How “Polarising” Launders a Racial Judgment Into a Market Observation, and Why Predominantly White Newsrooms Cannot See the Difference

In March 2026, the Mirror published an article about Meghan Markle’s Netflix situation that included analysis from a PR professional named Mayah Riaz. Her assessment: Prince Harry has “strong individual brand equity,” while Meghan is “less relatable and more polarising.” Harry, she argued, is “the safer asset.”

The word appeared without justification. No audience research was cited. No engagement data was referenced. No comparative analysis was offered. It was simply stated as professional consensus: Meghan Markle is polarising. Everyone knows this. It requires no evidence because it is ambient knowledge, the kind of thing that floats through editorial meetings and PR strategy decks and expert commentary without anyone stopping to ask where it came from or what it is actually encoding.

This piece is about that word. Because “polarising” is not a description. It is a mechanism. It is a single adjective that performs the work of an entire media system, converting a manufactured output into a personal attribute, laundering a racial and gendered judgment into what sounds like a neutral market observation, and providing the editorial justification for the very coverage that produces the polarization it claims to describe.

I. Where the Causal Arrow Points

When someone is called polarising, the framing implies that the division originates from them, that something about who they are or what they do inherently splits opinion. The word locates the problem in the subject. It treats polarization as an attribute of the person rather than as an output of the system processing that person.

But polarization is not something Meghan Markle does. It is something that is done around her. The royal rota’s hero-versus-villain binary, the algorithmic amplification of outrage, the Bower serialization model, the aggregation pipeline from anonymous source to tabloid to aggregator to mainstream platform: these are the mechanisms that produce polarized audience responses. Meghan is the input. The polarization is the output. Calling her “polarising” reverses the causal arrow.

Consider an analogy. If a factory dumps chemicals into a river and the river becomes toxic, we do not call the river “toxic” as though toxicity were an intrinsic property of the water. We examine the factory. We trace the effluent. We ask who is producing the contamination and why. But when a media ecosystem processes a biracial woman through tabloid economics, institutional narrative management, and algorithmic amplification, and the resulting audience response is divided, we call the woman “polarising.” We attribute to her an outcome that the system manufactured.

Polarization is not something Meghan Markle does. It is something that is done around her. The word reverses the causal arrow, converting a manufactured output into a personal attribute.

II. Who Gets Called Polarising and Who Doesn’t

The racial dimension is not incidental. It is constitutive. The word “polarising” has a specific deployment pattern in media coverage of Black and biracial public figures, and it functions as what critical race scholars identify as a race-neutral descriptor that carries racialized meaning. It allows the speaker to express discomfort with a person’s presence in a space without naming the actual source of that discomfort.

Barack Obama was relentlessly described as “divisive” and “polarising” throughout his presidency, despite running explicitly on unity and bipartisanship. Research from Texas A&M found that exposure to negative news frames of Obama primed prejudicial attitudes toward African Americans broadly, not just toward Obama himself. A study tracking explicit racial slurs on Twitter found that usage of the n-word increased measurably in the days following Obama’s public speeches, suggesting that the mere visibility of a Black person in a position of institutional power activated racial hostility. The word “polarising” provided a socially acceptable container for that hostility. It allowed commentators to express the discomfort without naming its source.

Hillary Clinton was called “polarising” for decades in ways that male politicians with identical policy positions never were. The word performed the same function: it made a gendered reaction to a woman in a male-coded space sound like an objective assessment of her personal qualities.

The pattern is consistent. When a person who is not a white man occupies a space historically reserved for white men, the word “polarising” gets deployed to make the structural disruption sound like a personal defect. It converts institutional discomfort into individual pathology.

Meghan Markle did not do anything structurally different from what other royal spouses have done. She married into the family. She performed duties. She wore clothes. She attended events. She had children. The “polarisation” began before she did anything publicly contestable. It began when a biracial American woman entered an institution that functions as a symbol of white British identity and continuity. The discomfort preceded the behavior. The word “polarising” retroactively attaches that discomfort to the person rather than to the disruption her presence caused within a racially coded institution.

III. The Active Voice and the Passive Attribute

There is a linguistic tell that illuminates how the word operates differently depending on who it describes. White public figures who generate controversy are typically described in active terms: they “sparked debate,” they “courted controversy,” they made a “bold move,” they “divided opinion.” The controversy is framed as something they chose. Agency is preserved. The division is presented as a consequence of a decision, not an essence.

When a biracial woman generates the same level of divided opinion, the framing shifts to a passive attribute: she “is polarising.” The division is treated as intrinsic to her rather than as a product of how institutions process her. The word does the work of making a systemic output look like a personal characteristic. It is not that the media ecosystem produces divided responses to her. It is that she is, in her nature, the kind of person who divides.

This grammatical distinction matters enormously. “She sparked debate” preserves the possibility that the debate is about something external, a decision, a statement, a policy. “She is polarising” forecloses that possibility. The debate is about her. The division inheres in her existence. There is nothing to examine about the system because the system is merely responding to what she is.

“She sparked debate” preserves the possibility that the debate is about something external. “She is polarising” forecloses that possibility. The division inheres in her existence.

IV. The Self-Fulfilling Loop

The media utility of the word is where the analysis gets genuinely dangerous, because “polarising” functions not only as a laundered judgment but as a self-fulfilling editorial justification. The loop works like this:

An editor decides to run a negative piece about Meghan. It generates high engagement because negative content about her reliably does, for all the systemic reasons documented in the companion piece to this analysis. The high engagement is interpreted as evidence that she is “polarising.” Her “polarising” nature is then cited as the editorial justification for the next piece. The coverage creates the polarization. The polarization justifies the coverage. The word converts an output of the system into an input that authorizes more of the same.

This is not a description. It is a perpetual motion machine disguised as an adjective.

A 2022 Press Gazette survey of UK journalists found that 50% believed media coverage of Meghan Markle had been racist. But notably, journalists at tabloid newspapers, the outlets that produce the most coverage of her, were the least likely to agree: 61% of tabloid journalists thought their coverage was fair. This is the loop in action. The people inside the machine are the least equipped to see what the machine produces, because from inside, each individual editorial decision looks rational. She is polarising, so she generates engagement, so we cover her, so she remains polarising. The circularity is invisible from within.

V. The Gatekeeping Function: Who Decides What’s Normal

The word “polarising” does not emerge from a vacuum. It is produced by specific people in specific institutions, and the demographic composition of those institutions shapes which framings feel “natural” and “objective” to the people producing them.

A 2021 CNN investigation into UK tabloid newsroom diversity found that the major tabloid publishers declined to answer questions about the racial composition of their editorial staff. The outlets that have been the primary engines of negative Meghan coverage, the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Mirror, the Express, could not or would not disclose how many of their editors, reporters, and opinion writers are not white. Marverine Duffy, director of undergraduate journalism at Birmingham City University and a member of the editorial board of the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, identified the core problem: editors drive the news agenda, and when those editors are overwhelmingly white, certain framings feel like objectivity rather than perspective.

This is where your observation, Predominantly white-staffed news orgs think it is their job to gatekeep on the basis of protecting a stagnant status quo, becomes analytically precise. The gatekeeping function operates on two levels. At the surface level, editorial decisions about framing, sourcing, and emphasis determine which narrative reaches the audience. At the structural level, the homogeneity of the decision-makers means that framings which align with their own institutional assumptions about who belongs, who is credible, and what constitutes appropriate behavior feel like neutral professional judgment.

When a predominantly white editorial team decides that a biracial woman’s paid speaking engagement is “tone deaf” but a white celebrity’s identical appearance fee is unremarkable, that is not a market assessment. It is an expression of institutional assumptions about who is entitled to monetize their own profile. When a predominantly white newsroom decides that anonymous claims about Meghan “talking over” Harry in meetings are newsworthy, while the identical dynamic in any other business partnership would go unreported, that is not editorial judgment about relevance. It is a judgment about which women are permitted to be assertive and which are not.

The word “polarising” is the linguistic product of this gatekeeping function. It is what homogeneous institutions produce when they encounter someone who disrupts their assumptions and lack the internal diversity to recognize that the disruption is coming from the institution, not the individual.

EVIDENCE The Double Standard in Headlines A widely circulated Buzzfeed comparison documented systematic differences in how UK tabloids covered identical behaviors by Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton. When Kate cradled her baby bump during pregnancy, the Daily Mail headline described her as “tenderly” caring for her child. When Meghan did the same, she was accused of performative behavior. When Kate ate avocado toast, it was a wholesome trend. When Meghan ate avocado toast, it was linked to environmental destruction and human rights abuses in the avocado supply chain. These are not differences in editorial judgment about newsworthiness. They are expressions of who the editorial gatekeepers consider to be “one of us” and who they consider to be an interloper whose every action requires scrutiny. The word “polarising” is the abstracted version of this double standard: it converts thousands of individual editorial decisions into a single adjective that sounds like a neutral description of audience response rather than an institutional output. As one Black broadcast journalist told Press Gazette in 2022: “She’s been treated differently, overtly and covertly. Whether in comparison with Kate Middleton or outrageous racial slurs about her coming from ‘Compton’ and what that implies. It’s wrong.” A senior editor of Black Caribbean ethnicity at a consumer magazine was more direct: “I feel the editors don’t like her because she’s not ‘in her place.’ As a Black person in England, I know what it’s like to get on the wrong side of Middle England. It’s brutal and draining.”

VI. The False Equivalence

There is one more layer to how the word operates, and it may be the most structurally significant. “Polarising” implies two equally weighted poles of opinion: people who support her and people who oppose her. The word presents this as a naturally occurring division, as though the population has simply sorted itself into two camps based on individual assessment.

But those poles are not symmetrically produced. The negative pole is industrially manufactured. It is the product of tabloid economics, serialization models, anonymous palace-adjacent sourcing, aggregation pipelines, algorithmic amplification, and institutional narrative management. It has organizational infrastructure, financial incentives, and professional staffing. Tom Bower’s books are commissioned, edited, serialized, promoted, and distributed through an industry supply chain. The Variety feature drew on six named and unnamed sources with institutional access. The Mirror piece was staffed by a reporter and included paid expert commentary.

The positive pole is largely organic. It consists of individual supporters, fan communities, social media users, and consumers engaging in what the companion piece calls oppositional consumer loyalty. It has no organizational infrastructure. It has no editorial supply chain. It has no serialization model. It is people on X spending their own time and, in some cases, their own money in response to what they perceive as injustice.

Calling the result “polarisation” treats these two asymmetric forces as though they were equivalent. It presents an industrially manufactured negative output and an organically produced positive response as two equally weighted opinions. The word erases the machine. It makes the manufactured look natural and the structural look personal.

“Polarising” presents an industrially manufactured negative output and an organically produced positive response as two equally weighted opinions. The word erases the machine.

VII. The Professional Consensus Problem

Return to the Mirror article and Mayah Riaz’s assessment. When a PR professional calls Meghan “more polarising” than Harry, she is not conducting original research. She is performing a consensus judgment, stating as neutral professional assessment what is actually a reflection of the media environment she operates within.

PR professionals absorb the framing of the outlets they work with. If every outlet treats Meghan as polarising, then “she is polarising” becomes ambient professional knowledge, something everyone knows, which means nobody has to justify it. The word circulates through editorial meetings, PR strategy decks, brand consulting presentations, and expert commentary without ever being traced back to its origin in the coverage system that produced it.

This is how racialized judgments become invisible. They get embedded in professional vocabulary. They get stated by “experts” in quotation marks. They get repeated across enough outlets that they feel like objective reality rather than a perspective produced by a structurally homogeneous set of decision-makers processing a biracial woman through institutional assumptions about who belongs.

The word “polarising” is not a finding. It is a consensus. And the consensus was formed by the same institutions whose coverage produces the polarization. The expert is citing the machine’s output as evidence for the machine’s input. The circularity is total.

VIII. What the Word Protects

Ultimately, “polarising” is a word that protects the status quo by making its disruption look like the disruptor’s fault. It tells you that the divided response to Meghan Markle is a fact about Meghan Markle rather than a fact about the institutions processing her. It tells you that the appropriate response is to assess her rather than to assess them.

Predominantly white newsrooms deploying the word are not engaged in neutral observation. They are engaged in gatekeeping: defining who is permitted to occupy institutional space, who is permitted to monetize their own profile, who is permitted to be assertive in business meetings, who is permitted to charge for speaking engagements, and who is permitted to exist as a public figure without being subjected to industrially manufactured negative coverage. The word “polarising” is the mechanism by which all of these gatekeeping judgments are compressed into a single adjective that sounds like a market observation.

Kehinde Andrews, the first Black Studies professor in the UK, has argued that framing Meghan’s inclusion in the royal family as a sign of racial progress was itself a “post-racial delusion” that demonstrated “how poorly the nation understands racism and the power of the desire to live in a fantasy of progress rather than address continuing issues.” The word “polarising” is a product of that same delusion. It allows institutions to process a biracial woman through racialized assumptions while maintaining the fiction that the assessment is race-neutral.

IX. Naming the Mechanism

The purpose of this analysis is not to argue that Meghan Markle is beyond criticism. Every public figure is subject to legitimate scrutiny. The purpose is to argue that the word “polarising,” as deployed in her coverage, is not criticism. It is not analysis. It is not a market observation. It is a mechanism.

It reverses the causal arrow, converting a manufactured output into a personal attribute. It deploys differently along racial and gendered lines, making structural disruption sound like individual pathology. It functions as a self-fulfilling editorial justification, authorizing the coverage that produces the condition it claims to describe. It presents asymmetric forces as equivalent poles. It embeds racialized judgments in professional vocabulary where they become invisible. And it protects the status quo by making its disruption look like the disruptor’s fault.

A single word should not be able to do all of that. But this one does. And it does it precisely because no one stops to examine it. It passes through editorial copy, through expert commentary, through PR assessments, through audience discussions, without anyone asking: who produced the polarization? Who benefits from calling it a personal attribute? And whose institutional assumptions are being expressed when a predominantly white newsroom applies this word to a biracial woman who had the audacity to enter, and then to leave, the whitest institution in British public life?

The word is not describing a phenomenon. It is participating in one. And the first step toward accountability is refusing to let it pass unchallenged.