Princess Diana of Wales (1961-1997) - 5 September 1997

Before I talk about the way the news came to us, which I hope may do something to underline a grim truth in the saying "the medium is the message", I ought to say at once that this country was most noticeably surprised and impressed by the range, the social range, of sympathy that was shown in Britain and (to the further surprise of many) in so many countries of the world.

It was, I think the shots of people in Africa and Asia that made it clear what in the Princess had taken hold of the affections of so many millions we hadn’t thought about: the sight and sound of her dedication to people everywhere who were disabled or dispossessed or very sick or desperately poor.

I think now there’s no doubt that her dedication was real enough to have become a lifetime’s commitment. If so, in only two or three years it dimmed and redeemed the former image of her as merely the sparkling star of the international jet set.

In all the massive television coverage since the bad night in Paris, I think the most moving moment was witnessed when the President of Norway stood before that convention that had met to write a treaty banning landmines; standing and asking for one minute’s silence, and the camera panned around the bowed heads of a hundred nations.

Well last Saturday night, I was scanning the channels, as we say, before I went to bed, and came on a long shot of a tunnel somewhere, the picture hardly varying for 15 minutes or so and two voices, three, four, five talking, talking, talking; in theory performing the first duty of television commentators, which is to enlighten you about what you’re watching.

In retrospect, that first scene turned out not to have done any enlightening, not adding anything to the original bleak sentence that Princess Diana was seriously hurt in a Paris car crash in which her companion had been killed.

They couldn’t add any true detail because they didn’t know. All they saw was what we saw: a police barricade, flashing lights, and somewhere deep in there, presumably, a wrecked car. The rest, they had to make up.

They were never short of breath, or talk. Here were six or seven commentators, correspondents, four of them from London – supposed experts on the Royals – and I suppose the rationale for calling on them was that since they were so well informed on all the movements of royalty, they must have been in touch with somebody close to the palace or Balmoral who had had an official word from the French government, from the hospital, from perhaps the British ambassador who (they guessed correctly) had gone to the hospital.

My point is this. Because they are reporters whose speciality is royalty and because there is gaping television time to fill, they’re under contract to tell us what they think has happened. So I went to bed that Saturday night knowing only what I’d been told; that two men were killed, one badly hurt, and the Princess “badly bruised” as one correspondent put it.

It was a rueful moment a day or two later to recall that when one royal expert, who seemed more authoritative than the rest, while he was assuring us that the princess had a broken arm and a lacerated thigh, the princess had in fact been dead for two hours.

Why do they do it? They’re doing in words very much what the paparazzi hope to do in pictures, to maintain at all costs the pretence that they are privy to some intimacy you never expected to know. How about ought not to know? Perish the undemocratic thought.

We get on television so much interminable speculation masquerading as news for the very simple reason that men climb Everest – because television is there – and for no compulsory reason I know, it has to fill 24 hours a day. If you have nothing to say, you make up something. If you’re supposed to be a reporter, in desperation you have to guess at what might be true,

I have an old friend, a novelist with a fertile imagination. He once told me that the spark that fired his ambition to be a novelist was one lecture during a month or two that he spent going to law school. He abandoned the idea of a lawyer’s profession after he’d attended this one lecture.

He told me how he went into the lecture room up at Columbia University. The professor came in and announced the title of the lecture, "What Is Evidence?" The professor then, I gather, rustled a few papers and was peering down intensely at his notes when suddenly a door banged. There was the sound of a scuffle. A young woman ran in and rushed down an aisle to the rostrum. She fired two shots in the air and then ran out of a side door before the stunned audience could do much about it.

The one person who was not stunned was the professor. He looked up blandly from his notes and said, “Well now, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to ask several of you in turn to tell me exactly what happened a minute or two ago. Mr Smith, may we begin with you?”

Well there followed four, five, six, I don’t know how many recitals of precisely what happened. A man and two girls had rushed in. No, no, two girls. No, just a man, no woman. No, two men had fired single shots. The woman didn’t have a gun. They both had guns. They came in from different doors … and so on and on. It went on until these highly-educated, intelligent students had formulated at least a dozen different versions of a gross event that had happened before their very eyes only minutes ago.

After that, my friend decided that since human beings appeared to be so unbelievably unobservant about the events of real life, they would swallow any fictional plot provided it was ingenious enough. As it was, he went on to create a whole world of first-generation immigrants from the Lower East Side, more believable, more memorable than the real people they were based on.

Similarly, I notice in any piece I happen on about living members of the Royal Family or, for that matter, any living high celebrity from the movies or from jet society, the writers rarely have the historian’s passion to stay with what can be proved to have happened. They’re out in the first place to tell a story. If possible, a romantic or juicy story. If they are already tabloid reporters, they long ago discarded any conscience they had as truth-tellers. They’re looking only to take an acorn of truth and magnify and distort it into a blazing forest of rumour.

My father used to say, “You can’t make men moral by act of parliament.” The question is can you legislate good taste? And that’s what we’re talking about – it’s nothing but good taste; simple, if you like, elementary manners to rush and try to help if you’re present at an atrocious accident.

Should there not be a strict law that can make up for the total lack of conscience in those miserable photographers who actually shoved police and helpers aside so as to snap pictures of a battered body inside the twisted steel and metal of the ruined car?

Chancellor Kohl, I think, is to be applauded for his appeal for governments to seek some kind of a code that might be enforced against these prying moles of the reporter’s trade.

I’m afraid the chances of such a law coming into force in the United States may be slimmer. It’s, I think, only an accident of some unexplained sort that we don’t have national daily tabloids of the sort that Princess Diana called “unforgivably ferocious”. We have such magazines sold weekly in supermarkets, but daily city newspapers throughout the United States are by English standards comparatively staid and many of us hope they will stay so.

But in this country the moment anyone suggests a legal restriction not only on forms of speech, but say on a piece of declared art – art is what the maker of it says is art on a public performance, a public protest – it’s almost impossible to put such a restriction on the statute books. However outrageous somebody’s behaviour may be to you, there are ten Americans who will rise and scream, “The First Amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or abridging the freedom of speech!”

The mere mention in the Constitution of free speech is enough. And the courts, including the highest, have interpreted speech to be any human activity – speaking, shouting, swearing, stripping, painting anything that comes to mind, burning the American flag, filming something cruel or obscene. On obscenity, the United States Supreme Court gave up, as the courts of Western Europe did 20, 30 years ago.

One famous justice, asked to define obscenity said, “I can’t define it. I know it when I see it.” And that’s about where we stand. You don’t dare prohibit anything that somebody can plausibly claim is his way of expressing his constitutional right to freedom of speech.

The only case I know where a judge ruled that the harassment of a person can outweigh a claim to free speech was the case of the late Mrs Jacqueline Onassis and her children who were always being hounded by photographers.

The judge ruled that an uninvited photographer could not come closer to those children than 20 feet. It seems a very small restriction on the liberty of the subject. Can the lawyers of the western world not devise some stronger medicine for harassment by photographers?

This is a question that challenges the stability of a free society. And perhaps because this horror happened in France, I’m reminded it was a Frenchman who said, “Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline; and when nations fail to discipline themselves, they get discipline thrust upon them.”

I learned this as a very young man when I saw in Germany scenes of wild public behaviour and public obscenity that did not lead a weak government to understandable legal restraints. It led to as wild a reaction, to the jackboot and Hitler’s roving thugs.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.