"The Last Princess. How Could There Be Another?"
  - headline, The Washington Post,
1 September l997
I guess I have to be up front about this. Were I one of the news photographers in the Paris tunnel, I would have checked to see if Princess Diana was alive, helped in any reasonable way I could, made certain the police were called, then pulled out my camera and started shooting like crazy. Whatever pious posture I might wish to adopt now in retrospect and far from that awful crash, had I the opportunity to capture the death of the world's most famous person, I wouldn't have hesitated. My jaw drops at all those who are so sure they would have reacted differently.
To pretend otherwise is to deny the most elemental reality of the journalist's strange, sometimes detestable role in society, and to engage in self-serving hypocrisy.
When I told my daughter my sense of this, her eyes widened. "My god," she said. "You're a vulture."
For sure. I want a piece of this story too, as evidenced by this column. More than once in my career as a newspaper reporter, I sat by some dying murder or accident victim, solicitously offering one hand in comfort while the other was scribbling furiously in my notebook. Once, I happily gave the mother of a kidnapped child an expensive coat in exchange for being allowed to sit next to her on the plane home and pump her for details of her ordeal.
My editors were thrilled with all this, and generally so was I - in part because stories like these are so intensely read. Sometimes before the bodies had even grown cold, I was out with my friends yakking happily throughout the night.
Everybody wants and needs journalists. And everybody, at one point or another, comes to hate or fear them, more so the closer they get.
Journalists and society are unhappily codependent, at odds and cross-purposes, but bound together for life.
So there it is, the truth every journalist acknowledges in his or her heart at some point or another, the single ethic shared by everyone in the media - at least those with some self-awareness: We are voyeurs and vultures, among other things, a considerable portion of the time. We feed off the lives, work, and misery of others.
What reporter hasn't thought that as he or she tries to wheedle quotes out of some grieving survivor, or waits for hours outside the gates of some dying celebrity's home, or calls the parents of a fallen soldier to ask how they feel about the death of their beloved child? It isn't journalism's whole story, but it's a big part of it.
So I'm not able to sit in fuming judgment of the photographers demonized and abandoned by most of their colleagues, and who are by now the most hated and reviled people on the planet. If I haven't walked precisely in their shoes, it's only because of a difference in locale and the victim status. Was I more or less of a monster because the lives I intruded upon were not the lives of royalty?
What we all witnessed last week wasn't only the death of one of the world's most carefully crafted celebrities, but another reenactment of Frankenstein. The monster, played by various paparazzi, is disowned by its maker, in this case, pious and self-serving journalists. All week, reporters fed on the story like vampires, pausing only long enough to cluck at their sacrificed colleagues, who were hauled away by mortified Parisian authorities reeling from the worst publicity imaginable.
Victor Frankenstein didn't want any more to do with his monster than Barbara Walters and Dan Rather did with theirs. They're happy to host two-hour specials on the "people's princess," then profess astonishment that anybody would chase a glamorous icon into a tunnel to snap one more picture of her with her new beau.
It was hard to understand how journalism - even its high-budget, highbrow ranks - could sink so low.
One of my oldest and most romantic notions of the journalist is that of the solitary man or woman standing fearlessly against the mob. In this fantasy, the journalist exposes the crooked political boss nobody else would stand up to, takes on the brutal and racist cops of the old South when nobody else cares, or works to free a wrongly convicted prisoner.
These aren't daydreams, of course. Journalists at various points in American history have done all these heroic things and more, often at risk to life and limb.
But it's hard to find many occasions in history when mobs have gathered and any good has come of it. Mobs lynch people, conduct inquisitions and witch hunts, slaughter heretics, conduct ethnic cleansing, and eradicate entire cultures. They are the antithesis of free, deliberate, rational, and individualistic thought.
Reason and fact are the enemies of any mob, because they keep the herd from moving and force the individuals to stop and think about what they're doing. Government is one check against the mob, as are the police, presumably. Journalism is supposed to be yet another, a critical bulwark in the chain of reason.
But this is no longer the case, as the hapless and reviled paparazzi are learning firsthand. It seems inconceivable that at least some of them won't be charged with felonies and probably spend some time in jail. Somebody has to pay for what happened to the "last princess," and the people likely to emerge as most culpable are either dead or sitting behind big desks at broadcast studios far away. Journalists, instead of acting as providers of perspective and caution against the howling furies, are making most of the noise. They've become one of the biggest mobs there is. And the response is not awareness, but hysteria.
In response to the worldwide uproar, French officials have begun homicide inquiries into the behavior of the seven photographers - internationally labeled "paparazzi" - who allegedly harassed Diana and her friend in Paris, provoking them to speed into a tunnel, thus possibly contributing to their deaths.
Various eyewitnesses have ascribed horrible and insensitive behavior to the men on motorcycles: They chased the princess, interfered with police and rescue personnel, and callously snapped pictures of her mangled body still trapped in the crumpled Mercedes.
At last report, six photographers and a motorcyclist have been charged with involuntary homicide and failure to come to the aid of victims of a crash, according to French journalists, and three more photographers have been detained by police for questioning. In French law, involuntary homicide - killing someone without intending to - is punishable by three to five years' imprisonment and fines of US$50,000 to $83,000.
Mainstream journalists have railed for days, accusing the photographers of hateful and irresponsible behavior and furiously working to distance themselves from people who chase celebrities for photos. Major papers like the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have all run stories on these fearsome and lawless picture-takers and privacy-invaders, as have CNN, Time, Newsweek, and each of the commercial networks. "These people aren't the media," fumed an outraged Variety columnist.
ABC News decided that Prime Time Live would devote its entire broadcast to a town meeting on the excesses of the paparazzi. How could any news organization possibly make it clearer that this phenomenon was something other than what it does?
Instead of interviewing sociologists, cultural scholars, and legal experts for the purpose of examining celebrity culture, the TV networks seized upon Diana's death as a chance to parade before the viewing public an endless stream of aggrieved celebrities, supposedly providing commentary, analysis, and historical perspective.
Celebrities including Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg, Alec Baldwin, Sylvester Stallone, Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, and George Clooney rushed to denounce paparazzi as well as the publications that purchase pictures from them. One after another, they told horror stories of their own invaded and difficult lives. They called for new laws and demanded boycotts and jail sentences. The paparazzi are probably lucky to be in jail.
"The media killed her," sobbed an elderly British woman on CNN one night. "May they rot in bloody hell."
Such self-righteous fury ought to sound an alarm in itself. But the mob's call for blood was so loud and persistent there was no chance for perspective. The call will be heightened by the carefully orchestrated and genuinely emotional funeral - a shoo-in for one of the most watched events in history.
But are these celebrities really the people best equipped to define the issues for us, or just one more way for newscasts to pack stars into their programs?
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
