News Agency Deems Kensington Palace Untrustworthy After Kate Middleton Photo-Editing Debacle

Kensington Palace, the home of Prince William and Princess Catherine (aka Kate Middleton), has been deemed untrustworthy by a major news agency.

Phil Chetwynd, the global news director of Agence France-Presse (AFP) recently sat down for an interview with BBC Radio 4′s Media Show to discuss how the Princess of Wales’ photo-editing debacle has impacted the level of trust that the media has in the Palace.

If you missed it, press organizations such as the Associated Press issued a mandatory kill order after it was determined that a photo of Princess Catherine with her children was edited.

During the interview, Phil addressed how often publications hope to issue a kill order, in the process comparing the Palace to North Korea and Iran.

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Phil said that the Palace is “absolutely not” a trusted source after this, via Deadline. He continued, explaining, “Like with anything, when you’re let down by a source the bar is raised … We sent out notes to all our teams at the moment to be absolutely super more vigilant about the content coming across our desk — even from what we would call trusted sources.”

A kill order is incredibly rare, with the goal to send one out less than once a year. Previous orders “have been from the North Korean news agency or the Iranian news agency,” Phil said.

He acknowledged that multiple organizations had a conversation about the photo before issuing the kill. The Palace was asked to supply the original, unedited photo and did not.

“One thing that’s really important is you cannot be distorting reality for the public. There’s a question of trust. And the big issue here is one of trust, and the lack of trust and the falling trust of the general public in institutions generally and in the media. And so it’s extremely important that a photo does represent broadly the reality that it’s seen in,” he said.

We have all of the information about the photo editing controversy. New details include how the Princess feels about the situation and why she made edits in the first place.