Breaking News: U.S. Magazines That Burst Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s Bubble…..Read More

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s U.S. empire has been under mounting pressure in recent years after a series of high profile articles in American magazines.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have long hated the British media and framed their declining popularity in the U.K. as a product of tabloids poisoning the well of public opinion.

However, more recently U.S. magazines have been the outlets throwing the Sussexes into crisis mode, starting in 2022.

The Cut: ‘Meghan of Montecito’
Meghan and Harry were still highly popular in America in 2022 but the first sign the bubble might burst came that August when New York Magazine’s The Cut dispatched Allison P. Davis to Montecito to interview the duchess.

The result was a far cry from the brash hit pieces in U.K. newspapers like The Sun and the Daily Mail but there was a strong sense Davis had chosen not to drink the Kool-Aid.

“She has been media trained and then royal-media trained and sometimes converses like she has a tiny Bachelor producer in her brain directing what she says,” Davis wrote. “At one point in our conversation, instead of answering a question, she will suggest how I might transcribe the noises she’s making: ‘She’s making these guttural sounds, and I can’t quite articulate what it is she’s feeling in that moment because she has no word for it; she’s just moaning.’

At this stage, post-royal, there’s no need for her to hold back. She’s flinging open the proverbial doors to her life; as any millennial woman whose feminism was forged in the girlboss era would understand, she has taken a hardship and turned it into content.”

Another passage read: “Meghan, silenced no more, looks around, making sure nobody (who would be?) is listening in. Then the top-secret drop: ‘I’m getting back … on Instagram,’ she says, her eyes alight and devilish.

This could have been a troll: Delivering a nothing with such gravitas feels as if Meghan, who has been so trolled by the media, is serving it back, just a little. But, as I quickly realize, it is actually news.”

The mismatch between interviewer and interviewee is an interesting one because it speaks to a symptom of Meghan and Harry’s wider malaise.

At times, they have pushed themselves out of the spaces that normally fawn over the royals but without necessarily working out how to appeal to other audiences.

The revelation she was returning to Instagram was indeed a big story for precisely the tabloids Meghan and Harry have been trying to avoid but she perhaps should have known The Cut would expect something of greater substance from a woman who once said she reads The Economist.

Variety: ‘It’s Well Past Time for Harry and Meghan 2.0’
Months later, Meghan and Harry released their first Netflix project, a biopic charting their messy exit from the palace.

It soared to the top of the Netflix rankings globally but again there was a canary in the mine shaft moment when Variety gave it a scathing review.

Andrew Wallenstein, president and chief media analyst of its Intelligence Platform, wrote: “There can only be so many revelations left to share with the public now that the couple have exiled themselves away from their fractious coexistence with the monarchy.

Given that they’ve beaten this horse to death, perhaps this one-trick pony is due for the glue factory.

“Of course, Harry and Meghan would have you believe they are about so much more than their own story.

“The brand they believe they are building through their media company, Archewell Productions, is meant to be about all the social causes and charities they support.

“Their game plan has always been, Come for the sob story, stay for the high-minded uplift. But that’s a shaky strategy for keeping an audience around that probably doesn’t care about anything either of them has to say that isn’t royal gossip.”