Winston Churchill could not have imagined how prescient his words would be; how decades after he uttered them, they would be truer than they ever were. “A lie gets half way around the world before truth gets a chance to put its pants on,” he once said. This is equally true of rumours too.
Kate-gate, as the infamous doctored photo incident might well be called, has a voyeuristic world in its hold. An image of the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, posing with her three children, her arms wrapped around two of them, released by Buckingham Palace on the occasion of Mother’s Day, was in the news for all the wrong reasons. The media discovered that the image had been manipulated and spent time and energy speculating about it. Rumours swirled at greater speed after Kate herself admitted that she had edited the photo. The memes and updates fed the relentless interest of the world, as the ‘non story’ travelled everywhere.
Across the world, journalists battle with the ability of rumours to capture the imagination and attention of the public. Sometimes, this support from the public offers a bulwark of resistance against truth itself, making the job of countering rumours with facts burdensome.
