When journalism becomes a mob, it spawns others. It was simply not possible for world leaders to express enough grief as the emotional imagery built over the week after Princess Diana's death. The British royal family was the subject of widespread outrage in Britain because its members didn't seem sad enough, and hadn't issued enough public statements to convince mourners that they were sincerely stricken and deeply grieving. What an ironic and contemporary nightmare for these princesses and princes, trained their whole lives to avoid showing this kind of emotion in public.
Buckingham Palace, an institution deeply rooted in medieval times when kings and queens didn't need popular support or worry about their TV images, demonstrated all week why Diana was able to outmaneuver them time after time.
The palace responded belatedly to the world's growing demand for royal comment by issuing more statements through spokespeople, expanding the funeral's parade route, and telling trusted journalists that Diana's sons could determine for themselves what role they wished to play in her funeral and weren't, in fact, being bullied by the Queen.
But no person or institution could possibly grieve enough, not in the wake of the awful fusion of technology, imagery, and celebrity. It seems only a matter of time before the queen gets an American-style spin doctor, picks smarter charities, learns how to use the tube more effectively, and starts crying in public.
The mob's call for blood was so loud and persistent that there was no chance for perspective in an atmosphere heightened at the carefully orchestrated and emotional funeral - one of the most watched events in world history.
It seems both fair and reasonable to consider enacting laws to guarantee the privacy and safety of public people who feel endangered or harassed, just as new anti-stalking laws have worked to protect some non-famous victims.
But it's far from clear whether the photographers pursuing Diana were responsible for her death, or behaved criminally. In fact, the evidence revealed so far suggests just the opposite - that a shockingly drunk driver crashed the car at frightening speeds for reasons that are not yet clear. It isn't even certain whether the pursuing photographers behaved irresponsibly after the crash.
It's also not clear why Diana's friend, guard, or driver didn't call the police and ask for help if they thought they were being harassed - as celebrities often do, particularly those experienced in dealing with media.
It isn't difficult, as a former reporter and producer, to imagine photographers trying to capture the death of the world's best-known woman. Princess Diana is not simply a victim of celebrity, but one of its more spectacular beneficiaries. As the insanely fawning coverage of her death suggests, the media have elevated her image to the point that pictures of her can be worth millions.
There will never in our lives be a world in which somebody won't pursue that kind of money.
Princess Diana worked deliberately and skillfully to construct an image for herself as a new kind of royal - accessible, culturally aware, young, humane, and good-hearted. In contrast to the Addams Family look-alikes ensconced in the House of Windsor, the charismatic, telegenic, and savvy Princess was particularly effective.
She never chose to withdraw from the public eye, live in a more private part of the world, or, as Jacqueline Onassis managed, to live a life largely apart from journalists and media contacts. Instead, she made herself one of the world's central media figures, a person certain to attract the kind of interest that makes the paparazzi not only possible but inevitable.
Diana used her ability to attract media to bludgeon her ex-husband into a generous settlement that left her with many millions of pounds and a palace in the center of London, thus assuring - with that and her books and interviews and charity work - that she would be a highly visible figure for years.
She courted journalists, columnists, and celebrity personalities - Kissinger, Walters, Travolta - many of whom offered very personal accounts of their friendships with her in the days after she died.
She also cused her media skills on behalf of a number of charities, and there's no reason to doubt either her sincerity or the public-relations windfall these very public acts generated.
None of this media manipulation, for worthy causes or personal gain, makes her a person deserving of harassment, loss of all privacy, or a violent death. But it does put in some context the circumstances in which photographers would dog her every step.
The paparazzi, if that is even the right term for them, deserve a fairer, cooler, and more considered hearing than their righteous journalistic colleagues or the public have yet been willing to give them.
The media issues surrounding the life and death of Princess Diana are important and complex. They greatly transcend the issue of privacy of celebrities, or simply First Amendment concerns. They have to do with values, imagery, and the stunning impact of new-media technologies that shape and manipulate the emotions, morals, politics, and values of much of the world.
Even the neo-luddite New York Times seemed to grasp this in a recent editorial: "The difference between Diana and her spiritual predecessors is technology. People had to seek out Alice Roosevelt or Frances Cleveland in person to find out how they appeared in the flesh, moved, and sounded. At the peak of the craze over Mrs. Kennedy, there were only three television networks, no handheld cameras, and no cellular phones and modems that now allow photographers to take and transmit pictures to their agents in seconds."
This is all very much so. Technology can create a new kind of social whirlwind when it converges on a story like this, one we seem unprepared to deal with, understand, or put in context. When the image of any single person, dead or alive, can spark so much anger, emotion, and intensity of feeling, the ante becomes frighteningly high - the stakes much bigger than celebrity or privacy.
At such times, we never need journalism more. But increasingly, we find it is less and less useful.
If The Washington Post headline is right, if Diana was the last princess and there could never be another, what kind of journalist or photographer would let her passing go unrecorded?
The unflinching truth about the paparazzi and their work is that they don't function beyond the pale of journalism, at least not as far from it as we would like to pretend. They are an integral part of it. They take us where we can't and don't always want to go. Their work is followed and consumed by countless millions. They feed the appetites we ourselves create.
Without us, there would be no them. If they belong in jail, then they deserve a lot of company.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
