Serious Media Join the Bottom Feeders

Have the news executives who run America’s mass media gone mad? Is there any possible journalistic justification for the seemingly endless coverage of the death of Princess Diana?

Nothing that this woman represented can warrant the astounding excess of attention accorded by the most respectable centers of electronic and print journalism. No pioneer of science, genius inventor, brilliant poet or head of state--short of John Kennedy--has ever received, in my recollection, such adulation. Indeed, this past Sunday when all bounds of good taste were breeched, even the death of Mother Teresa, whom Diana venerated, was relegated to the inside pages. How could a tiny nun married only to God and dedicated to the poor compete with a tall, blond royal divorcee?

Princess Di’s attention to AIDS, homelessness and the elimination of land mines was certainly admirable, but it mocks her deeply felt concerns to drop them in as sidebars in the effort to trade on her fame one last time. It would take only a small fraction of the resources committed by the media to the exploitation of her death to actually remove the land mines now in place throughout the world. Or perhaps news editors could have explored the irony that representatives of the president of the United States were in Oslo arguing against an international ban on land mines as the president’s wife was flying to London to attend Diana’s funeral.

If the wonder of Princess Di was that she was “classless” in her compassion, as her brother eulogized, why didn’t the media follow her example and devote some decent amount of thought and space to those hundreds of women and children who had their throats slit in Algeria the very week of her death?

Do they not now mock this young woman’s brave efforts to feel the suffering of the anonymous many by turning Diana into an icon the likes of which no modern royal house has ever been able to claim?

This woman who in life fled the imprisonment required by the royal family is now offered up as its proudest achievement. What irony that her death has given the decadent old order a new lease on life and has made the stale trappings and tawdry gossip of British royalty fashionable as a subject for intricate analysis in the serious media.

Yes, I can already hear the answer to my tirade. We are giving the readers and viewers what they want. But wasn’t that the claim of the tabloids that exploited her life in the same way that the more respectable media now exploits her death? And is not the goal the same--to sell papers or improve ratings? No, it is not the same, they will respond, we did not create this phenomenon, but merely reported it. The millions placing flowers in her memory were clearly touched in ways unprecedented, making this a legitimate news story. Obviously it is, and no one is suggesting it not be covered. But let’s not kid a kidder: This story has been stoked by once proud journalists now preoccupied with market shares who saw a spike in sales and played it for all it was worth.

Did the world stop for a week? What important stories were left out of the evening news or off the front page because the profitable hyping of Diana’s death took precedence? Has the definition of news now come to be ordered by the tastes of consumers exclusive of the informed judgment of experienced reporters and editors? Are we all now People magazine?

Sadly, in the end, the real significance of Princess Diana is not to be found in her obviously hard fought battle to establish her own identity as a divorcee rejected by the royal family, a mother confronting an obnoxious and powerful ex-spouse or as a leader reaching out beyond the pretenses of decaying monarchy to touch the common folk. She was all that, and it should be remembered. But none of that has much to do with this orgy of idolatry that the media seem determined to raise to the level of mass hysteria, or is it hypnotic escape? There was a taste of the Roman circus in the spectacle of so many whipping up themselves and being whipped up in the deception that the ordinary content of their lives is lent significance only by association with some event or personage presumed to be greater. What we invest in the famous we steal from ourselves.

That is the true danger of the celebrity gossip craze that so totally dominated the media food chain last week. Distinguished news executives who lowered themselves to swim with the bottom-feeding paparazzi should be warned that “you are what you eat.”