In the days before smartphones, it was possible to spend an evening out without constant news alerts and Twitter notifications.
On the night of Aug. 31, 1997, I attended a play and then dropped by a nightclub, so it was after midnight when I got into my car and flicked on the radio to hear the shocking news: Princess Diana had been killed in a horrific accident.Within 24 hours, I was on my way to London to cover her funeral.
For the next week, I witnessed the raw grief and outrage of the British people: their anger at the royal family and their fury at the media, especially the paparazzi, whom they blamed for the car crash.
Every flower laid in front of Kensington Palace was a rebuke. “For 17 years we have seen her in the papers and on television,” mourner Ray Moore told me. “I’m quite hardened, but I was shocked at the grief I felt. It was like losing a member of the family.”
It was the biggest story in the world: No detail was too small for the voracious public, but those of us reporting were regarded with resentment and suspicion.
The truth, of course, was more complicated. Diana was the most famous woman in the world — beloved, betrayed, pitied and pursued. Unlike the rest of the British royals, she innately understood the power of the media, and used it to become a superstar and, later, to wage war with the palace. She believed she could summon the cameras when she wanted flattering stories, and send them away when she’d had enough.
In the end, she was the victim of a taciturn royal family, an insatiable celebrity culture and her own tragic misunderstanding of what it meant to be a fairy-tale princess in the real world.
An estimated 750 million people worldwide watched the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, a 20-year-old beauty with no past and, it seemed, an unlimited future. From the moment reporters realized the shy kindergarten teacher was dating the heir to the throne, the public couldn’t get enough of her.
To say she was woefully unprepared for the demands of the modern monarchy is an understatement. Charles — in love with Camilla Parker Bowles and ill-equipped to deal with a naive, emotionally fragile young woman — was unable or unwilling to help her.
So Diana turned to the public, which loved her for her beauty, her charisma and the affection it had never seen from other royals. She gave them an adorable heir and a spare. The tabloids were extravagant in their praise, breathlessly following her every move. She upstaged the other royals by charm or by calculation.
She cultivated reporters, flattering them, leaking choice bits of news. “Let it not be said that she lacked sophistication about the media, her use of it and its use of her,” Times of London editor Peter Stothard said after she died.
Later on, the media became her weapon of choice as she battled Charles during their separation and divorce. The palace was furious when she secretly cooperated with author Andrew Morton for the sensational biography “Diana: A True Story.”
“She just couldn’t really get to grips with being an international superstar on the one hand and being treated in such a poor way by both the royal family and particularly by Prince Charles,” Morton told “Frontline.”
But it was Diana’s 1995 BBC interview, where she confessed to depression, bulimia and infidelity, that was the last straw for the queen. The divorce was finalized the following year, and Diana lost “Her Royal Highness.”
The only thing that sells better than a fairy tale is a fairy tale gone wrong. Diana believedthe only way to fight the royals was to have the public on her side. She sat alone in front of the Taj Mahal, and wore a sexy black dress the night Charles admitted to adultery on national…
The post Diana and the media: She used them, and they used her. Until the day she died. appeared first on FeedBox.