Like the trial of O. J. Simpson, the death and funeral of Princess Diana was one of those media events which remind us of how villagelike the global village really is. The bare facts of Diana’s life and accomplishments, and of the circumstances surrounding her death, were nothing but the simplest of patterns upon which fantastical embroideries of gossip and speculation, of moral praise and censure, and of (usually) hilariously bad literary and artistic invention were woven—and woven by a communal effort in which not to take part was obscurely shaming and even antisocial. Ordinary people considered it priggish or worse on the part of a few spoilsports even to refer to the princess’s moral and intellectual insignificance, except as a pastime to the trivial media that live off the contemporary cult of celebrity.

Well, ordinary people had, as they so often do, a point. For one thing, the more trivial and lightweight the media, the more commercially successful—therefore powerful, therefore heavyweight—they are. Taking an interest in Diana and those journalists who make their livings from her and other celebrities is like taking an interest in the fortunes of General Motors or IBM. In fact, it would not surprise me to learn, if such a calculation could be made, that America exports more celebrity journalism than it does either cars or computers. For another thing, the universality and fervency of the Diana phenomenon suggested that there really might be, as the masses of reporters and commentators kept assuring us there were, vast significances to be discovered in the people’s evident capacity for self-identification with the princess and her passion.

To be sure, most of the significances were pure journalistic fabrications.

To be sure, most of the significances were pure journalistic fabrications. By far the most popular of these, at least among American journalists, was the myth of a “New Britain”—a myth which began with the prime minister’s emotional reaction to her death. Tony Blair picked up and popularized the epithet for Diana which seems to have been the invention of the journalist Julie Burchill: “the people’s princess.” Blair is the progenitor of “New Labor,” landslide victors in the general election of May 1, and as such a hero to the media, among which there was already a tendency to speak of a “New Britain” as New Labor’s triumphant creation. But with the death of Diana, New Britain seemed to take on a new freightage of moral, personal, and linguistic habits that promised to transform the very essence of Britishness.

Here, for instance, is how Anthony Lane, in The New Yorker, described what Blair had to say:

Certainly the American media’s view of the matter would seem to bear out the truth of this observation. On television, at any rate, opinion seemed to be unanimous among reporters and commentators and the various rented “experts” and “royal watchers.” that Diana’s life and death were matters of transformative significance for her countrymen. The funeral, said Tom Brokaw, could almost be described as forging a “new nation” by the “coming together of classes.”

Brokaw’s colleague in London and the editor of The New Yorker, Tina Brown, agreed, comparing Diana’s shindig to the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia. This was the “Flower Revolution,” she said, and represented a “shedding of old reticence” and “inhibitions” among her less-Americanized fellow Britons. And this was a view of Diana’s significance which was remarkably congenial to the visiting American press corps (it was less often mentioned in the British coverage). The phrase “stiff upper lip” was fished out of the journalistic word-hoard again and again to describe what these Americans found so distasteful about the old-fashioned, pre-Diana kinds of Britons, and they were most congenial to the idea that she had taught them to forsake the stiff upper for quivering lower lip.

Richard Attenborough, the actor and director, likewise said that “we’re too obsessed by our wretched stiff upper lips,” though I would have thought that the whole point of keeping a stiff upper lip was not to get obsessed by things. Yet Attenborough spoke for the vast majority who were obsessed with not being—as it was universally acknowledged that the royal family were—“stuffy” or “stodgy.” And by the same token, no one doubted that Diana’s greatest virtue and contribution to the royal family was her knack for showing her feelings. A similar point seemed to be made by her brother in his funeral oration when he spoke pointedly of the intention of the “blood family” to do all that it could to “continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men [i.e., the princes William and Harry] so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned.”

It has probably often been remarked by Britons of Lord Spencer’s generation that what the royal family has too much of is duty and tradition, and what it lacks is singing souls—though perhaps an occasion for such an observation has been lacking up until now. Certainly the earl must have been right in attributing such views to Diana herself, whose public confessions of adultery and of her battles with eating disorders (Lord Spencer even managed to get a reference to these into his eulogy) were real coloratura stuff. To journalists, this kind of bogus frankness is meat and drink, and to a person the reporters and commentators seemed to think it praiseworthy in the late princess, and of a piece with her capacity for “empathy” and “compassion.”

At any rate, there were plenty of American newsmen to congratulate the new Britons on how, as one NBC correspondent put it, “they have lost their stiff upper lip and found that grieving in public is not a sign of weakness but of humanity.”

But it was left to Tina Brown to make the most direct connection between the twin revolutions wrought by Tony Blair and Princess Di. The funeral, for instance, was a direct contradiction of Mrs. Thatcher’s famous dictum that “there is no such thing as society.’” Here, Miss Brown confidently asserted, noting the throngs of people turned out to mourn, was “society” indeed, and the numbers visible were reminiscent to her of the numbers who jammed into polling stations to hand Tony Blair his magnificent victory last May. “People feel liberated emotionally now in a way they haven’t done before,” she said, looking narrowly and hard-eyed at the camera. “Do you wanna make something out of it?” she seemed to be saying.

The most obvious candidates for emotional liberation, so far as the press were concerned, were the royal family. Everybody among the media folk seemed to agree that they had to change, and to change in particular with respect to their emotional reticence. Even a hesitation on this point could be fatal. NBC’s Katie Couric said to Andrew Roberts, whose voice was almost the only one to be heard on the American networks with a good word to say for the royals, “Andrew Roberts, you think it [i.e., the royal family] is quite fine as it is.”

“No,” he said defensively, “but I think there’s a good argument for people being reserved at times.”

The most obvious candidates for emotional liberation, so far as the press were concerned, were the royal family.

Fancy that! But the idea was heresy to Katie and her kind. More representative was good old Richard Attenborough who proclaimed himself “in favor of royalty, but we need to bring them into the next century.” This, of course, was a job which had already been begun by the efforts of the late sainted princess. Andrew Morton, the “royal biographer,” paid tribute to Diana’s “education” of Prince William by “taking him to see down and outs, to see the homeless, to see AIDS patients” all in order to give him a “rounded view of what life is really like in Britain today, so he would be in touch with the people.” Victoria Mather of The Tatler magazine told NBC’s audience that the royal family could not go back now to being “boring and stuffy.” After all, she said, “we live in an age of celebrity.”

What she supposed she was saying when she said that I cannot imagine. If you live in an age of celebrity it is no longer possible to be boring and stuffy? Well, they’ve managed it up until now, apparently. What has changed? Miss Mather was not the only one to have taken it for granted that being any one of the bad things associated with the royal family—boring, stuffy, stodgy, reticent, unemotional—was in itself tantamount to being “out of touch” with “the people.” That is the unforgivable sin. Similarly, being “in touch” with the people is the same thing as joining them in spontaneous displays of emotion. The most respectable media seemed to make similar assumptions, and R. W. Apple in The New York Times quoted “a prominent city businessman who knows them well” as saying that “the sensibility of the royals, and especially the younger ones, has been changed forever. They understand in a way they never have the importance of emotion. She taught them that, she and the reaction to her death. There were never many hugs in that family, you know.”

The Earl Spencer, who obviously had something of his sister’s talent for appealing to the media, made a similar point in his paean to the singing soul, and there was plenty of brainpower to back him up. Flora Fraser, for instance, a biographer of Queen Caroline, wrote in The Washington Post that Walter Bagehot’s famous words about how “we must not let in the daylight upon magic” had in effect been proven wrong by the bewitching princess. “Diana threw open all the curtains, and it seemed more magical than ever!” Some, of course, might say that that was an illusion. Her own aura, it is true, increased, but the effect on the royal family, as an institution whose very raison d’être is to span the generations, was exactly as Bagehot had predicted, and the evidence was precisely in the universal chorus calling upon them to abandon the royal barque to the tide of popular sentiment.

Was this “the real world” to which, in the words of Jeffrey “Lord” Archer, another of NBC’s British experts, Diana had led the royal family? And if so, why was it more “real” than the world of emotional restraint? Archer, who was not shy about reminding Tom Brokaw’s audience that he had written speeches for Mrs. Thatcher (though not, surely, the one expressing atheistic principles about “society”?)—also told a story about how the applause for Lord Spencer’s effusion had started from the back and how this was “another example of people power.” In fact, Archer’s observation was a perfect illustration of the otherwise unacknowledged worth of reticence, for in the space of three or four sentences he had managed to reveal not only that, in the course of a long and distinguished “political career,” he had written speeches for not one but two prime ministers, but also that he was an intimate of the late princess’s and had sat in the row right behind the immediate family at the obsequies in the Abbey.

Such shameless self-promotion was of a crasser and more obvious kind, but was still recognizably kin to the sort of manipulative behavior that Diana was mistress of and that almost automatically results when people make their emotions public. A too-little-known corollary of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle dictates that the instant emotions are submitted for the world’s observation, they turn into something else. Genuine emotion can never be observed, for as soon as it is observed it becomes, to a greater or lesser extent, manipulative. But this is a law of moral physics to which the media must turn a resolutely blind eye and against which it must maintain its own version of the stiff upper lip.

The range of journalistic emotions is almost comically limited to sloppy sentimentality and a melodramatic but bogus moral outrage. Both were fully on display during Diana Week. The sentimentality was often, like that of Lord Archer or Clive James (who wrote an embarrassing account of his intimacy with the princess for The New Yorker), a function of journalistic access to people who make news. One of the most hilarious examples of how, in the journalistic mind, all other human qualities save that of access and openness amount to little, was provided by Katherine Graham’s memoir of Diana in The Washington Post. Recalling an occasion shortly after their meeting on Martha’s Vineyard in 1994 when Diana came to play tennis with her and showed herself impressively down to earth, Mrs. Graham recalled how,

And, with such attention, how could they fail to realize that there were poor people as well as palaces in the world? Yet similar inanities issued from the lips of journalist after journalist who did not have the advantage of having played tennis with the princess on Martha’s Vineyard. I tell you, the profession does not forget its benefactors.

The bogus outrage was at first directed at the press itself, or that part of it known as the paparazzi, who were said by some to have caused the princess’s death by riding on their motorbikes too close to her car in order to take photographs of her. Then the story was that they had failed to assist the princess and the others in the car in their distress, but had continued to snap their pictures as they lay dying. Of course it is possible that both things may be true. But then, by the time of Charles Spencer’s scathing words about the wicked tabloids who had dared to question the purity of his sister’s motives in doing good works, the indictment of the press had become very much generalized.

It is true that the media had a lot of outrage to spare for the royal family, but it should not surprise us that so much of it was seemingly self-directed. The media thrive on such self-flagellation. Tom Brokaw on NBC, for instance, told the story of how some of his colleagues had hired a taxi and offered the driver a “generous” tip. This the driver had refused, scornfully remarking: “I don’t want your money.” Tom loved it, saying that he and other media folk were forever making “subjective judgments about groups of people and now they’re making subjective judgments about us.” Such self-critical tendencies directed not only toward the bad behavior of virtually every member of the media lower in the food chain than oneself but at oneself, too, serves the purpose of reinforcing journalistic conceit. It confirms one as a member of a secular priesthood charged with the weighty business of instructing the rest of us in our civic duties.

These were media aristocrats who were looking down their noses, like the bad old, “stodgy” royal family, at those in trade.

Moreover, the paparazzi are to be so roundly condemned not because they killed Diana (though it would be wonderful to be able to pin that on them, too) but because they are ever-present reminders of what journalism actually is, as opposed to what the journalistic mandarins want us to think it is. Some of the most comical statements about the paparazzi were made by Mrs. Graham, proprietress of The Washington Post, who called them “commercial,” and Diane Sawyer, who makes more than a million dollars a year and said that they “basically chase people for money.” Dan Rather, who probably makes six or seven million a year, called them “entrepreneurs.” These were media aristocrats who were looking down their noses, like the bad old, “stodgy” royal family, at those in trade. And is there not something riotously funny about the incomparably stodgy New York Times solemnly editorializing about how “dottily remote” the royal family was from the grieving in the streets? Such unanimity, thoughtfully and independently arrived at, is not in nature. It is patently a product of the general hysteria, to which journalists are more than commonly susceptible.

This brings up the one way in which, as I wrote in the beginning, I think there really are—or at least may be—permanent effects to be expected from the princess’s life and death. For the most striking thing to me about the appalling splendor of the media’s tributes to her was the unanimity with which the audience and everyone who managed to get in front of a camera were meant to acquiesce in whatever self-promotion or bad taste managed to thrust itself upon our notice with the excuse that it was an authentic expression of someone’s feelings. If anyone was prepared to censure the unspeakable vulgarity of Elton John’s re-written “Candle in the Wind” or the bad taste of any of the film stars (even including the mother of JonBenet Ramsey) who sought publicity by claiming to share with Diana in her martyrdom to the paparazzi, he or she did so quietly and out of the range of the cameras.

True, it’s only the media behaving as the media has always done, but in the past there was at least the possibility of a check upon its rampant bad taste. There was enough of a residual sense of shame, even among television journalists, that one could imagine them listening patiently to, and without consigning them to perdition, points of view with which they did not agree. The disappearance of that sense of shame is, at any rate, what I fancy may be behind what was to me the most sustained instance of bad taste in the whole of Diana Week. This was Peter Jennings’s commentary on the funeral for ABC. Dan Rather at times ran him close, but it was Jennings who really had the power to shock with his constant inane patter while the funeral cortège (or “cortage” as the reporter Cynthia McFadden had it—perhaps because all the flowers made her think of corsages) passed through the streets of London.

The BBC commentary, anchored by David Dimbleby, at least had the virtue of maintaining radio silence for great stretches, so that all we could hear was the clop-clop of the horses’ hooves and the minutely tolling of the Abbey’s bell. Occasionally, it is true, Dimbleby could not forbear to notice that “everything is silent and still,” but for the most part the unadvertised silence was genuinely moving. Jennings, by contrast, never had the chance to notice it, as he was constantly chattering, often coming out with little gems like this:

I wonder what some of our younger viewers made of that. Surely, if they enjoyed being patronized by being told that Winston Churchill was “Britain’s great wartime leader,” not many other people can have done so. But the infantilization of the commentary was also a part of the message. Here, for example, is what Jennings’s patter had to say as the cortège passed through Horse Guards Parade:

All this must be about to change now, one supposes. But Jennings, with his all-encompassing wisdom, is ready for that, too:

In any well-run republic, a man capable of uttering drivel like that on the public airwaves would be subject to beheading. I fancy he might even be summarily executed in Saudi Arabia. It is only the decadence and softness of the present royal family and its all too abundant “compassion” which allows him to live in order that he might drivel again.

Writing about the three major networks’ prominent displays of their logos on screen during the services, Tom Shales of The Washington Post noted that “the funeral of a cherished public figure hardly seems the time or place to advertise, but network promotion departments are almost vicious in their relentlessness.” He does not see that the whole point of the exercise for everybody involved on screen, and everybody who talked to the camera, was self-advertisement. Why else do people make a point of expressing their grief in public instead of keeping it hidden as they used to do in the bad old stiff-upper-lip days? Why show other people how much they feel, unless they think such feelings a credit to themselves? That Diana’s funeral should have become a rather comical orgy of such attempted emotional manipulation before the cameras was wonderfully appropriate, since she herself in her lifetime had pioneered the technique brilliantly. She must have been very pleased, looking on from wherever she is now.