Meghan Markle Is Losing America's Sympathy

Meghan Markle is once again at the centre of a media storm after a public attack that her supporters say is wildly disproportionate and evidence of racialised bias. However, this familiar story is now taking place on U.S. soil.

The Duchess of Sussex was lumped in by Politico with Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried on a list of "narcissists" who the public have lost interest in.

Boston-based contributor Joanna Weiss wrote the article, which sparked a widespread backlash and was condemned as "demented" and "casual misogynoir" by commentators on social media.

However, while the opinion may sit at the more extreme end of the spectrum, Politico is not the first U.S. publication to criticize the couple's Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan.

Supporters of the couple may wish to defend them in the context of a serious discussion in the show about racism in the media, and conflict in the royal family.

However, in the Sussex camp there may also be genuine reason to seriously consider the reasons why their latest media outing got a different reception to their March 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview.

U.S. Media Reaction to Harry & Meghan on Netflix

Politico's article launched a particularly strong attack on the duchess but it was not the only U.S. publication to make criticisms.

Another significant intervention came from Variety a few days after Part II of Harry & Meghan was released on December 15, containing its allegations of Prince William shouting at Harry during royal exit negotiations.

The article's author, Andrew Wallenstein, president and chief media analyst at Variety Intelligence Platform, wrote: "It's not that Harry and Meghan don't have a story worth telling; the prejudice they faced from the royal family and the British press was awful. But telling the story ad nauseam has diminishing returns.

"At some point, even the dimmest of minds among their fans is going to tire of their 'Oh, woe is us' routine as they play the victim card again and again. That's a tone-deaf message to be sending from their posh Montecito estate at a time of economic insecurity around the world.

"At some point soon, Harry and Meghan need to pivot to something beyond retelling their old plight over and over. It's not as if they're going to have new stories to tell of their days in the U.K. now that they've been largely cut off from the monarchy."

Variety's intervention is particularly significant because Meghan gave the magazine an exclusive interview as recently as October 2022.

Meanwhile, a review in The Wall Street Journal described Part I of the show as a "royal pity party" while The Hollywood Reporter suggested "what it does not turn out to be is essential."

Its article stated: "When a subject declares that they've never been 'allowed' to tell their side before, a viewer might reasonably expect what follows to yield unanticipated details or novel insights.

"Yet, despite extensive interviews with the couple both together and separately, despite never-before-seen footage of their private lives, Harry & Meghan offers too little that feels fresh enough to merit its luxurious six-episode sprawl for all but the most fervent royal watchers."

How Netflix Reaction Differs to the Oprah Winfrey Interview

It all adds up to a very different response when compared to the American reaction to the Oprah Winfrey interview, in March 2021, which revealed for the first time that Meghan had experienced suicidal thoughts while a working royal.

She also accused an unnamed royal of "concerns and conversations about how dark" her unborn baby's "skin might be when he's born."

At the time, Bethenny Frankel, star of The Real Housewives of New York City, was bounced into an apology having been dismissive in a tweet posted the day before broadcast.

She initially wrote: "Cry me a river...the plight of being a game show host, fairly unknown actress, to suffering in a palace, w tiaras & 7 figure weddings for TWO WHOLE YEARS to being a household name w @Oprah on speed dial, fetching 7 m for interviews, hundreds of millions in media deals."

After the interviewed aired on CBS she said that "emotional distress & racism must feel suffocating & powerless," and added: "I'm sorry if it hurt or offended you."

Since Oprah, however, Frankel's public statements about Meghan have returned to somewhere far closer to her original position.

The star criticized Meghan numerous times in multiple viral TikToks, most recently saying the Netflix show was "like a smash and grab job for money" in a post liked more than 126,000 times.

In September, she said: "She got out of something that was a terrible situation for her and she just, she really is f****** it up. And I remember talking about this before the Oprah interview and getting death threats and losing major deals and having many A-list people text me saying that they agree with me secretly but then friends of hers text me 'please take down what you said.'"

Whatever regret Frankel faced at the time, the atmosphere appears to have changed to the point that she is not now a lone voice of dissent.

Criticism of Harry and Meghan from the American right dates back longer than Oprah to the summer of 2020 and the couple's comments on the U.S. presidential election.

However, since the Oprah interview, a different story has slowly emerged of a growing willingness to mock or criticize them, within a wider cross section of American society.

Harry and Meghan have been ripped on Saturday Night Live, most recently by comedian Martin Short, who days after Part I dropped told Steve Martin on air: "You know Steve, we are like Harry and Meghan. No one's rooting for us but you'll tune in to watch anyway."

The Cut also poked fun at Meghan during an August 2022 cover interview, observing that she "sometimes converses like she has a tiny 'Bachelor' producer in her brain directing what she says."

It added: "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.'"

Prince Harry, Meghan Markle and the British Media

One recurring theme of Harry and Meghan's relationship with the U.K. is that—whether there are legitimate criticisms to make or not—invariably a commentator will pop up willing to say something outrageous enough to bring the glare of public anger back onto the media.

Most recently, Jeremy Clarkson, host of Amazon original series The Grand Tour, sparked an outcry after writing in The Sun that he was "dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, 'Shame!' and throw lumps of excrement at her."

He said he hated her on a "cellular level," unlike convicted British serial killer Rose West.

The British media has been accused of extreme takes on the couple since the very start of their relationship but British public opinion has been more complicated.

The Sussexes told Oprah Winfrey a pivotal moment came towards the end of 2018 with an article accusing Meghan of making Kate cry, sparking an avalanche of negative media commentary which by January 2019 had left Meghan feeling suicidal.

It continued throughout that year and Meghan would later tell the Teenager Therapy podcast she was the most trolled person in 2019 and that it was "almost unsurvivable."

However, she remained popular with the British public during that time, with a YouGov poll that October suggesting 55 percent of U.K. adults liked her.

That all changed after Harry and Meghan quit the royal family in January 2020 and Meghan is now disliked by two thirds of Britain.

In other words, it is possible to be trashed in the media and remain popular, but it is far from guaranteed.

Comparisons Between America and Britain

Meghan is currently less popular in America than Prince William, Kate Middleton and Prince Harry, according to polling for Newsweek.

In fact, a smaller percentage of Americans (43 percent) like Meghan now than British people in October 2019 (55 percent), the year of media hostility.

The Sussexes still enjoy far more support in the U.S. than in Britain but if American public opinion were to go the way of the U.K. polls the crisis for Harry and Meghan would be greater than the prospect of being unpopular.

A key part of their narrative is that they had to leave Britain for the safety of America due to the U.K's notoriously hostile and unfair media, yet that narrative of British tabloid exceptionalism is conditional on the America media treating them better.

In the early days of their royal relationship, when the media criticized the duchess, she had a loyal fanbase, now known as the Sussex Squad, who would take to social media to defend her in outspoken terms.

In February 2019, five of her friends anonymously gave interviews to People to defend her, and in September that year Harry and Meghan began to defend themselves through their British legal team, suing several newspapers.

When Meghan was accused of bullying her staff days before Oprah, her celebrity friends came out to defend her publicly and during the interview itself the couple defended themselves.

Between that interview, reportedly three hours and twenty minutes long before the edit, and the six one-hour episodes on Netflix, they have had more than nine hours in which to tell their story—and Harry's memoir Spare is just around the corner set for release in January 2023.

They also spoke about the media and the royals in Apple TV series The Me You Can't See, released in May 2021.

But based on polling, now on both sides of the Atlantic, vigorous public defense of the couple has not, seemingly, irradicated public criticism and the cotton wool in which they were protectively wrapped in the days after Oprah appears to have dissolved.

The temptation may be to see Politico's article as vindication of the long held belief that the couple's problems arise from an unfair and unbalanced media, not from their own strategy and messaging.

However, if in reality there are underlying problems with the way Harry and Meghan have presented their narrative then to ignore those problems could lead to real life consequences for the Sussexes and their commercial success as Netflix producers and Spotify podcasters in a competitive media landscape and on the cusp of a global recession.