What to read after Did the Media Kill Diana??

The author was one a multitude outraged by the media’s role in the Princess of Wales’s tragic death in August 1997. Like most, he thought the media had hunted her to death. Roused to indignant anger, he got to work and had a book ready for publication about eighteen months later.

This present book is a reorganized, rewritten, chopped-up, added-to, and expanded version of that book with a sharpened refocus. In that first book, he was keen to explain the ideological presuppositions behind the media’s reporting and to challenge who they blamed for the accident. He wanted to refute the dodgy arguments they ran to shift blame from themselves to the public’s (allegedly) vicious appetite for sensation and gossip. The subject of republicanism and the viability of monarchy in our modern world came in for extensive discussion.

The aim in this new book with a new title is to examine and refute the same arguments, but to shift the emphasis from ideology to the media’s motivations and purposes in their reporting of Diana’s demise.

Two connected happenings roused the author to revisit the Diana story. First, there was Lord Dyson’s sensational report (14 May 2021) of his investigation into the BBC’s handling of the accusation that Martin Bashir of the BBC Panorama program tricked Diana into giving the 1995 interview that became the scoop of the century. Second, equally important, is Prince William’s address to the world on Dyson’s findings. With feeling, William explained from his point of view – a unique point of view – how the BBC (and, by the implication, the rest of the media) significantly contributed to his parents’ divorce and his mother’s end. Bashir’s interview, the BBC’s inability to see and accept the deceit, and Princes William and Harry’s responses are part of the Diana story. With these new developments, he proposes to round off the story of Diana’s death and its causes.