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Meghan Markle receives much more negative coverage than Kate Middleton.

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News Desk

Updated on March 27, 2021

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According to a recent study, Meghan Markle can’t get a break in the British press and gets a lot more flak than her sister-in-law Kate Middleton.

The Guardian’s review of over 800 articles about the Duchess of Sussex published in 14 British newspapers found twice as many negative articles as positive. 43% were negative, 20% were positive, and 36% were neutral.

Just 8% of headlines about Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, were negative in a similar search.

The stories spanned from Markle’s wedding to Prince Harry in May 2018 to the middle of January 2019.

The findings are similar to those of Brandwatch, which found that 72 percent of the 29,000 articles about Markle published in 2019 were negative, whereas only 31% of the 14,000 reports about Middleton were critical.

The Duchess of Sussex has been forthright about the negative press’s effect on her health. A reporter asked if she was “not really okay, as in it’s really been a struggle?” in footage from the documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey.
“Thank you for asking,” she said in the same interview, “because not many people have asked if I’m okay.”

On the other hand, Prince Harry has been especially vocal about the “relentless propaganda.” “I’ve seen what happens when someone I love is commoditized to the point that they are no longer treated or seen as a real person,” he wrote in an open letter published on the Sussex Royal website in October. “I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.”