Episode 6: Meghan Markle Pregnancy Truthers
While the rest of the world speculated over Kate Middleton’s whereabouts this spring, why was an old conspiracy theory about the Meghan Markle suddenly trending on X (formerly Twitter)? Royal reporter Ellie Hall unravels the YouTube community committed to exposing their “Duchess of Deception,” from claims that Meghan faked her pregnancies to masterminding the #WhereIsKate PR crisis. Scholar Moya Bailey also connects the dots between the misogynoir targeting Meghan, Serena Williams’ life-threatening childbirth and everyday Black women’s pregnancy experiences.
Read the episode 6 transcript.
guests:
Ellie Hall is a freelance reporter and royal correspondent. She covered the royal family for BuzzFeed News from 2013 until the newsroom shut down in April 2023. She is based in Washington, D.C. See her recent work at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab and The Cut and follow her on Twitter/X: @ellievhall.
Moya Bailey is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University and is the founder of the Digital Apothecary and co-founder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice, and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021).
sources:
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