Analysis of the News and Social Media Coverage of the British Royal Family: Recollections May Vary

The fascination with the British monarchy, which spans the globe, is particularly visible in the United States. Despite fighting a bloody war to separate themselves from Great Britain, Americans are still heavily obsessed with the British royal family. The interest endures in great part due to the air of mystery and celebrity depicted in media productions as well as real-life events that keep providing media fodder on both sides of the pond. Among the latest and most controversial royal family moments are those regarding Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. This study analyzes the treatment of the Sussexes in the mass media and on social networks by examining the Netflix productions The Crown and the Harry & Meghan docuseries, Meghan Markle’s Spotify podcast, Archetypes, as well as the correlation between articles and interviews in both American and British media and the social media posts. Employing the uses and gratifications theory and the theory of the negativity bias, it aims to demonstrate that the combination of the two approaches can be useful in explaining shifts in media coverage that catered to the needs of media users whose changing gratifications shaped media representations of the ex-royal pair. The analysis reveals how varying reactions pertaining to cultural differences reinforce preexisting attitudes regarding the British royal family in order to expose the gratifications and experiential factors accompanying the participation of individuals in news production and diffusion in large global virtual communities.