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Tucker Carlson with Putin in the Kremlin
Photo: Gavriil Grigorov / SPUTNIK / KREMLIN / EPA
How attractive that must be for an editorial team: A young Brit comes forward and says he worked for the royals' public relations department until a few days ago.
He was supposed to edit a family photo of Princess Kate with her children, but the editing was exposed and caused a scandal, the “Kate Gate”.
And the young Brit was fired.
He says.
The “Kate Gate” really exists, as does the manipulated photo, but hardly anything is known about what goes on behind the scenes.
The only thing that doesn't exist is the whistleblower.
But there is an editorial team that believed in such a whistleblower for a while.
Namely that of ex-Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson - the American media entrepreneur who recently gave Vladimir Putin the opportunity in an interview to publish his propaganda largely unchallenged in the West.
Two British YouTubers Josh & Archie claim in their new film that they fooled Tucker Carlson and his team.
They could have easily made him believe that he was actually dealing with a real Windsor whistleblower.
To flatter his ego, they told him that "the mainstream media" wouldn't dare touch on this story.
Finally, an interview with Tucker was actually recorded, for which Archie was invited to a London studio to broadcast it live.
There Archie told his story: He had been creating digital content for Kate and William for a long time.
One of Kate's uncles took the photo at Christmas time; his job, among other things, was to make the Christmas tree disappear into the background.
“The edit was almost too big to do,” he says.
And finally she was exposed.
Josh & Archie's video shows interview scenes that were apparently shot with a hidden camera in the London studio.
Accordingly, Carlson is well aware of the risk of fraud: »We have done our best to verify that your identity is who you say you are.
“You’re not a fake Navalny or pulling a prank,” he can be heard saying.
According to Josh & Archie, the Tucker editorial team had asked in advance to send the original Mother's Day photo as proof of authenticity, as well as documents proving the employment relationship with the palace.
So Josh retouched a Christmas tree in the background of the family idyll, as well as a baseball under the table.
And he removed Kate's left hand, which looks so artificial in the published photo.
Termination during the probationary period – arm off?
They also forge an employment contract.
However, not without inserting a greedy clause that should actually have exposed the forgery: According to paragraph 9, the employer has the right to amputate a limb of the employee's choice upon termination of the employment relationship during the probationary period.
Nobody on Team Tucker seems to notice the passage.
Josh & Archie now say they wanted to test how willingly such a good news story would be believed.
It was all too fitting: the conspiracy stories that the royal family is hiding a - possibly bad - truth about Kate are rampant anyway.
Tucker would have had an international scoop.
Camouflage abandoned
So far Josh & Archie are the only source.
There is their video, and the Hollywood portal “Deadline” quotes the two of them directly.
It remains to be seen how Tucker Carlson reacts to the alleged prank.
His production company has not yet responded to a query from SPIEGEL on Saturday, and “Deadline” apparently did not receive a response to an earlier request for comment.
What's surprising, however, is that the two of them didn't wait until Tucker Carlson was fully into it before releasing it.
The Tucker people told them that the interview would be broadcast at the beginning of the week.
And now Josh & Archie came out with it a few days before.
They explained to Deadline that they gave up their cover because they didn't want Carlson's 12.6 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) to be fed disinformation.
mamk