Polarised thinking insists that only one side in any argument can be right. Life though is messy & royal life very much so. People seeing @valentinelow's book Courtiers either as a smear against Meghan or proof that she deserves the unhinged criticism piled on her miss this point Here are a couple of very short extracts on the bullying allegations from my own book amazon.co.uk/Charles-Heart-…. Note: extracts. This is by no means everything I've written or learned.

For over two decades, I was a foreign correspondent based in London for @FOCUS_Magazin then @TIME, for part of that period also president of @FPALondon, and what I found is that foreign press covers the UK differently & in some respects better than UK media. Mini-thread

https://twitter.com/catherine_mayer/status/1567439440905207810

Of course you'll find examples of poor foreign correspondenting making basic errors or describing a romanticised tourist versions of a Britain that never was, but many foreign corrs are at least as expert as their domestic counterparts. They live here &, importantly, they think

As co-founder of @WEP_UK, you might expect me to celebrate the UK getting its third female Prime Minister. I don't. Liz Truss is not a symbol of equality but a proponent of worsening inequality & her expected victory is a sign not of progress but regressive populism. Short 🧵 First of all, a reality check. When @sanditoksvig & I started @WEP_UK, people said "but women already have equality" & "there are so many female leaders". Both statements were untrue. When T May became PM, just 7.6% of elected leaders of 144 full or partial democracies were women

Short thread on #Meghan’s new podcast #Archetypes. Sure waspish columnists are at work & there’s plenty of soft underbelly to attack. BUT there’s genuine news value to her interview with @serenawilliams not least that #Harry & SW conferred on leaving the only lives they knew 1/? The concept of Meghan’s series, examining & words & stereotypes deployed against women, is solid. (Says the co-founder of @PrimadonnaFest… why waste a great word when you can reclaim it?) And her first episode tackles a word all too often thrown at women as an insult: *ambition*

This #IWD week @the_female_lead calls for healthier social media. Online abuse & toxic messaging targets women, people of colour, LGBT+. Misinformation is rife. To help #DisruptYourFeed, here's a 🧵of people to follow that I'll keep updating. Please add your own suggestions too Follow @ManduReid @Elif_Safak @KitdeWaal @monisha_rajesh @scribblercat @_EmmaGH @olgatokariuk @rachelcoldicutt @MarianKeyes @carolecadwalla @tweeter_anita @SholaMos1 @nazirafzal @GreatDismal @BernardineEvari @lemnsissay @bbclysedoucet @RosieisaHolt @chrispaouros #DisruptYourFeed

#COVID19 arrived in the UK *last year*. The finding by the Kent coroner raises many hard questions swerved in this @TheSun piece. A short, sad thread thesun.co.uk/news/12618638/… One of the hardest questions for me and for many others is whether #Covid19 killed our loved ones. Here's a blog post I wrote in May about the death of my husband @andygangof4 catherinemayer.co.uk/post/2020-visi…

As you follow the reporting on #Sussexroyal, think about the absences and why they occur. Here’s a big one. And a short #MeghanAndHarry thread

https://twitter.com/marcusryder/status/1215169160671453186

The UK media is structurally racist and sexist as reflected and reinforced by pay and employment gaps. Misogynoir directed at #MeghanMarkle hasn’t just been constant but systemic. However the problems with celebrity & royal coverage, very different, go much deeper

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

Kicking myself for a bad decision. I declined invite from @BBCr4today to discuss Prince Andrew’s #Epstein interview before seeing the interview. But there’s so much to say about the culture of impunity Andrew embodies in this clip alone. A few thoughts...
theguardian.com/uk-news/video/… @BBCr4today The reason I declined, as I say, is that I hadn't seen the interview. The problem with much discussion of the royals is that it takes place in a vacuum. They are protected by layers of secrecy that don't apply to other institutions. They can't be scrutinised or called to account

THIS IS URGENT. We're heading into a snap election and the laws meant to enable fair elections are hopelessly out of date--a fact being ruthlessly exploited bbc.co.uk/news/entertain… It isn't just about the lack of transparency on who pays for the ads (and whether the financial sources are legitimate) though that's a huge problem. Money doesn't just talk in the UK political system. It SHOUTS. No smaller parties can compete with this bbc.co.uk/news/technolog…

If you want to know how our world became so polarised, look at the competing narratives about the #PutitothePeopleMarch. Critics from left and right denounce the marchers as members of an elite. It's worth acknowledging the extent to which that's true--and also true of Brexiteers Yesterday's march was huge. As a veteran of marches following precisely that route, it was the largest by far that I've seen. After three hours, my group, nowhere near the back of the march, had been able to move only 0.4 miles, from Hyde Park Corner to the start of St James's St

It was only banter. Of course. Snowflake women are easily confused. I remember when my boss wrote me a long, explicit letter. Banter. The work meeting with a man whose opening line was “what are the chances we’ll be rolling around in a hotel room in an hour?” #onlybanter The interviewee who extracted my number from the PR company and wouldn’t stop calling. The colleague who lunged & then accused me of leading him on. The MP who texted about my boots. During Prime Minister’s question time. #onlybanter