Diana was queen of the media she loved — and hated
Looking back 20 years, the relationship was ‘famously and fatefully symbiotic’
She wanted to be the queen of all hearts, and in the end, Princess Diana achieved that. But before that, she was definitely the queen of all media.
After all, whose face sold more books and newspapers? Who sparkled more brightly on a red carpet than any movie star? Whose pictures — some of them arranged by her on the sly — sold for higher prices and in greater numbers than any others? Whose triumphs and trials launched a zillion celebrity-gossip magazines and TV shows?
As fans and observers mark the
20th anniversary of Diana’s death on Thursday, she remains a media magnet.
From 1980, when she first emerged as a potential wife for Prince Charles and thus a future Princess of Wales, to 1996, when their divorce after 15 tumultuous, unhappy years was finalized, the relationship between Diana and the news and entertainment media was complicated. She loved some, she hated many, sometimes in the same week. She cared what they said about her, she complained frequently about them hounding her, and she tried to manipulate them to help her fight various battles.
“The relationship between Diana and the press was famously and fatefully symbiotic,” says British PR consultant and royals commentator Richard Fitzwilliams, in something of an understatement.
After Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997, the world mourned, but the keening was especially intense in newsrooms: No one was a more reliable meal ticket than Diana back in the media Stone Age (that is,
pre-2000), and now, suddenly, she was gone. Talk about grieving.
Even worse, her death threatened initially to become a blamethe-media story: Diana had died in a car racing to elude paparazzi on motorbikes, and her brother, the Earl Spencer, was railing that “the press” had killed her.
In the months before her death, Diana was in the headlines near daily as she campaigned against land mines and vacationed on a yacht in the Mediterranean with her new beau (of about 30 days), Dodi Fayed, the son of Egyptian-born billionaire Mohamed Fayed.
It was not fawning coverage. Her land-mine campaign ticked off powerful political and economic interests in Britain and elsewhere. And the Fayeds were viewed with wide suspicion by the British establishment, the father because he made a stink about being denied British citizenship and the son because he was seen as little more than a feckless playboy.
When she tipped off some photographers to where she would be on vacation with Dodi on the yacht, leading to the publication of pictures of swimsuit-clad Diana embracing and kissing Dodi, it caused a sensation in the U.K. three weeks before her death.
After learning Diana had died at about 4 a.m. local time, the media’s tone pivoted from damning the princess to beatifying her, conveniently ignoring their headlines from the previous three weeks, says Sally Bedell Smith, the American author of a bestselling biography of Diana.
Meanwhile, the initial blame- the-media moment was giving way to a bash-the-royals movement. Queen Elizabeth was perceived as being indifferent because she wouldn’t break protocol and fly the royal standard over Buckingham Palace. “Where is our Queen? Where is our flag?” wailed the biggest-selling tabloid, The Sun.
What followed was a week of 24/7 “adulatory” coverage, Fitzwilliams says. And despite the lingering ill feeling toward Fleet Street, newspapers did “a roaring trade” in the days after Diana’s death, says British journalist and royals biographer Katie Nicholl. “There wasn’t rolling news as such in 1997, and no Twitter, so newspapers were very much the source of information,” she says.
The long-term impact of Diana’s death included greater pressure on the British media to leave her sons alone while they were underage and still in school. “It made the media as a whole change — it was a call to arms,” says CNN royals contributor Victoria Arbiter, daughter of the queen’s former press secretary.
Now, 20 years later, Diana is back on screens, the subject of books, articles and TV documentaries. Only now it’s not just the old media that are preoccupied with Diana, which leads to an interesting question: What would Diana have thought about, say, Twitter or Facebook or Instagram?
She would have hated them, Smith says. It’s not a coincidence that her sons and other young royals stay away from them.
“To have millions weighing in about her on Twitter or Facebook would have overwhelmed her,” Smith says. “She was so profoundly affected by depictions in the tabloids — imagine the trolls. It would have been horrible for her.”
What would Diana have thought about today’s social media? “To have millions weighing in about her on Twitter or Facebook would have overwhelmed her. ... Imagine the trolls. It would have been horrible for her.” Author Sally Bedell Smith