A ferocious backlash against the media emerged Sunday in the hours after the deaths of Princess Diana and two others, killed in a car crash while apparently trying to flee photographers in Paris.
While a motorist yelled “bastards” at a group of photographers outside Buckingham Palace and patients in a Paris hospital shouted “murderers” at 20 journalists, a much broader but no less searing examination of how the news media do their job began to take root.
Complaints about the so-called paparazzi photographers, free-lancers who have made a profitable business from photographing the Princess of Wales and other celebrities for huge sums of money, mounted amid calls for tighter controls over media intrusion into the private lives of personalities.
“In the longer term, serious questions will need to be asked if the aggressive intrusion into her privacy has contributed to this tragedy,” said British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.
To Earl Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother, there is no question: The press had “blood on its hands” because it was willing to pay vast sums of money to “greedy individuals” for intimate photographs, he said Sunday.
“I always believed the press would kill her in the end,” Spencer said.
Amid the condemnations, though, there remains a public appetite for the spectacular, the lurid, the salacious. The tabloids feed it, and the paparazzi feed the tabloids.
The paparazzi thrive mostly in Europe, where the tabloid press has a much stronger presence than in the United States. Weekly tabloids do have a loyal following in the U.S., and the incident in Paris may pressure the tabloid media to end voluntarily or be forced to stop the practice of paying high fees for provocative photographs or salacious stories.
The impact may not be limited to the tabloid press because many in the public do not distinguish between the so-called mainstream media and sensationalist tabloids.
“I think this is going to crystallize the feeling against the media, and it will force journalism to start acting like a profession and not just a business,” said Professor Charles Eisendrath, chairman of the Journalism Fellows Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Even as the world mourned the death of Diana, the editor of The National Enquirer said pictures of the princess trapped alive inside her car were being sold to reap as much as $1 million.
“We were offered those pictures,” Enquirer editor Steve Coz said on the ABC television program “This Week.” Coz said the shots were offered to the Enquirer for $250,000. He said he turned them down and urged other publications to do so as well.
Coz said recent photographs from the French Riviera of the vacationing Diana and Dodi Fayed, also killed in the crash, sold in the United States for about $200,000.
Although the actions of the paparazzi will attract the most scrutiny–from the public and government authorities–there may well be spillover effects on all the media. Public opinion polls say journalists as a group are not highly regarded.
More Top Picks Computer Vision Syndrome In Children Warning Signs
The cumulative effect of reports on the private lives of President Clinton, sports broadcaster Frank Gifford and other celebrities have sometimes blurred the distinctions between the reporting of grocery store tabloids and the so-called respectable press.
“I would caution the mainstream media about being so high-minded about the differences between what they do and what the paparazzi do,” said Professor Jack Doppelt of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. “I suspect that, to the victim, there is very little distinction.”
But just as celebrities complain about intrusions, they often benefit from and thrive on the media exposure. Diana was a skilled manipulator of the press. She knew how to keep herself in the public eye and how to upstage her former husband, Prince Charles. But like nearly all celebrities, she could not control it.
In Chicago, street-side public opinion on events leading to Diana’s death were mixed.
“The press was just as bad as a bullet, just as lethal,” said cab driver Curtis Esters. “They chased her and hounded her and kept chasing her until they chased her to death. . . . Those photographers and reporters have a responsibility to show restraint.”
Joylene Medina was purchasing a copy of The National Equirer at a North Side grocery store. On the cover was the headline: “Di Goes Sex-Mad `I Can’t Get Enough!’ ‘ Inside was a two-page spread with photos of Diana and Fayed cavorting on the beach.
“I don’t think anyone is to blame. I just think it was a terrible accident,” said Medina, who lives on the West Side and works as a maid.
Medina says she buys the Enquirer every week because it’s “fun to read.” She does not think the press or the public bear any responsibility in Diana’s death.
“She was married to a prince, so her life is public. I think she knew that,” Medina said.
The University of Michigan’s Eisendrath said, “What the photographers were after was not news. This had nothing to do with informing the public and everything to do with four guys trying to make a living.”