Word: royalism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...council also took note of the increasingly strained relations between the royal family and Britain's newspapers, took both sides to task for this state of affairs. It suggested "an improvement in the quality and the supply of news" from the palace, urged newspapers not only to handle news of the crown "with discretion," but to stop paying palace servants for "offensive trivia." The Mirror, world's biggest daily (circ. 4,649,696) promptly snapped back at the "pompous" council for talking "nonsense...
Bumbling Officials. Only two months ago the Mirror had delivered its own prognosis of the press-palace rift in a three-part series that reproached the royal family for "aloofness." Chided the Mirror: "This should have been the age when kings mixed with commoners, when pomp shaved off its whiskers and came down to the people. Unhappily, this is still the age of golden cobwebs...
Most British newsmen agree that the royal family, now almost openly hostile to the press, is at least partly to blame. Royal public relations are handled through a Press Secretariat whose tight-lipped refusal to discuss even a Balmoral barbecue forces newsmen to patch up stories from gossip, invention and half-truth. Important royal events outside the palace, complain reporters, are usually handled by bumbling local officials. Only when newsmen threatened to boycott Princess Margaret's recent African tour in mid-trip was she allowed to make news by mingling with the natives, thus realize the tour...
...Britain's newspapers are still widely torn between deference and defiance in chronicling the crown. Last year, the lip-smacking Mirror gave almost a whole page to a peekaboo shot of Princess Margaret, in a low-necked gown, stooping to receive a bouquet. In the venerable Times, the royal cleavage, chastely camouflaged with an artist's airbrush, was squeezed into a single inside column...
Mike Williams-Thompson, a longtime government information officer, argued in a recent book that royal public relations should be taken away from courtiers ("men with built-in sneers"), entrusted to expert publicists. If press-palace relations continue to deteriorate, he warned, the crown cannot long "survive as a symbol of permanence in an all too swiftly changing world...