Harry and Meghan’s Media Choices

It’s been about two weeks since The Hollywood Reporter published a report on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle about “Why Hollywood Keeps Quitting [Them]”. Many took this to be a hit piece, focusing on staff departures, with unnamed sources sh-tting on their leadership style and, in particular, Meghan described as a “dictator in high heels”. It’s giving Daily Mail energy but the problem for the Sussexes is that The Hollywood Reporter isn’t a tabloid, it’s a Hollywood trade, and Harry and Meghan are doing business in Hollywood now and a lot of people in Hollywood read and work with THR. While most celebrities can ignore the Daily Mail because so many of us know about their f-ckery, it’s a different story with The Hollywood Reporter. So it’s been interesting to see how Harry and Meghan have responded to THR. And, frankly, they’ve made some odd choices. 

First there was that story in GB News, of all places. About a week after THR’s article went out, GB News had an exclusive rebuttal. 

“GB News has been handed an absolute denial of the allegations - as well as Meghan's message to her employees - and has confirmed with several current staffers that the "Duchess Difficult" moniker has never been used. 

One Archewell source, who asked not to be named, said: "These quotes were fabricated by someone lacking knowledge of our company.

"The duke and duchess work from Montecito, and we're based in Hollywood. 

"They likely think we're all in the same office and that this quote would fly, but the circumstances don't even allow for it.

"If she's 'marching around' and 'barking orders', no Archewell employee could factually claim that... It's total nonsense."

The Duchess of Sussex had also been targeted by claims that she had filed "angry" 5am emails to employees.

In response, another source said: "Who hasn't sent an email when they can't sleep or are awake early?

"I've never once ever gotten an email from either of them at that hour - and even if I did, the duchess specifically notes in her email signature that everyone has a different working day, and to not feel obligated to respond outside of normal business hours.

"These source quotes don't make any sense!"

In another condemnation of the claims, GB News understands that Meghan's email signature contains the phrase: "My working day may not be your working day. Please do not feel obliged to reply to this email outside your normal working hours."

On any regular day, I wouldn’t bother reading anything from GB News, especially as it relates to the Sussexes. But somehow they were able to get information about Meghan’s email signature, and that’s the detail that suggests that they did indeed have a good source or good sources who may have been authorised to place these quotes which, again, is baffling because… GB News is super problematic; they’ve been called out many times by Ofcom for breaching broadcasting standards and have, in the past, aired racist and misogynistic coverage of Harry and Meghan and have regularly invited unhinged Harry and Meghan haters to be on their shows to double down on even more heinous rhetoric. 

Still, even if you’re giving Harry and Meghan the benefit of the doubt that they did not authorise those quotes to GB News and that the network was pulling their pro-Sussex reporting out of its ass (which would be a dramatic unprompted pivot for them), there’s also the new Us Weekly cover story. 

It was a major exclusive for Us Weekly yesterday when they released their new issue that includes five former and current staffers on the record disputing the claims put forward in The Hollywood Reporter. And that certainly is a strong response to THR’s piece since THR’s sources were anonymous and Us Weekly was able to actually put names to their quotes. 

This, of course, is a better look than GB News but there are still … questions, questions from the media angle and why Harry and Meghan made such a curious choice in Us Weekly. So now we have to talk about Us Weekly. 

Us Weekly in the 2000s and early 2010s was a major challenger to PEOPLE Magazine. This was the Janice Min era, and they had good gossip reporters breaking good stories, legit stories. Janice would (ironically?) go on to reshape The Hollywood Reporter after she left Us Weekly. For a few years after Janice left, Us Weekly was able to maintain its standards but it started falling apart in the mid-2010s with budget cuts and buyouts and, up until VERY recently, Us Weekly was pretty trash, much closer to InTouch and Life & Style than what it used to be. It’s basically been a whole decade since Us Weekly was taken seriously. 

This summer, though, a major editorial change happened after Dan Wakeford become editor-in-chief. After starting his career on the more tabloidy side of entertainment reporting, Dan Wakeford was editor-in-chief at PEOPLE and worked on the editorial team at Entertainment Weekly. Which means he should have good contacts in the business. In addition to Dan Wakeford, former Us Weekly writers and reporters from during the magazine’s better days have returned to the publication, like Brody Brown and Justin Ravitz who co-reported this new Us Weekly story about Harry and Meghan. 

Us Weekly, then, seems to be returning to its former editorial approach, aiming to separate itself from the trash mags and get into respectability. Which is great, but they’re still in the infancy of this reset. This pivot is freshhhhh and Us Weekly’s reputation is not yet, not even close, to where they need it to be. Which brings us back to Harry and Meghan. 

It’s understandable that they’d want to address that negative piece in The Hollywood Reporter by placing a more positive counterresponse in another publication. But… GB News and now Us Weekly are not on the same level as The Hollywood Reporter. Us Weekly eventually, over time, will get to the place it’s striving for, with more accurate reporting and exclusives and breaking stories, but right now, in media circles, that shift hasn’t happened yet. And that’s why people in media circles are head-scratching this move by Harry and Meghan. Why did they counter The Hollywood Reporter with… Us Weekly? The Hollywood Reporter to Us Weekly would be like being on a game show and your opponent using their phone-a-friend to call Christiane Amanpour and you decide to hit up Piers Morgan. Like being on Lip Sync Battle and you just watched your competitor bring out Beyoncé as your guest and you decide to match up with Katy Perry. 

It's especially weird considering it’s not like there wouldn’t be other options available to Harry and Meghan, right? That’s the question that people in media that I’ve talked to are asking. Why wouldn’t they take this exclusive to, say, PEOPLE. Or Vanity Fair. Or Puck. Other publications that are more on the level with The Hollywood Reporter? Was Us Weekly their first choice? Think of how a publicist would operate, and publicists SHOULD know this game. If you’re clapping back at THR, do you call your contacts at PEOPLE/Vanity Fair/Variety/The Wrap/Puck etc? Or do you call Us Weekly? If Us Weekly wasn’t the first choice, how far down the line would Us Weekly have been…? What does it mean that this exclusive landed at Us Weekly and NOT elsewhere? 

The goal with this exclusive and all of the Sussex staffers presenting a more flattering portrait of what it’s like to work for Harry and Meghan, is to challenge THR’s story, correct the impression of them that THR put out there, not just to the public but to people IN Hollywood who Harry and Meghan might be working with. So what we’re doing here is assessing the effectiveness of that strategy. How effective is the strategy when people in the industry aren’t just reading the details in the story but kinda side-eyeing WHERE the story showed up? 

Let's break it down together at The Squawk. (app link here)