Borkowski Weekly Media Trends: Kate's Edits | Louis Walsh vs Jedward & MORE

PLUS Skibidi Toilet vs UMG | Tories' Lee Anderson Problem

From Mother’s Day to Media Meltdown: Unedited Truth Key for Royals

Tin foil hats at the ready? Let’s go.

In January, it was announced that the Princess of Wales was undergoing abdominal surgery and would therefore take a leave of absence until after Easter. But more recently, rumours have begun to swirl about the nature of her absence. The theories ranged from affairs to illnesses, pregnancies, and leaving the country. In the words of the Atlantic, the whole debacle has become Qanon for Wine Mums.

The Royal Family fueled the fire when they released a seemingly innocent photo from “2024” of the Princess with her three children for Mother’s Day last Sunday. It turns out that the image had been so heavily edited that photo agencies, including Reuters, PA, Getty, and AFP, released a “kill notification” and retracted the image. Social media erupted, but so too did almost every major news publication across the world, and suddenly, the whereabouts of the Princess of Wales became an international talking point.

Kensington Palace kicked into action the following day and released a statement written by the Princess saying “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.” A line immortalised by historians and, more importantly, the public.

In many respects, however, the damage had already been done to their credibility and trust. Information is key in our world where the terminally online armchair experts dissect every word and image. These people could fill a vacuum that the Royal Family had left wide open. The Prince and Princess have become the main attraction to the Royal Family in recent years, and to think that the world of social media would quietly accept the Princess’s absence is naïve. The lesson seems to be that sometimes it’s best to feed even just a small trickle of information rather than let the narrative get beyond your control.

The second and slightly more obvious lesson is about quality control. If the purpose of the image released was to squash rumours about the Princess’s absence, it managed to do the exact opposite. If perhaps greater scrutiny had been put on the image before it was released, the slightly obvious doctoring could have been fixed. Always ensure your team has assessed work before it goes out.

The royal family now has the difficult task of regaining the people’s trust, but they can now go forward, having learned from mistakes made in the social media age.

Walsh’s PR Disasterclass

For those who don’t spend time watching old X Factor auditions, seeing Jedward in the headlines this week might have felt like a blast from the distant past. The bequiffed twins, who initially shot to fame on the 2009 series of ITV’s juggernaut talent show before representing Ireland twice at the Eurovision Song Contest, are now mostly known for their prolific social media presence across Instagram and X. After Louis Walsh called them “vile” on Celebrity Big Brother, and intimated that he made £5m while managing them, they put their following to good use, enlisting former TOWIE star Gemma Collins in support as they pushed back against his comments – amongst their allegations are that Walsh forced them to transfer £70,000 to one of his PRs, that they signed “dodgy contracts”, and that he didn’t send them flowers when their mother passed away.

Just last week we praised ITV for securing the star power of Walsh and Sharon Osbourne, who dominated the first few episodes with their showbiz gossip and the endearing partnership they’d honed on The X Factor. But Osbourne, who left on Tuesday night, was notably uncomfortable in her post-show interview upon realising that many of those conversations had been aired. Her pre-planned departure couldn’t have come at a better time: reintroduced to the British public, arguably rehabilitated, she left to an adoring audience and a swell of public opinion in her favour. Her comments on fellow celebrities came at the expense of the likes of Adele and Anna Wintour, who are unlikely to ever pass comment on public remarks about them, let alone in retort to someone like Osbourne, who has made a career of burning bridges.

Yet perhaps she realised that for Walsh, who is in the house until the public decides otherwise, this could have more serious consequences. Jedward thrive in an online space where nostalgia makes them kings, and they have nothing to lose by biting back. In calling Walsh’s comments “spiteful and disrespectful”, they instigated a tidal wave of backlash against their former manager, who, without Osbourne to protect him, was the subject of “Get Louis Out” chants from the show’s live studio audience.

Anyone who paid attention to the 2000s pop landscape knows that The X Factor’s positioning of Walsh as a curmudgeonly titan of the pop world was always somewhat fraudulent. Girls Aloud sacked him after two years for ostensibly failing to do his job, with band member Kimberley Walsh, no relation, taking over managerial duties in that period. But in returning the spotlight to Jedward, who, for many, recall the simplicity of those long ago Saturday nights, he’s created a genuine crisis for himself, losing the support of people it seemed he’d so effortlessly won last week. It’s a testament to the fickle nature of public opinion, but it also emphasises once again how social media, when wielded by the well-liked, can create headaches for even the most experienced of operators. And perhaps it’s a lesson, too, for future Celebrity Big Brother housemates – you are live on ITV, please do not call your former acts “vile”. 

The ‘Skibidi Toilet’ meme forcing UMG to take action

For those who don’t regularly use TikTok and don’t have a young child, chances are any reference to ‘Skibidi Toilet’ is utterly gibberish. But what if we told you that this online series has racked up over 65 billion views since Feb 2023. A recent article by MBW helpfully puts these figures into perspective:

The biggest-ever video on YouTube, Baby Shark, has 14.2 billion views. All of Taylor Swift’s official music videos combined have 985 million.

But so what; why are we discussing this now?

Well the Trendies among you will recall last week’s section on James Blake and his gripes with how TikTok shapes the music industry in a way that prohibits creativity. He referenced French Montana’s 126-track mixtape with songs with several different versions, and Skibidi Toilet is the prime example of why you do this.

Skibidi Toilet is a series of short videos about a city slowly being taken over by toilets with terrifying animated heads. The last line of defence is cameraheads - suited men whose heads are CCTVs. And the show’s soundtrack - a mashup of the songs Give It to Me by Timbaland and Dom Dom Yes Yes by Biser King... but sped up!

If this viral show has been viewed 65 billion times, what does it mean for this song featured on most epidsodes?

Well the track’s owner Universal Music Group are taking action and looking to profit off this global trend, just like Amazon who’ve turned a quick buck by selling unofficial merch. MBW reports that UMG is hitting TikTok with over 37,000 separate copyright takedown requests to remove different ‘Sounds’ from the platform, which impacts a whopping 120 million videos on the platform. While they’re mainly going after unmodified Sounds, they are laying the groundwork to hit unmodified tracks that have altered the tone, pitch (etc). And this will include the ‘Skibidi Toilet’.

It is another example of mega music corps having to rapidly adapt to these meme trends to ensure they aren’t missing out on humungous opportunities to make money. While the Wild West of TikTok generates wildly popular memes and viral pieces of content, these days are numbered when music labels catch up with this fast-paced landscape and clamp down on this unfettered creativity.

‘…Jokers to my right’: Lee Anderson’s defection shows Tories’ lesser-spotted electoral challenge

Lee Anderson’s long-anticipated defection to Reform UK, the latest crude scribble on the UKIP-Brexit Party palimpsest, is an illustration of yet another challenge facing the Conservative Party ahead of this year’s inevitable (but still strangely ephemeral) general election.

The combination of Labour’s ultra-pragmatic political rope-a-dope and the Tories’ inability to recover from two failed premierships has opened a sizeable gap in the polls, and while naturally the focus of analysis has been the likelihood of Tory voters crossing to Labour, Anderson’s desertion is symbolic of increasing pressure from the right of the political spectrum.

Boris Johnson’s embrace of a right-wing, pro-Brexit manifesto in 2019, and then of the reactionary ranks of the culture wars, helped the Tories pretty much absorb the ‘Farage fringe’ of British voters into their big tent.

This was a big factor in Boris’ initial success, and thus greedily co-opted by his successors who have doubled down on culture wars issues often at the expense of their previous principles (hence the ongoing rise of Trumpist Truss) in order to retain the support of this small but crucial voting bloc.

They were helped in this cause by the fact that Reform UK, hampered by the hapless media skills of its leader Richard Tice, was seen as a profoundly unserious party even by many of those who share its founding principles.

But the government is to battered and bruised that Reform UK has started creeping up in the polls, nibbling yet further into Tory support that is already being hacked away by Labour.

And now they have an MP.

Yes, it is Lee Anderson, arguably an even greater liability than Tice. But the mere fact of having an MP brings with it a publicity platform that will drive a colossal increase in media coverage and attention, and with that comes the opportunity to pilfer a few more precious votes from a Conservative Party who would struggle to move any further to the right, and fight back, without haemorrhaging even more support to Labour. It’s just a snippet of the multifarious problems impacting our government’s hopes for another term in office.