Published: January 17th 2008 - at 11:36 pm

Like most rational human beings, I gave up on the Princess Diana “story” a long time ago. Although my very first reaction when I heard about her death was to assume that the secret services had bumped her off, the idea of the Duke of Edinburgh as some sort of murderous eminence grise is simply not credible.

So I reckon Roy Greenslade’s call for editors to stop reporting the increasingly tedious Diana Inquest is probably quite timely.

But it seems to me there is a slightly deeper issue here to do with the nature of modern journalism which I am surprised that Greenslade, as a media commentator, does not address more fully. It concerns what I would term “journalism without context.”

Only this week, for instance, we have witnessed newspapers and broadcasters alike getting all excited over the second-hand “revelations” from the Princess’s allies that she did not think Charles would become King, ignoring the fact that this ground was extensively covered by the Princess herself in her notorious 1995 Panorama interview.

Similarly, there has been much made in recent days of the infamous “Mishcon letter” in which the Princess aired the fear that her car would be tampered with in order to cause her to have an “accident.” This too has been in the public domain for a number of years.

Maybe the press and broadcasting organisations think that the British public really does have the attention span of a gnat, and that after a certain amount of time has elapsed, any old rubbish can be presented as news on the basis that we’d all have forgotten about it first time round. Maybe they are adopting a “year zero” approach to journalism, where everything that happened before a given date is simply ignored.

I have known this to happen on papers, for instance when the editor changes, and unscrupulous news eds try to hoodwink the new guy by presenting an old story as freshly-minted.

Or maybe it’s just that news organisations everywhere are still in thrall to the idea – almost certainly mistaken if the sales figures of the Daily Express are anything to go by – that Diana still sells papers.

(cross-posted from my blog)

About the author
Paul Linford is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He is a digital publishing manager and former Parliamentary Lobby journalist where he was political editor of the Newcastle Journal for seven years. He has an 18-year career in newspaper journalism and lives in Belper, Derbyshire, with his wife and two children. A committed Christian, his faith informs his own belief in progressive politics and the view that a society must always be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members. His eponymous blog combines a mixture of the personal and the political and has become particularly renowned for its commentaries on liberal-left politics. He is also a leading voice in support of an English Parliament and other democratic reforms. Also at: Paul Linford blog
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