Public faith in the royal family has seemingly been dwindling ever since a doctored photo of Kate Middleton smiling alongside her children was released on Sunday for the UK’s Mother’s Day.
The snapshot featured the Princess of Wales, 42 — who is currently still recovering from her abdominal surgery she underwent in January — and her kids Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, 8, and Prince Louis, 5.
Although most royal photos go viral for good reasons, this one made headlines for Photoshop mistakes.
After the photo was removed from several news agencies, including Reuters and the Associated Press due to its obvious engineering, the AFP news agency has claimed that Kensington Palace cannot be a “trusted source” of information.
Phil Chetwynd, the global news director of Agence France-Presse (AFP), appeared on BBC Radio 4’s “Media Show” recently, and noted that the royal residence is “absolutely not” a reliable place.
The snap raised “major issues” and should not have been approved to use to begin with as it “violated” the AFP’s rules, Chetwynd said, according to Deadline.
“Like with anything, when you’re let down by a source, the bar is raised,” he explained.
“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,” Chetwynd said.
“To kill something on the basis of manipulation [is rare],” he went on, add that the occurrence goes down “once a year maybe, I hope less.”
On Monday, kill notices were sent out to press outlets.
“At closer inspection, it appears that the source has manipulated the image,” a statement from the Associated Press read.
Agencies then asked the Palace to provide the original image, but they refused to do so.
“You cannot be distorting reality for the public,” Chetwynd went on. “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.”
Middleton later apologized for the editing issues of the photo, which was taken by Prince William.
She wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) on March 11: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”