While many are glued to the screen for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, a pair of YouTube stars may have shown that Royal experts aren’t always as trustworthy as they seem. In a viral video released before the interview (H/T Bustle), Josh Pieters and Archie Manners put together a slight experiment to see what The Royal Family’s experts had to say about the aftermath of the interview.
The catch is nobody has seen it yet and the talk they provide is not representative of the actual content of the chat. Dickie Arbiter, the queen’s former press secretary, Majesty EIC Ingrid Seward and royal commentators Richard Fitzwilliams and Victoria Arbiter were the four tapped for involvement in the YouTube experiment. Pieters and Manners informed the subjects that their comments would air on a special following the airing of Oprah Winfrey’s interview in the United Kingdom.
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The results on the video are surprising. Each subject seems to give their expert opinion with confidence, even though they have not watched the interview outside of what we have seen in previews. “In the interview, to my mind, this was an actress giving one of her great performances,” Seward can be seen saying in the video, adding that Winfrey went easy on the couple. “From start to finish, Meghan was acting.”
Fitzwilliams also criticized Winfrey and the interview, saying it wasn’t balanced and the couple was given an “easy ride” by Winfrey. “There was a great deal in it that the palace will find deeply concerning,” Fitzwilliams added.
Bustle points out that Pieters and his partner denied that their video was meant to comment on any racism allegedly hurled at Markle. Their focus was instead showing that “people are willing to say things that aren’t necessarily true” as part of the ongoing media affair with The Royals.
“It was purely to experiment whether people would talk about something that hadn’t happened yet in a sector that they are meant to be experts in,” Pieters told Insider, according to Bustle. “We gave them facts, which weren’t facts, and they spoke about them as facts.”
Arbiter and Fitzwilliams defended their comments in the video, calling the video “misleading” and a “scam.” Fitzwilliams tweeted that the video was a “sting” and held fast that he only commented on the video released in the previews.
