Prince Harry said the British media 'creates' news instead of reporting the truth

• Prince Harry spoke about the UK media during a panel discussion about misinformation for WIRED.
• He said the British press turns "fact-based news into opinion-based gossip."

Prince Harry spoke out against the British press on Tuesday.

The Duke of Sussex, 37, spoke at WIRED's RE:WIRED virtual conference on a panel about misinformation called "The Internet Lie Machine."

During the discussion, the prince spoke about how misinformation doesn't exist solely on the internet, comparing social-media lies to falsehoods he says the British press has written about him and his family.

"I learned from a very early age the incentives of publishing are not necessarily aligned with the incentives of truth," he said. "My experience is being more pre-social media around the UK press who sadly conflate profit with purpose and news with entertainment."

"They don't report the news, they create it," he went on to say of the UK press. "They're successful in turning fact-based news into opinion-based gossip with devastating consequences for the country."

"I lost my mother through this self-manufactured rabidness, and obviously I'm determined not to lose the mother of my children to the same thing," he added. Harry has compared the way UK tabloids treat Markle to their treatment of the late Princess Diana on multiple occasions.

He has also been a vocal critic of the UK press in recent years, with both he and Markle filing separate lawsuits against British tabloids.

The UK media's racist attitude toward Markle also may have played a role in the couple's decision to step down as senior members of the royal family. Insider has previously reported that there is a marked difference between the way the British press writes about Markle and Harry versus Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Harry and Markle have been targeted by trolls on social media as well, with an independent study finding that just 83 Twitter accounts were responsible for 70% of 114,000 hate tweets about the couple.

In the WIRED panel discussion, Harry said one of his biggest concerns about those accounts was the way the British press interacted with them.

"Perhaps the most troubling part of this is the number of British journalists interacting with and amplifying the hate and the lies," he said of the study. "They regurgitate these lies as truth."

He then went on to give the example of the term "Megxit," which people used to describe his and Markle's decision to step back from the royal family.

"Maybe people know this and maybe they don't, but the term 'Megxit' was or is a misogynistic term," he said. "It was created by a troll, amplified by royal correspondents, and it grew and grew and grew into mainstream media."

Harry said he thinks the solution to this amplification is for "real" journalists to make changes from within the system.

"I've grown up learning that news should be sacred ground," he said. "When a lie spreads on social media, it's dangerous. Of course it is. But when that same lie is given credibility by journalists or publishers, it's unethical, and as far as I'm concerned, an abuse of power."

"I feel as though we have to invest in and support professional, honest journalists who respect and uphold the values of journalism, not the pirates with the press cards who have hijacked the most powerful industry, the freest industry in the world," he said.

"Real journalists have the power and the will to tackle racism, misogyny, lies, all of it from within their own system," he added. "So what I would love to see is a movement for journalists to expose the unethical, the immoral, and dishonest amongst them."

Representatives for the Duke of Sussex did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.