1092810

research-article2022
CUS0010.1177/17499755221092810Cultural SociologyClancy

Article
Cultural Sociology

‘If You Move in the Same

1­–20
© The Author(s) 2022

Circles as the Royals, then Article reuse guidelines:

You’ll Get Stories About sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755221092810
DOI: 10.1177/17499755221092810
Them’: Royal Correspondents, journals.sagepub.com/home/cus

Cultural Intermediaries and

Class

Laura Clancy
Lancaster University, UK

Abstract
This article analyses the cultural politics of the Royal Correspondent: journalists who specialise
in reporting news on the British royal family. It draws on in-depth interviews with Royal
Correspondents and a broader understanding of royal news production, to position Royal
Correspondents as cultural intermediaries. Pierre Bourdieu described cultural intermediaries
as ‘taste-makers’ with influence over the construction of, and responses to, forms of culture
(1984). This cultural intermediary role is significantly classed, where it is Royal Correspondents
who demonstrate the appropriate ‘capital’ (Bourdieu, 1984) who get access to the most
exclusive stories. The research finds that, because of the general secrecy around royal news,
Royal Correspondents rely heavily upon elite networks and contacts, a practice that produces
‘homophilic’ (Fincham, 2019) tendencies in reporting as well as a hierarchical and nepotistic
structure based around those with the most exclusive access. This creates intersectional classed
inequalities between those Royal Correspondents who have elite contacts and work for elite
institutions, and those who do not. Such exceptionality in access to royal news means that
Royal Correspondents are not necessarily disturbing the ideological bases of monarchical power.
Rather, they function in service of reproducing the classed power of the monarchical institution.

Keywords
cultural intermediaries, monarchy, news production, Royal Correspondents, social class

Corresponding author:
Dr Laura Clancy, Sociology Department, Lancaster University, Bowland North, Lancaster, LA1 4YW, UK.
Email: [email protected]
2 Cultural Sociology 00(0)

Introduction
Royal Correspondents are journalists who specialise in reporting on monarchy. In the
UK, many mainstream media outlets have a designated Royal Correspondent to report on
the British monarchy, including broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV, Channel 5, ITN and
Sky News; news agencies such as Press Association; newspapers such as the Mail, the
Mirror, the Sun, The Times, the Telegraph, the Express and the Evening Standard; and
magazines such as Hello!, OK!, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. Some international
outlets, such as Yahoo and CNN (at CNN they have a ‘Royal Commentator’, although
the job is essentially the same) also have a Royal Correspondent. Many of these Royal
Correspondents are also called upon to offer commentary on the British royal family in
international contexts, in television, radio and news appearances. Some have become
well-known in their own right, for example Jennie Bond was BBC News Royal
Correspondent for 14 years (1989–2003), before undertaking a number of media appear-
ances as a celebrity, such as being a contestant on the reality television show I’m a
Celebrity. . . Get Me Out of Here in 2004.
Despite the ubiquity of the Royal Correspondent in the UK media landscape, in aca-
demic terms, the role remains remarkably invisible to critical analysis. There have been
no academic studies of the Royal Correspondent: who they are, what they do, and what
this means in terms of media, culture, and ideology. This reflects a dearth of critical
analysis of the British royal family more broadly, which my previous research has sought
to address (Clancy, 2021). This article seeks to draw attention to the Royal Correspondent,
and consider the cultural politics of the role in the context of journalistic practices. More
specifically, this article positions Royal Correspondents as cultural intermediaries: those
whom Pierre Bourdieu (1984) described as ‘taste-makers’ with influence over the con-
struction of, and responses to, forms of culture. This cultural intermediary role is, as I
will show, significantly classed, where it is Royal Correspondents who demonstrate the
appropriate ‘capital’ (Bourdieu, 1984) to access the most exclusive stories about the elite
institution of monarchy.
This article argues that Royal Correspondents construct multiple forms of legitimacy
and value around the institution of monarchy, anchored to their role as a classed cultural
intermediary. On a simplistic level, just the very presence of Royal Correspondents in
major news organisations gives the British monarchy value. Royal Correspondents stand
alongside other key specialist correspondents: the Foreign Correspondent, or the Political
Correspondent. Their presence gives royal news comparable legitimacy to these other
facets of inter/national news, and institutionalises royalty as part of our regular news
cycle. As Ana Alacovska and Dave O’Brien argue, ‘genres are categories that help com-
municate value and legitimacy to audiences and markets’ (2021: 644). The genre of royal
news is given legitimacy by the presence of the Royal Correspondent, who as a cultural
intermediary gatekeeps the boundaries of the genre, and constructs what we see, hear and
understand about royal news.
Historically, the hiring of Royal Correspondents was influenced by the monarchy
itself. In her memoir, Jennie Bond recounts the story of former BBC ‘Court Correspondent’
(the former name for Royal Correspondents) Godfrey Talbot, who ‘was summoned to
Buckingham Palace and ushered in for an audience with King George VI and Queen
Clancy 3

Elizabeth before the final seal was put on his job’ (2001: 17). Meanwhile, Joan Reeder is
considered the first Royal Correspondent to work for a national newspaper, the Daily
Mirror, after the Second World War, covering George VI’s death and Elizabeth II’s coro-
nation (Cardiff University Archives, 2022). As I will argue, while Royal Correspondents
are no longer officially approved by the monarchy, they continue to gatekeep royal news
through the formal and informal arrangements of royal news reporting, which are often
based around interrelationships, networking and contacts between elite sources, particu-
larly revolving around social class.
Drawing on three in-depth interviews with Royal Correspondents, as well as visual
and discourse analysis of texts written by and about Royal Correspondents, and a broader
understanding of royal news production (Clancy, 2021), this article seeks to understand
what the production of royal news looks like. The article begins with a literature review
about the relationships between the media and the monarchy, and cultural intermediaries
and journalism, before summarising the research methods used in data collection. I then
consider the role of capital and privilege in accessing royal news. Following this, I
explore elite sources and social networks, before connecting to concepts of ‘homophily’
(Fincham, 2019). I conclude by addressing what an analysis of the Royal Correspondent
can reveal to us about royal news production.

The Media and the Monarchy

The relationship between the monarchy and the media has existed for as long as monar-
chy itself. Historical monarchies were mediated through portraiture and coins (Sharpe,
2009), Queen Victoria was the first to feature in newsreels (Plunkett, 2003), 20th-century
monarchs used mass-produced portraits as souvenirs (Owens, 2019), and the contempo-
rary monarchy uses social media to communicate with its subjects (Clancy, 2021). As I
have argued elsewhere (Clancy, 2021), in an age where the sovereign no longer rules by
divine right, media culture is the key site for the reproduction of public consent for mon-
archy’s power. This can be seen in media representations of the monarchy as a royal
family: for example, Prince William and Kate Middleton’s family as an idealised, nuclear
family unit. The important role of the media in reproducing the contemporary monarchy
has been explored in popular biography (Pimlott, 2012) and critical analysis (Blain and
O’Donnell, 2003; Nairn, 1994; Otnes and MacLaran, 2015)
Royal Correspondents are a small, although important, group of those who report on
monarchy. All journalists, from Royal Correspondents to opinion columnists to news
editors, write pieces about royals, and the monarchy is big business for media outlets,
with public interest still high. According to BBC News, in the first week of March 2021
during the period when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah
Winfrey aired, 25,894 articles were published online about Markle (Taylor, 2021). In
addition, there is a history of royal figures being exploited by media institutions to capi-
talise on their popularity. Princess Diana’s life and death was hyper-mediated, to the
point that the paparazzi were blamed for her death in a car crash in Paris in 1997
(Hindman, 2003; Merrin, 1999). More recently, as part of a set of claimants citing illegal
phone hacking, Prince Harry is pursuing court cases against tabloids the Sun, News of the
World and the Daily Mirror for hacking his phone and illegally obtaining private
4 Cultural Sociology 00(0)

messages (Siddique and Waterson, 2021). Meanwhile, Meghan Markle won a case in
2021 against Associated Newspapers Limited for publishing a ‘personal and private’ let-
ter she wrote to her father, Thomas Markle, in the Mail on Sunday (Davies, 2021). Markle
called out ‘deception, intimidation, and calculated attacks’ in the tabloid treatment of her
(Davies, 2021), and in her interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, specifically identified
the racist and sexist coverage in the British tabloid media as a reason for her resignation
from the monarchy (CBS, 2021).
There is an important distinction to make between some of these stories and Royal
Correspondents. A Royal Correspondent did not, for example, write the original stories
about Meghan Markle’s letter to her father. This is not to suggest that Royal Correspondents
have never sought to exploit royals for stories, but rather to specify that not all royal sto-
ries are written by Royal Correspondents. In an interview, the Sun journalist Dan Wootton
(Harry, Meghan and the Media, 2022) claimed Royal Correspondents are limited in what
they can report because they can’t ‘cover the story as honestly as an outsider’ as they
‘might be shunned’ by royal Communications Officers and not get access to royal events
again. Meanwhile, in their interview with Oprah Winfrey (CBS, 2021), Prince Harry and
Meghan Markle identified what they called an ‘invisible contract’ between the media and
the monarchy, whereby choreographed public exposure to royals is offered in return for
privacy at other moments. One example of this might be the so-called ‘pressure cooker
agreement,’ where royal officials negotiated a deal to have the paparazzi leave Princes
William and Harry alone during their education, in return for intermittent occasions when
they would stage photograph opportunities (such as William’s 18th birthday at Eton
College) (Clancy, 2021). I explore these claims about ‘agreements’ between Royal
Correspondents and royals in a separate article (Clancy, forthcoming). For the purposes of
this piece, what matters is the specific role of the Royal Correspondent within the context
of royal news production, and within journalistic practice more broadly. I am interested in
what the Royal Correspondent symbolises; what this might tell us about their role in royal
reporting; and how describing them as a cultural intermediary is useful in order to under-
stand the implications of their position within an elite social class.

Journalists as Classed Cultural Intermediaries

In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu describes cultural intermediaries as encompassing ‘all
the occupations involving presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising,
public relations, fashion, decoration and so forth)’ (1984: 359). Cultural intermediaries
are ‘taste makers’ or ‘cultural authorit[ies]’ (Nixon and Du Gay, 2002: 497) who influ-
ence norms and tastes by selling products and setting cultural boundaries. Jennifer Smith
Maguire and Julian Matthews describe the cultural intermediary’s role as ‘framing’:
‘they construct value, by framing how others . . . engage with goods, affecting and
effecting others’ orientations towards those goods as legitimate’ (2012: 552). Cultural
intermediaries therefore have an ‘expert orientation’ in their field, and their degree of
expertise is necessarily dependent on ‘market context’, where they will have greater
legitimation in specific fields (Maguire and Matthews, 2014: 2). Their ‘expertise’ means
their ‘framing’ of goods appears authentic and aspirational, influencing how audiences
engage with the representations.
Clancy 5

‘The journalist’ is one such example, particularly a journalist who works in a specific,
specialised field because of the connotations of expertise (Archetti, 2012; Mellor, 2008;
Tunstall, 1976), such as the Royal Correspondent. Maureen Mahon suggests that journal-
ists ‘conceptualize, construct, and transmit meaningful cultural forms’ and in so doing
‘construct, articulate, and disseminate ideologies about identity, community, difference,
nation, and politics, and with their impact on social relations, social formation, and social
meanings’ (2000: 468–469). Journalists gather, piece together, edit and disseminate news
stories in particular ways, often according to ideological positions. This is built into the
very name: a Royal Correspondent will produce, and is assumed to have authentic
knowledge of, royal news.
By considering the journalist as a cultural intermediary, we can understand how their
construction of news is dependent upon ‘how such activities will vary according to the
conditions and networks in which [journalists] work’ (Matthews, 2014: 146). That is, the
stories they get and the news they produce is contingent upon their access to sources and
their ability to build these sources into digestible stories. Mark Banks’ (2017: 43) work
on the cultural industries has described how cultural workers ‘invest their work with
varied purposes, intentions and meanings’. Stuart Hall (1985: 101) argues that journalists
are ‘inscribed by an ideology to which they do not consciously commit themselves, and
which, instead, “writes them”’: from, for example, the influence of their place of work.
Hall uses Gramscian concepts of ‘hegemony’ and ‘producing consent’ to consider how
news values ‘naturalise’ the views of powerful elites, who largely control news cycles
(Hall, 1973). Therefore, the ‘legitimiz[ing] hierarchies of taste’ of cultural intermediaries
‘ultimately serve different forms of institutional power’ (Cronin and Edwards, 2021: 4).
There is some debate over the classed dimension of cultural intermediaries. Research
has explored the role of intermediaries in enabling, facilitating and legitimating ‘elite’
lifestyles through organisational practices, for example by operating as agents or fund
managers (Davies, 2017; Yee Koh and Wissink, 2018). Peter Conlin has critiqued work
which positions cultural intermediaries as a privileged class, and instead suggests they
are a ‘precarious educated working class’ (2015: 270) seeking upward social mobility. In
this article, I want to show how some Royal Correspondents are shaped as cultural inter-
mediaries in part by their perceived proximity to the bastion of the upper-classes, the
monarchy, where one key reason they are in their jobs is because they themselves fit the
class profile of this upper-class group. To use Bourdieusian terms, they have the habitus
with which to pass. At the same time, despite their class privilege, they will never be as
privileged as the objects of their study. They are working in service of reproducing a
classed institution, while always trying to ‘fit’ into that lifestyle themselves in order to
get access to sources.
In Media Rituals, Nick Couldry proposes ‘the myth of the mediated centre’: ‘the
belief, or assumption, that there is a centre to the social world, and that, in some sense,
the media speaks ‘for’ that centre’ (2002: 2). There is an assumption that the media acts
as a ‘social frame’ of what is happening in society, and media gives us access to the ‘cen-
tre’. Elsewhere, I have argued (Clancy, 2021) that the monarchy can be considered as
part of this ‘centre’, as spectacular royal events and the ubiquity of representations of the
royal family mean the monarchy is ‘centred’ in understandings of British society. This is
not an accidental process, rather monarchy’s ‘centring’ is actively reproduced in and by
6 Cultural Sociology 00(0)

media culture. I want to argue here that it is the Royal Correspondents’ job to broker
access to that ‘centre’. Through their journalistic practices and the challenges associated
with this, which I will outline later, they are the intermediation of royal news for the
public: from the ‘centre’ out.

Research Methods Qualitative Methodology Sample

This article follows a mixed-methods approach of in-depth interviews with Royal
Correspondents, as well as visual and discourse analysis of texts written by and about
Royal Correspondents and a broader understanding of royal news production. Data about
Royal Correspondents is available from public sources: online (in blog posts, news arti-
cles), on social media (many Royal Correspondents have a Twitter account), and in pub-
lished texts. For example, Jennie Bond published the memoir Reporting Royalty (2001)
and Dickie Arbiter published On Duty with the Queen (2014), both of which are autobio-
graphical accounts of life as a Royal Correspondent. Likewise, there are various accounts
of royal news production more broadly, such as the BBC documentary series’ Reinventing
the Royals (BBC, 2015) and The Princes and the Press (BBC, 2021), and the latter’s sister
podcast Harry, Meghan and the Media (Harry, Meghan and the Media, 2022). These are
useful for what they reveal about day-to-day Royal Correspondent work. Some Royal
Correspondents have published books which discuss the monarchy more generally; for
example, Robert Jobson, the Royal Editor at the Evening Standard, has published a number
of popular books providing profiles of various royals (2021). These have been discounted
from my analysis, as I am interested in accounts of the work of royal reporting rather than
biographies of royals. Due to the secrecy around royal reporting, as I explore in this article,
the published accounts of doing this work are limited. This is, itself, interesting given the
extreme visibility of their reporting work versus the invisibility of how this work is under-
taken. It should be noted that this secrecy around the work of royal reporting is mirrored
within the institution too: tight non-disclosure agreements mean staff working for the mon-
archy cannot readily share their experiences (Clancy, 2021). Of the texts I sourced, I under-
took thematic analysis, looking first for moments where the practicalities of making royal
news was described (rather than, for example, anecdotes about meeting individual royals),
and then breaking these down into subsections to find similarities and differences.
Due to the secrecy around royal reporting, in order to try to understand their work I
undertook semi-structured phone interviews with three Royal Correspondents in mid-
2020. Access to Royal Correspondents was always going to be a challenge. Researching
journalists constitutes what Hanne Bruun refers to as ‘elite interviewing’ (2016: 131),
where the power imbalances between the researcher and the participant are flipped from
the usual position where the researcher has ‘superiority’. Participants in elite interview-
ing can be understood as ‘powerful gatekeepers of information or holders of information
on the processes within and the workings of organizational structures’ (Bruun, 2016:
132; see also Conti and Neil, 2007). As gatekeepers – or, indeed, cultural intermediaries
– Royal Correspondents are in a position of power (Maguire and Matthews, 2014).
Of the 30 past and present Royal Correspondents I identified to contact, I secured
10% of these interviews. Small sample sizes can be useful for qualitative research, as it
allows for a close reading of the interview material. As Mira Crouch and Heather
 Clancy 7

McKenzie argue, for ‘depth’ of understanding, contextualising, and theorising interview

data, ‘it is much more important for the research to be intensive’ over a small sample size
(2006: 494). Combining my interviews with mixed-method analysis of the texts about
Royal Correspondents means I can contextualise the accounts I received within broader
discourses about and by Royal Correspondents, while undertaking a close, in-depth anal-
ysis of the stories they told in the interviews. Of course, there may well be differences
between my interviews and the published texts given that the latter are written for public
consumption, whereas my interviews (and particularly the Royal Correspondents who
have remained anonymous) were off the record. I have tried to remain mindful of this
where relevant.
My three interviews lasted between 30-60 minutes, and I asked the Royal
Correspondents about their working practices, their day-to-day activities, and their feel-
ings on royal news production more broadly. The participants were given the option of
remaining anonymous in the data. One chose to remain identifiable, who will be referred
Anonymous
to by name: Stephen Bates, former Royal Correspondent at the Guardian. Two chose to
remain anonymous, and due to the limited pool of Royal Correspondents in the UK, I
will not categorise these participants by any demographic information as this risks iden-
tifying them; rather they will be referred to here as RC1 and RC2. Gareth Rice argues
that researchers must develop an ‘elasticity of positionality’ (2010: 72) to deal with the
complexities of ‘studying up’ and any specific concerns raised by participants. I gave my
participants the opportunity to read the transcripts of the interviews, and they had two
weeks to request the removal of any data they did not want included in the study. While
this meant that I lost some relevant data, it gave elite interviewees some control over
their representation to mitigate concerns about reputational damage.

‘Capital’ and Privilege in Accessing Royal News

It is first worth noting that multiple Royal Correspondents said they did not ‘set out’ at
the beginning of their journalist career to become a Royal Correspondent, and indeed
many started off as general reporters before moving across to royal reporting, often by
chance. Jennie Bond (2001: 3) writes that ‘it wasn’t a post I’d ever sought or even con-
sidered’ before the BBC offered her the opportunity, RC1 said ‘I was a reporter and then
an opportunity came up to move into royals and I took it’, and RC2 said ‘I have more
experience as a journalist as opposed to being a Royal Correspondent’. This suggests that
there is no ‘training’ for the Royal Correspondent role as such, rather it is an extension
and a specialty of journalism more broadly, particularly current affairs. As RC2 said,
‘once you specialize and once you’re used to having a patch’ (in this case they started in
local news, as opposed to, as they say, ‘just sort of covering anything’) ‘you can transfer
that skill to anything’. It is just a case of ‘learn[ing] the facts of things’ and ‘work[ing]
out the logistics’ of a new ‘patch’. In this way, the role of Royal Correspondent is posi-
tioned as a specialty within broader logistics of journalism, drawing on the skillsets of
other journalist roles. Valentine Low, Royal Correspondent for The Times, interpreted
this as a political necessity (2021): ‘no one ever sets out to be a Royal Correspondent’
and if they did ‘they are quite clearly far too interested in the royals and therefore in
danger of becoming a full-blooded sycophant’. This proposes a level of critique and
8 Cultural Sociology 00(0)

objectivity in royal reporting, where Low considers Royal Correspondents to be tasked

with maintaining a critical distance from the royal family. As he goes on to say, ‘the day
the royals think that they can rely on you to say the right thing is the day you have ceased
to be a proper journalist’.
I am not here to dispute the ideological positionality of individual Royal
Correspondents. However, it is in the interests of this article to address the structural
inequalities and ideologies which constitute the Royal Correspondent role. Despite a
distinct lack of choreographed career trajectory amongst some Royal Correspondents, it
would appear that while a variety of journalists can become a Royal Correspondent, it is
a very specific one who is more likely to succeed, as RC1 outlines:

it is quite different to journalism in general and there are certain skills that are valuable. It’s
weird though, the people who really excel . . . in all honesty, there’s a class dimension to it,
which is that if you move in the same circles as the royals, then you’ll get stories about them.
But very few people actually fit into that category. (RC1)

RC1 identifies a ‘class’ issue in Royal Correspondent work. Social class is an important
factor in hierarchies of employment within the cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh and
Baker, 2011). But Royal Correspondents are a specific case considering the royals are
upper-class and aristocratic, and the social circles surrounding royalty are extremely
exclusive, therefore logically it could follow that the ‘same circles as the royals’ that RC1
mentions are also upper class. RC1’s reference to Royal Correspondents having ‘certain
skills’ could be interpreted as referring to forms of Bourdieusian ‘capital’ – social, cul-
tural, economic and symbolic (Bourdieu, 1984) – that structure social stratification.
Those Royal Correspondents who possess the appropriate ‘capital’ get access to the inner
royal circle.
The intersectionality of this classed dimension is also important, and I would add that
this is also a racialised issue. In 2021, it was revealed that the Royal Household (those
working for the monarchy across the royal palaces) have only 8.5% of employees who
are from ethnically diverse backgrounds (Meierhans, 2021), and the monarchy has been
at the centre of racism accusations throughout 2021 after Prince Harry and Meghan
Markle identified structural racism within the institution (CBS, 2021). The British mon-
archy is a colonialist organisation which is built on white supremacy (Clancy and Yelin,
2021). Therefore, part of the ‘capital’ required for access to the institution is, presumably,
whiteness. This is especially notable given the racialised inequalities within the cultural
industries more broadly, as identified by scholars such as Anamik Saha (2017).
These intersectional inequalities amongst Royal Correspondents of who is most likely
to ‘excel’, as RC1 put it, are indicative of the type of ‘tastes’ they reproduce as cultural
intermediaries. Dave O’Brien and colleagues (2017: 275) state that ‘inequalities in cul-
tural production produce damaging “epistemological effects” (Saha, 2012), leading to
the production of a limited and problematic repertoire of representations of ethnicity,
class, gender and regional identity’. That is, social inequalities in the production of cul-
tural texts will be reflected in the representations they display and the consumption of
those texts amongst audiences. If the most successful Royal Correspondents are white
and upper class, it follows that they are likely reproducing white, upper-class tastes, and
Clancy 9

hence reproducing the norms on which the monarchical institution relies. They are,
therefore, not necessarily disturbing the ideological bases of monarchical power; rather
these elite Royal Correspondents are functioning in service of reproducing the monarchi-
cal institution.
This invested relationship also feeds into the type of information these elite Royal
Correspondents share, and the type they do not. RC1 notes that:

there are a couple of other people as well who just move in certain circles where they’re much
more likely to come across things and again they probably don’t write everything they come
across either, based on, you know, you’ve got to be discreet in order to move in those circles, I
suppose. (RC1)

This notion of discretion presupposes a level of loyalty, where ‘to move in those circles’
the elite Royal Correspondents must ‘play the game’, so to speak, and retain their silence
where it is appropriate. Keith Negus (2002: 508) argues that a cultural intermediary’s
power comes not only from the ‘production and circulation of information and symbolic
materials’, but also from the ‘concealment of knowledge, deception and manipulation’.
As ‘experts’ on monarchy, these elite Royal Correspondents have authority in defining
the boundaries of royal stories, and structuring what, when, and how royal news is
reported. The elite Royal Correspondents are also often called upon to give statements or
interviews at key royal moments, for example, in television coverage of royal weddings.
Considering the royals themselves very rarely speak publicly (see later in this article),
especially to confirm or rebuke rumours, the Royal Correspondent is thus given the role
of managing royal public relations and deciding what is made public, and perhaps more
importantly, what is not. Hence, the Royal Correspondent is tasked with interpreting
news from ‘the centre’ (Couldry, 2002) for public consumption. At the same time, their
role as an elite Royal Correspondent also positions them as part of, or at the very least on
the periphery of, the ‘centre’ themselves. The class inequalities inherent to monarchy are
being compounded by the elite networks surrounding it, and speaking for it.
While there are elite Royal Correspondents, there are also those who get less access
to royal exclusives. As RC1 said, this is also often classed. This access is especially
problematic for those Royal Correspondents who are not part of an organisation which is
on the Royal Rota system. The Royal Rota is a rota system that news organisations must
apply to if they wish to cover royal events. According to News Media Association, where
applications can be sought: ‘representatives from each relevant media sector are offered
the opportunity to cover a [royal] event, on the understanding that they will share all
material obtained, with other members of their sector who request it’ (News Media
Association, n.d.). That is, those organisations on the Royal Rota who are invited to
attend events must share their materials with other journalists, as part of the obligations
of the Royal Rota pass. Members of the Royal Rota include the Daily Mail, the Sun, The
Times, the Telegraph, Wire Picture Agency, Independent Photographers Association,
BBC, Sky News and ITV. Only established media outlets that are deemed ‘appropriate’
are allowed access to the Royal Rota, and this is not usually independent organisations,
or ‘up-and-coming’ ones. Nor is it ever independent journalists: they are all attached to
an elite institution, which itself comes with news values and is usually high-profile
10 Cultural Sociology 00(0)

enough to be part of the Establishment (the BBC, for example. See later for an account
of the BBC–monarchy relationship).
RC2 says that ‘it is really tricky’ to get access to royal information, and to ensure it is
confirmed before publication, because of the secrecy employed by the monarchy. RC2
continues, this inevitably means that those not on the Royal Rota system ‘don’t have as
good and as easy access to these Palace sources, whereas they [Royal Rota journalists]
get told stuff that we don’t get told, so we do rely on them’. Reliance on Royal Rota
sources means a reliance on those elite journalists who have been ‘approved’ to operate
within the elite royal circle. While the Royal Rota claims it has been designed to address
‘space restrictions and security’ (News Media Association, n.d.) and any information
gathered is shared with other journalists, this is still structuring what information gets
gathered. Multiple roadblocks are in place here to prevent producing objective, impartial
royal news, and to produce royal news from alternative sources outside of the classed
‘centre’.

Social Networks and Elite Sources

While capital and privilege was key to success as a Royal Correspondent, other related
skillsets also seemed important. Let us return to the aforementioned comment from RC1:

It’s weird though, the people who really excel . . . in all honesty, there’s a class dimension to it,
which is that if you move in the same circles as the royals, then you’ll get stories about them.
(RC1)

We can take from this quotation that networks and contacts are vital to Royal
Correspondent work. When asked what sort of skillset was needed for Royal
Correspondent work, my interviewees, echoed in the public Royal Correspondent
accounts, said that developing contacts and sources was a central part of the role. While
this is true of all journalist work (Aelst et al., 2010), this took on a different dimension
for Royal Correspondents. RC1 said, there is ‘lack of guidance from the [Buckingham]
Palace’ on the majority of stories, who typically just say ‘no comment’ to any rumours
(this was echoed from multiple Royal Correspondents on the podcast series Harry,
Meghan and the Media (Harry, Meghan and the Media, 2022)). Rather, Royal
Correspondents are left to ‘piece stuff together based on very limited information’ (RC1),
usually by contacting sets of elite sources who might have some information from inside
the Palace. Jennie Bond writes that ‘you depend on . . . a friendly relationship with pri-
vate secretaries, or friends and relatives of royalty’ (2001: 76).
I explore the claims that the British monarchy offers a ‘lack of guidance’ to journalists
elsewhere (Clancy, forthcoming). For the purposes of this piece, RC1’s comments speak
to the earlier argument about the privileged demographics who have the ‘capital’ to
access royal circles. Jennie Bond writes of trying to confirm a story about Prince Charles
and Princess Diana in the mid-1990s: ‘in pursuit of the truth, I called all the contacts I
could muster. One, a household name who was a personal friend of the couple’ (Bond,
2001: 75). Likewise, Katie Nicholl, Royal Correspondent for Vanity Fair, said of collect-
ing sources: ‘it’s a long process and one that takes years . . . Some of my best contacts
Clancy 11

have become close friends now’ (in Bonner, 2018). These references to ‘friendships’
relies on the cultivation of personal relationships with elite sources, which depends upon
Royal Correspondents having the appropriate capital to do so. David Hesmondhalgh and
Sarah Baker found that ‘sociability is essential for professional success’ across the cul-
tural and creative industries (2011: 156).
But these comments also raise issues of social networks, and how those networks are
interconnected. This is suggestive of ‘the Establishment’: a networked, interconnected
and often interdependent group of elite actors made up of ‘the national media, the City,
large corporations, the Whitehall civil service, and the major political parties at
Westminster’ (Davis, 2018: 3). Theories on the Establishment suggest that these groups
often move in tangent with one another to shore up elite privilege and ensure their inter-
ests are maintained. It is not that I am suggesting all Royal Correspondents are part of the
Establishment. As we have seen, some cite frustration with lack of access, although one
could argue that the Royal Correspondents’ role as cultural intermediaries earns them a
place in the Establishment regardless. Rather, I argue that the elite Royal Correspondents
who have closest access to royalty can be considered ‘the Establishment’, because they
move in the same upper-class social circles, and hence can be assumed to have compara-
ble interests. These elite circles tend to ‘shore up’ (Clancy, 2021) each other’s privilege
and power using their specific skills: in a Royal Correspondent’s case, producing media
representations. If they are loyal to royalty, as we have previously seen, then they too are
involved in the process of shoring up royal power and reproducing elite privilege. This,
again, raises questions of classed networks, impartiality and objectivity.
As I have previously demonstrated, historically, Royal Correspondents were appointed
based on advice from the monarchy itself. This no longer happens, but it seems that the
best chances of getting stories comes from being within the royal circle. Tom Bradby,
former Royal Correspondent for ITN and now the host of ITV’s flagship news show
News at Ten, has reportedly had a decades long friendship with Prince William and
Prince Harry, including an invitation to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding in
2011 as a guest, and both royals’ personal phone numbers (Bickerstaff, 2021). Bradby
was educated at Sherborne School, an independent all-boys boarding school which is a
member of the Eton Group, an association of 12 exclusive English public schools. Both
Prince William and Prince Harry attended Eton College, another member of the Eton
Group. It is also worth noting that Jennie Bond attended St Francis’ College, an inde-
pendent all-girls school (BBC, 2003), Roya Nikkhah, Royal Editor at The Sunday Times,
attended independent St Mary’s boarding school (St Mary’s Calne, n.d.), Camilla
Tominey at the Telegraph went to the independent St Albans High School for Girls (The
Clem and Em Podcast, 2019), Katie Nicholl from Vanity Fair went to independent
Channing School (Miller, 2005), and Nicholas Witchell at the BBC was educated at
independent Epsom College (Luckhurst, 2005).
As Aaron Reeves and colleagues suggest, ‘when elites are drawn from narrow educa-
tional backgrounds, they are more likely to develop “a unity and cohesion of conscious-
ness and action” which, in turn, may have profound implications for the exercise of
power’ (2017: 1141). Elite educational systems can be considered part of the Establishment
in that they are central to shoring up networks of privilege. The symbiosis between Royal
Correspondents and their subject suggests similar values, and hence a reproduction of
12 Cultural Sociology 00(0)

elite narratives through the cultural intermediary role. There are also questions about the
extent to which elite networks tend to protect one another’s interests, considering these
interests are mutually beneficial in reproducing elite privilege.
Elsewhere, these mutual interests are more obvious. Dickie Arbiter moved from Court
Correspondent at Independent Radio News to Press Secretary at Buckingham Palace in
1988, hence making the move from reporting on royalty to literally producing royal
news from within. In his memoir, Arbiter tells the story of being approached directly by
the then-Press Secretary Robin Janvrin and the Private Secretary William Heseltine
while on the royal yacht Britannia. This suggests that the materials he was producing as
Court Correspondent were suited to his becoming the monarchy’s spin doctor. Like
Jennie Bond, Arbiter has earned social and cultural capital, and indeed celebrity cre-
dence, through his Royal Correspondent work, and is now a regular royal commentator
across the news and entertainment industries. The cultural intermediary therefore takes
on ‘legitimacy’ as a media personality in their own right – indeed, Bond discusses at
length in her memoir how she has been recognised all over the world (2001). This chimes
with Helen Powell and Sylvie Prasad’s theories on the ‘celebrity expert’ as a cultural
intermediary, where the individuals have connotations of ‘familiarity and trust’ (2010:
114) which imbue them with legitimacy. If the ‘expert’ is a well-known individual, audi-
ences will feel more able to relate to them, hence increasing the ‘experts’ ability to influ-
ence public opinion.
Dickie Arbiter’s daughter, Victoria Arbiter, is now a Royal Commentator for CNN.
The Arbiters lived in Kensington Palace when Dickie Arbiter was Press Secretary, and
Victoria Arbiter is very open about having been ‘on both sides of the royal press
machine—she essentially grew up in the press office’ (Bonner, 2018). This is a form of
nepotism which mirrors the reproduction of monarchy itself as hereditary, which presup-
poses that the Arbiters’ values on monarchy are being reproduced across generations.
Such networked relations extend beyond individual journalists and to news organisa-
tions. RC2 reflected on the kinds of institutions which, when limited royal news did
come from Buckingham Palace, tended to receive it:

I get frustrated, but also have a little bit of respect in some ways for the fact that they frequently
go to BBC. It’s annoying, you can think ‘well what about the rest of us?’ But on the other hand,
you think ‘okay fair enough’. Like if they went to some tiny . . . And yeah, it’s annoying to see
them telling the BBC all these exclusives. Well, they don’t need all these exclusive anyway,
they’re the BBC! Like, everyone’s going to watch and listen to them anyway. They don’t need
any help! But they are the royal family, so they go to the other institutions. (RC2)

The reference to ‘the other institutions’ is particularly revealing of the kinds of values
that RC2 sees being reproduced in royal news. The BBC and the monarchy are both
considered key organisations at the centre of the British Establishment (Mills, 2016), and
both have comparable values in terms of British national identity and public service
(Clancy, 2021). RC2 notes that it is not surprising that the monarchy would go to the
BBC instead of ‘some tiny’ media outlet. Rather, this is considered the obvious choice,
and it is ‘fair enough’ that the two institutions would uphold one another given that they
are both elite. Returning to Couldry’s concept of ‘the myth of the mediated centre’
Clancy 13

(2002), if both the BBC and the monarchy are key actors in the British Establishment
then the BBC can equally be considered as part of the ‘centre’, reporting ‘outwards’ for
audiences. This gives the BBC a sense of legitimacy for audiences (Mills, 2016). In this
way, the BBC is perhaps constructed as the ultimate mediator of royal news. It is possi-
bly not a coincidence that Jennie Bond, former BBC Royal Correspondent, is the most
well-known British Royal Correspondent. The position inherently has a supposition of
superiority because the BBC are considered part of the same ‘centre’ as the monarchy,
and therefore it follows that the BBC Royal Correspondent will have access to the ‘best’
royal news.
These classed interrelationships between Royal Correspondents, the monarchy’s
Communications Offices, and the royals themselves raise questions about bias and
objectivity. In the following section, I’ll explore this as a form of ‘homophily’.

‘Homophily’ and Social Media Journalism

Various scholars have discussed issues of ‘groupthink’ or ‘pack journalism’ in relation to
journalism (Bentivegna and Marchetti, 2018; Hanusch and Nölleke, 2018), critiquing
how the self-reverential tendencies of journalism mean journalists think along similar
lines, leading to homogenous reporting. This often means that journalists rely on other
journalists as sources, thus repeating similar information. Studies have also found that
there are ‘bubbles within bubbles’ (Fincham, 2019: 215), whereby journalists with simi-
lar specialisms are most likely to interact with their equivalent: for example, for our
purposes, Royal Correspondents with Royal Correspondents.
‘Homophily’ is a concept describing ‘the tendency of individuals to form groups with
those most similar to themselves’ (Fincham, 2019: 215), which could be demarcated
along identity lines (i.e. class, gender, race, age; see Nwonka, 2021; Wreyford, 2015, in
relation to the film industries) or acquired characteristics (i.e. occupation, education),
such as journalism. The concept has been applied in journalistic studies and social net-
work analysis to consider how news media is structured around homophilic ties between
journalists and/or other elite cultural intermediaries, who tend to communicate primarily
between themselves. In an article focusing on Taiwan correspondents in mainland China,
Daisy Xiaoxuan Cheng and Francis L.F. Lee (2015) found that such ties were especially
relevant in cases where ‘news information does not always flow freely’, so the trading of
information amongst journalists is often the only way to produce news content. While
remaining conscious of the many differences between China’s media systems and the
UK’s, Cheng and Lee’s approach does speak in many ways to Royal Correspondent
work, where, as we have seen, a very limited amount of information comes willingly
from Buckingham Palace. Royal Correspondents may therefore be particularly suscepti-
ble to ‘homophily’, because they are almost entirely reliant on their own (elite) networks
for news.
This susceptibility is only enhanced considering the Royal Correspondent community
in the UK is quite exclusive, and those working on the ‘royal beat’ are likely to know/come
into contact with each other, not least considering they run in the same elite social circles
as part of their journalistic networks. They are also especially susceptible given how royal
news is produced. The Royal Rota system guarantees that only a select group of Royal
14 Cultural Sociology 00(0)

Correspondents will get exclusive access to royal news, which they are then obliged to
share with fellow Royal Correspondents. In this way, the Royal Rota System almost
actively produces homophilic news reporting along classed lines, as Royal Correspondents
rely upon a privileged few to share their findings with the rest of the group.
Kelly Fincham (2019) has found that ‘homophily’ amongst political journalists is
particularly prevalent on Twitter, where they are more likely to connect with fellow jour-
nalists. This is, as Fincham argues, symptomatic of the ‘filter bubble’ factor on social
media more broadly, where individuals are most likely to interact with users similar to
themselves, with similar viewpoints. Royal Correspondents regularly comment on,
‘retweet’ or ‘like’ each other’s posts. For instance, on 21 February 2021 Daily Mail
Royal Correspondent Emily Andrews quote retweeted royal commentator Peter Hunt
and his article in the Spectator entitled ‘the monarchy failed Harry and Meghan’, with
Andrews adding ‘this is a well-argued piece & I agree with much Peter says’, before
offering her own commentary on ‘it’s so sad that a middle way cd [sic] not be found’ for
Harry and Meghan to stay in the monarchy (@byEmilyAndrews, 2021). Although Royal
Correspondents do not always agree with one another online, what this informally dem-
onstrates is a space where they regularly communicate, and they can discover and engage
with royal news from their competitors and/or colleagues.
Social media also impacts upon the roles of cultural intermediaries. As Anne Cronin and
Lee Edwards argue, ‘algorithms, platforms, online crowd-sourcing and do-it-yourself (DIY)
culture-making have all been recognized as important intermediaries’ and ‘non-human actors’
are involved in ‘the information curation, circulation and filtering processes that influence the
political-economic context for cultural intermediation’ (2021: 5). Of course, this is especially
notable considering (some of) the general public have access to social media and can post
news themselves. While there are processes in place which (theoretically) produce some
news sources as more ‘legitimate’, which on Twitter consists of adding a ‘blue tick’ to profiles
which are verified (Miragliotta, 2012), ultimately any user could produce royal news at any
time. This form of ‘citizen journalism’ has been much theorised across journalist studies, as a
democratising process which enfranchises otherwise disenfranchised citizens from news pro-
duction (Goode, 2009); as decentralizing, de-westernising, and globalising forms of news
production (Allan and Thorson, 2009); and as endemic to issues of ‘fake news’ circulating
online to perpetuate false ideologies (Tandoc Jr et al., 2018).
For my purposes, online news and social media is interesting to consider in terms of
how it stabilises or destabilises Royal Correspondents as cultural intermediaries, and as
privileged interpreters of ‘the centre’. Many of the Royal Correspondents have the ‘blue
tick’ verification on Twitter, giving their accounts a sense of authenticity. RC1 reflected
on the introduction of Twitter: ‘it’s massively changed royal reporting because people
do feel like they need to have a big social media following’. While RC1 acknowledges
this is true for all journalists who use social media to promote their work, they note how
this has led to the promotion of Royal Correspondent work, where a ‘big social media
following’ is a sign of legitimacy and success in their role. This connects back to my
earlier comments about how many Royal Correspondents have become elite celebrities
in their own right. Studies have shown that individuals/companies with large social
media followings are more likely to be seen as trustworthy by other users and by the
public (De Veirman et al., 2017). This mirrors ideas of the ‘celebrity expert’ as a cultural
Clancy 15

intermediary, albeit on a micro scale. By cultivating followers, Royal Correspondents

can cultivate their position as cultural intermediaries.
Social media also shifts Royal Correspondents’ engagements with the monarchy
itself, considering the monarchy has its own social media accounts. On Twitter, @
RoyalFamily, @ClarenceHouse and @KensingtonRoyal are run as official accounts
from the royal Communications Offices, and they also have official Facebook and
Instagram accounts. Royal news will often be released on these profiles, and they are
then retweeted, quote retweeted, or linked to by Royal Correspondents on their own
profiles. This is direct sourcing of royal news, which as described earlier, is rare for
Royal Correspondents to get access to in a culture of royal secrecy. In quote retweeting
the official royal posts, Royal Correspondents can develop the stories with their own
interpretations and offer commentary or context for audiences, which in turn positions
them as the cultural intermediaries who are interpreting the social centre for less-
informed audiences. For example, Sky’s Royal Correspondent Rhiannon Mills quote
retweeted a tweet from the @KensingtonRoyal account, signed by Prince William, criti-
cising the racist abuse of England football players after Euro 2020 (@SkyRhiannon,
2021). Mills commented that the tweet was an ‘impassioned intervention’, and that it is
‘worth remembering William tried to get them to act on cyberbullying before and is
president of @FootballAssoc’. This cultural intermediation gives context to the tweet
from a seemingly informed perspective, while also framing the tweet in a positive way
– ‘impassioned’ – to shape how audiences might interpret it.
Sourcing royal news in this way, however, means that it is not exclusive royal news.
Rather, Royal Correspondents are receiving the news at the same time as their competitors,
other non-specialist journalists and the general public. Scholars Alice Marwick and danah
boyd (2010) use the phrase ‘context collapse’ to describe how social media collapses dis-
tinct contexts of time and space, and brings together audiences who are otherwise in dis-
tinct social groups, for example celebrity and fan, who all abound on the same platform.
Pre-social media, they argue, having such intimate contact with celebrities would have
been near impossible. This helps us to understand the Twitter dynamic between royals,
Royal Correspondents, and royal audiences (with the caveat that it is a team of communica-
tions staff, rather than royals themselves, who usually run the royal social media accounts).
Royals have, as I have already described, typically kept themselves very distanced from
Royal Correspondents and fans, choosing to let minimal information leave Buckingham
Palace, and Royal Correspondents have relied on secondary sources to attempt to confirm
stories. On Twitter, royals abound on the same platform as those reporting on them, and the
audiences consuming that news. Audiences can engage with the Royal Correspondents’
interpretation of the news, and/or they can engage directly with the royal post itself. While
quote retweeting does give the Royal Correspondent some room to offer cultural interme-
diation, Twitter alters their role in being the only ones privy to royal news. This is ‘context
collapse’, where some of the old classed hierarchies and boundaries of royal news have
been eroded and rewritten. While Royal Correspondents inevitably hold sway over online
royal news – the ‘blue tick’ of verification is one such example of how they are constructed
as ‘trusted, elite sources’ – audiences can also access and interpret this royal news them-
selves. This perhaps goes some way towards destabilising the classed inequalities I have
described in royal reporting.
16 Cultural Sociology 00(0)

Conclusion
This article has explored the Royal Correspondent as a cultural intermediary, considering
in particular the dimensions of class inequality, ‘capital’, and elite networks central to
their role. The term cultural intermediary is useful because it describes how Royal
Correspondents ‘frame’ royal stories for audiences, and also how their position as ‘experts’
gives value to royal news. This is pertinent given the often privileged positions of success-
ful Royal Correspondents, whereby only those with the appropriate ‘capital’ to exist in
elite social circles will succeed. Hence, the framing of news about the monarchy, an elite
institution, is being ‘framed’ by a cultural intermediary equally invested in maintaining
classed privilege. I also connect this to Couldry’s concept of ‘the myth of the mediated
centre’, building this using a framing of ‘the centre’ being inherently classed, to argue that
Royal Correspondents both are the centre and interpret the centre for audiences, leading
to a complex relationship between Royal Correspondents, the monarchy and the general
public. I have detailed the networks Royal Correspondents rely upon, the hierarchical and
nepotistic structuring of access to royal news, and the ‘homophilic’ tendencies of these
expert journalists, in order to understand the function and characteristics of the Royal
Correspondent in the UK today. These classed dimensions of Royal Correspondents’
work to construct multiple forms of legitimacy and value around royal news.
What does this tell us about the production of royal news? At the beginning of this
article, I quoted Royal Correspondent Valentine Low, who said ‘no one ever sets out to
be a Royal Correspondent’ and if they did ‘they are quite clearly far too interested in
the royals and therefore in danger of becoming a full-blooded sycophant’. While Royal
Correspondents may, indeed, not set out to become Royal Correspondents, this does
not account for the broader structures of royal news I have described in this article, that
force even the most critical Royal Correspondents to rely on established, loyal news
sources. And as we have seen, these loyal news stories often come from within elite
networks. It is important to flag, again, that the cultural industries generally are domi-
nated by elite actors: this is not unique to Royal Correspondents. However, it seems
especially pertinent here given that the systems of royal news reporting are designed in
service of the monarchy, and how this influences the cultural intermediation of Royal
Correspondents.
Although Royal Correspondents are often the subject of mirth from those who
disapprove of their news reporting roles (Blackall, 2021), they, and more importantly
the systems they belong to, are still not subject to systemic critical analysis in popular
culture or scholarly research. The role of the Royal Correspondent in upholding sys-
tems of capital, elites and privilege is vital to understanding the broader landscape of
both UK journalism and the UK’s feelings towards its royal family. What does it mean
when only a handful of elite actors get access to royal news, and can choose to spread
or hide information as they wish? What does it mean when the actors responsible for
producing a large proportion of royal news, and certainly the royal news which has
the most semblance of legitimacy, is produced by those within the same privileged
class? These are the bigger questions about monarchy, media and power that need
further consideration if we are to understand the influence of the British royal family
in British culture.
Clancy 17

Acknowledgements
Thank you to Sara De Benedictis, Helen Wood and the anonymous reviewers for generous feed-
back on this paper and the research project itself.

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: This work was supported by ESRC grant ES/T006064/1, ‘The Cultural
Politics of the British Monarchy: Inequalities, Neoliberalism and the Elites’

ORCID iD
Laura Clancy https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4688-0184

References
@byEmilyAndrews (2021) ‘This is a well-argued piece. . .’. Tweet. 21 February. https://twitter.
com/byEmilyAndrews/status/1363494162750963714?s=20 (accessed 11/08/2021).
@SkyRhiannon (2021) ‘Impassioned intervention by. . .’. Tweet. 31 January. https://twitter.com/
SkyRhiannon/status/1355943985756467203?s=20 (accessed 11/08/2021).
Aelst PV, Sehata A and van Dalen A (2010) Members of Parliament: Equal competitors for media
attention? An analysis of personal contacts between MPs and political journalists in five
European countries. Political Communication 27(3): 310–325.
Alacovska A and O’Brien D (2021) Genres and inequality in the creative industries. European
Journal of Cultural Studies 24(3): 639–657.
Allan S and Thorsen E (eds) (2009) Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, Volume 1. New
York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Arbiter D (2014) On Duty With the Queen: My Time as a Buckingham Palace Press Officer.
London: Blink Publishing.
Archetti C (2012) Which future for foreign correspondence? Journalism Studies 13(5–6): 847–856.
Banks M (2017) Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield.
BBC (2003) Jennie Bond to leave BBC after 14 years as Royal Correspondent. BBC News, 11
March. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/03_
march/11/jennie_bond.shtml.
BBC (2015) Reinventing the Royals, two-part series with Steve Hewlett.
BBC (2021) The Princes and The Press, mini series with Amol Rajan, produced by Clare Hix.
Bentivegna S and Marchetti R (2018) Journalists at a crossroads: Are traditional norms and prac-
tices challenged by Twitter? Journalism 19(2): 270–290.
Bickerstaff I (2021) Prince William has reportedly cut ties with ITV’s Tom Bradby. Tatler, 8
April. Available at: https://www.tatler.com/article/prince-william-ends-20-year-friendship-
tom-bradby-harry-meghan (accessed 14 July 2021).
Blackall M (2021) Royal commentators hoaxed into critique of Meghan interview before seeing
it. The Guardian, 7 March, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/07/royal-com-
mentators-hoaxed-into-critique-of-meghan-interview-before-seeing-it (accessed 12 August
2021).
Blain N and O’Donnell H (2003) Media, Monarchy and Power. Bristol: Intellect.
Bond J (2001) Reporting Royalty: Behind the Scenes with the BBC’s Royal Correspondent.
London: Headline.
18 Cultural Sociology 00(0)

Bonner M (2018) Inside the Wild Life of a Royal Correspondent. Marie Claire, 14 March. https://
www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/a19413297/what-it-is-like-to-be-a-royal-correspondent/
(accessed 15 July 2021).
Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Bruun H. (2016) The qualitative interview in media production studies. In: Paterson C, Lee D,
Saha A, et al. (eds) Advancing Media Production Research. Global Transformations in
Media and Communication Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cardiff University Archives (2022) Joan Reeder (1921–1997), journalist and Royal correspond-
ent. Available at: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/b1508a9d-4b2f-3402-ba8d-
365ce6d502df (accessed 22 November 2021).
CBS (2021) Oprah with Meghan and Harry. A CBS Primetime Special, 8 March.
Clancy L (2021) Running the Family Firm: How the Monarchy Manages its Image and Our
Money. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Clancy L (forthcoming) ‘If you do hold them to account, are you going to find yourself hitting
more brick walls later?’: Royal Correspondents and royal news production. Journalism.
Clancy L and Yelin H (2021) Monarchy is a Feminist Issue: Andrew, Meghan and #MeToo Era
Monarchy. Women’s Studies International Forum 84, published online first. DOI: https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.wsif.2020.102435.
Conlin P (2015) The cultural intermediary in plutocratic times, European Journal of Cultural
Studies 18(3): 265–282.
Conti JA and O’Neil M (2007) Studying power: Qualitative methods and the global elite,
Qualitative Research 7(1): 63–82.
Couldry N (2002) Media Rituals. London: Routledge.
Cronin AM and Edwards L (2021) Resituating the political in cultural intermediary work: Charity
sector public relations and communication. European Journal of Cultural Studies 25(1): 148–
165. DOI: 10.1177/1367549421994239.
Crouch M and McKenzie H (2006) The logic of small samples in interview-based qualitative
research. Social Science Information 45(4): 483–499.
Davies C (2021) Meghan calls for tabloid industry overhaul as Mail on Sunday loses appeal, the
Guardian, 2 December. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/02/mail-
on-sunday-loses-duchess-of-sussex-meghan-privacy-case-appeal (accessed 2 December 2021).
Davies W (2017) Elites without hierarchies: Intermediaries, ‘agency’ and the super-rich. In: Forrest
R, Yee Koh S and Wissink B (eds) Cities and the Super-Rich. London: Springer, 19–38.
Davis A (2018) Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
De Veirman M, Cauberghe V and Hudders L (2017) Marketing through Instagram influencers:
The impact of number of followers and product divergence on brand attitude. International
Journal of Advertising 36(5): 798–828.
Fincham K (2019) Exploring political journalism homophily on Twitter: A comparative analysis
of US and UK elections in 2016 and 2017. Media and Communication 7(1): 213–224.
Goode L (2009) Social news, citizen journalism and democracy. New Media and Society 11(8):
1287–1305.
Hall S (1973) Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham: Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Hall S (1985) Signification, representation, ideology: Althusser and the post-structuralist debates.
Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2(2): 91–114.
Hanusch F and Nölleke D (2018) Journalistic homophily on social media: Exploring journalists’
interactions with each other on Twitter. Digital Journalism 6(7): 1–23.
Clancy 19

Harry, Meghan and the Media (2022) Harry, Meghan and the Media. BBC Podcast. Produced by
Claire Hix.
Hesmondhalgh D and Baker S (2011) Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries.
(1st edn) London: Taylor and Francis Group.
Hindman EB (2003) The Princess and the paparazzi: Blame, responsibility, and the media’s role in
the death of Diana. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 80(3): 666–688.
Jobson R (2021) Prince Philip’s Century 1921–2021. London: Ad Lib Publishers.
Low V (2021) The Duchess of Cornwall is always happy to chat with the hacks. The Times, 28
May. Available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-duchess-of-cornwall-is-always-
happy-to-chat-with-the-hacks-w8ws5skdj (accessed 1 June 2021).
Luckhurst T (2005) Nicholas Witchell: More touchy than feely, the Independent, 28 August.
Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/nicholas-witchell-more-
touchy-than-feely-308574.html (accessed 13 August).
Maguire JS and Matthews J (2012) Are we all cultural intermediaries now? An introduction to
cultural intermediaries in context. European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5): 551–562.
Maguire JS and Matthews J (2014) Introduction: Thinking with cultural intermediaries. In:
Maguire JS and Matthews J (eds) The Cultural Intermediaries Reader. London: SAGE, 1–12.
Matthews J (2014) Journalism. In: Maguire JS and Matthews J (eds) The Cultural Intermediaries
Reader. London: SAGE, 145–156.
Mahon M (2000) The visible evidence of cultural producers. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:
467–492.
Marwick AE and boyd d (2010) ‘I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately’: Twitter users, context col-
lapse, and the imagined audience. New Media and Society 13(1): 114–133.
Meierhans J (2021) Buckingham Palace reveals 8.5% ethnic minority staff. BBC News, 24 June.
Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57589589 (accessed 17 August 2021).
Mellor N (2008) Arab journalists as cultural intermediaries. The International Journal of Press/
Politics 13(4): 465–483.
Merrin W (1999) Crash, bang, wallop! What a picture! The death of Diana and the media, Mortality
4(1): 41–62.
Miller C (2005) ‘Have you heard the latest?’ the Independent, 27 June. Available at: https://www.inde-
pendent.co.uk/news/media/have-you-heard-the-latest-496651.html (accessed 20 August 2021).
Mills T (2016) The BBC: Myth of a Public Service. London: Verso.
Miragliotta N (2012) Politicians, Twitter and the limits of the virtual political public sphere. Social
Alternatives 31(2): 6–10.
Nairn T (1994) The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy (updated edn). London: Vintage.
Negus KR (2002) The work of cultural intermediaries and the enduring distance between produc-
tion and consumption. Cultural Studies 16(4): 501–515.
News Media Association (n.d.) Royal Rota. Available at: http://www.newsmediauk.org/Industry-
Services/Royal-Rota (accessed 17 August 2021).
Nixon S and Du Gay P (2002) Who needs cultural intermediaries? Cultural Studies 16(4): 495–
500.
Nwonka CJ (2021) White women, White men, and intra-racial diversity: A data-led analysis of
gender representation in the UK film industry. Cultural Sociology 15(3): 430–454.
O’Brien D, Allen K, Friedman S, et al. (2017) Producing and consuming inequality: A cultural
sociology of the cultural industries. Cultural Sociology 11(3): 271–282.
Otnes CC and Maclaran P (2015) Royal Fever: The British Monarchy in Consumer Culture.
Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Owens E (2019) The Family Firm: Monarchy, Mass Media, and the British Public 1932–53.
London: Institute of Historical Research.
20 Cultural Sociology 00(0)

Pimlott B (2012) The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy (2nd edn). London: Harper Press.
Plunkett J (2003) Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Powell H and Prasad S (2010) ‘As seen on TV’. The celebrity expert: How taste is shaped by life-
style media. Cultural Politics 6(1): 111–124.
Reeves A, Friedman S, Rahal C, et al. (2017) The decline and persistence of the old boy: Private
schools and elite recruitment 1897 to 2016. American Sociological Review 82(6): 1139–1166.
Rice G (2010) Reflections on interviewing elites. Area 42(1): 70–75.
Saha A (2012) Beards, scarves, halal meat, terrorists, forced marriage: Television industries and
the production of ‘race’. Media, Culture & Society 34(4): 424–438.
Saha A (2017) Race and the Cultural Industries. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sharpe K (2009) Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England.
London: Yale University Press.
Siddique H and Waterson J (2021) After Meghan’s victory, Harry has phone hackers in his sights,
The Guardian, 3 December. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/
dec/03/prince-harry-phone-hackers-lawsuit (accessed 4 December 2021).
St Mary’s Calne (n.d.) Alumnae. Available at: https://www.stmaryscalne.org/index.php/the-sixth-
form/alumnae (accessed 26 April 2022).
Tandoc EC Jr, Lim ZW and Ling R (2018) Defining ‘Fake News’. Digital Journalism 6(2): 137–
153.
Taylor A (2021) Harry and Meghan: What’s the media’s ‘invisible contract’ with British roy-
alty? BBC News, 11 March. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-
arts-56326807 (accessed 12 March 2021).
The Clem and Em Podcast (2019) ‘Episode 1: Camilla Tominey’, October https://open.spotify.
com/episode/5Y1sth8SwzM4Z6m70t6fE6 (accessed 5 December 2021).
Tunstall J (1976) Journalists at Work: Specialist Correspondents, Their News Organizations,
News-Sources and Competitor-Colleagues. London: Constable.
Wreyford N (2015) Birds of a feather: Informal recruitment practices and gendered outcomes for
screenwriting work in the UK film industry. The Sociological Review 63(1_suppl): 84–96.
Xiaoxuan Cheng D and Lee FLF (2015) Journalist–source relations. Journalism Studies 16(6):
850–867.
Yee Koh S and Wissink B (2018) Enabling, structuring and creating elite transnational lifestyles:
Intermediaries of the super-rich and the elite mobilities industry. Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies 44(4): 592–609.

Author biography
Dr Laura Clancy is a Lecturer in Media at Lancaster University. Her research explores issues of
monarchy, inequality, media representations and power. Her book, Running the Family Firm: how
the Monarchy Manages its Image and Our Money (Manchester University Press, 2021) was short-
listed for the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.