to lose. The royals enjoy exemptions under the Freedom of Information Acts; they are shielded in many ways from the proper scrutiny of the press royal.uk/freedom-inform…
And the prevalence of royal guff also helps to present the royals as a kind of long-running soap opera, good for tourism, entertaining, but not especially significant. Their impact and influence is widely underestimated. It's why I wrote a political biography of Prince Charles
Nobody is served well by a media that is simultaneously restricted by layers of secrecy and problems of access from proper scrutiny of the monarchy and responds to those impediments by making up trivia and hacking phones.
It's easier to see how harmful the unspoken compact between press and royalty is since its disruption by the @maitlis Prince Andrew interview & @BBCPanorama with Virginia Giuffre & Sarah Ransome. Without serious coverage, the culture of impunity flourishes theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
@maitlis @BBCPanorama The culture of impunity extends far beyond the royals. The #Epstein story is a saga of abuse--not least of power. As an activist, I stand with @WEP_UK to tackle abuse & harassment and the systems & structures that enable it.
@maitlis @BBCPanorama @WEP_UK As a journalist, I applaud colleagues doing great work to puncture the culture of impunity. And I ask anyone covering powerful institutions not only to check quotes & facts but to be aware of how journalism instead of speaking truth to power too often lets itself be co-opted
