Diana and the Media

As I reported, the tenth anniversary of Princess Diana's death was hyped by the media, reluctantly observed by the Royals and largely ignored by the public. When alive and once she had understood where the power lay, Diana used publicity - for good or ill -  ruthlessly and basked in the power of her own celebrity. The media loved it - I became part of the process - and the momentum generated kept the story alive for a decade after her death. The question this raises is: who, exactly, is doing this, who is creating what we now accept as contemporary reality? The media, the newspapers especially, always say they are giving the people what they want and  their evidence for this is the fact that people buy their products. There are a number of problems with this argument, but the important one is this: it is inconceivable that, before, say, Big Brother came along, the public wanted a reality TV show about freaks locked in a house. Somebody had to invent the show. Of course, they did so thinking 'the public will want this', but the same thought could have created any number of different shows. The Big Brother story, therefore, cannot be some organic flowering of the desires of the people, rather it is a deliberate attempt to invent or at least guide those desires. The same is true of Diana. Of course, her marriage to Charles, its breakdown and her death would have been big news at any time in any context. But, because of the way the media now works, it also became an endlessly fertile story-generating system. It was not that the facts could be reported and commented once or twice, it had to be perpetually reinvented and recycled. The public could then be said to 'want' this but only because the media are very good at making people want things, it is, after all, their job. So effective was this process that it created overwhelming peer-pressure; magazines had to have Diana stories because all the others did, just as, for a while, they all had to have Victoria Beckham on the cover. The people were this hounded into an even tighter marketing circle - if they wanted a magazine, they had to have one with Posh or Di on the cover and the marketing goons concluded that, therefore, only Posh and Di sold mags because it was 'what the people wanted'. The media consist of machines for creating wants in people. The truth of 'what people want' is a concept that lies far beyond the imaginations of goons or media executives. Nevertheless, their invented idea of 'what people want' is the theory by which we live. It produces the best and the worst journalism - the best invariably created by those who accept the theory without ever really believing it.