'BLAME THE MEDIA OR BLAME THE PUBLIC?'
The author was among many outraged by the media's role in the Princess of Wales's tragic death in a car accident in August 1997. Like most, he thought the media had hunted Diana to death. Roused to anger, he went to work and had a book ready for publication in 1999.
Two connected events prompted him to revisit the Diana story. The first was Lord Dyson's shattering report (14 May 2021) on his investigation into the BBC's handling of the allegation that Martin Bashir of the BBC Panorama program tricked Diana into giving her sensational 1995 interview. The second was Prince William's address to the world on Dyson's findings. William accused the BBC of significantly contributing to his parents' divorce and his mother's death. Bashir's interview, the BBC's failure to see and accept the deception, and Prince William's and Prince Harry's responses are vital parts of the Diana story. With these recent developments, the author aims to round off the story of Diana's death, its purpose, and its causes.
This new edition is a thoroughly revised, rewritten in parts, and added-to version of the Diana story with a resharpened refocus. In the first edition, the author was keen to explain the ideological presuppositions behind the media's reporting and to challenge their claims about who was to blame for the accident. Attacking the system of Monarchy by inciting mob hatred was their chief aim. Greed took second place. He wanted to refute the dodgy arguments they ran to shift blame from themselves to the public's (allegedly) vicious, insatiable appetite for sensation and gossip. The public, they claimed, was driven by a prurient interest in the private lives of people like Princess Diana. The subject of republicanism?its ideology, motivations and purposes?and the viability of Monarchy in our modern world came in for extensive discussion.
In this new edition?The Media of the Republic: Who Killed Diana??he examines and refutes the same arguments but has shortened the lengthy ideological explanation in the concluding chapter to clarify the difference between a general idea of republicanism and what he calls theoretic-republicanism.
