MEDIA STUDIES
Why this year's attitude to the Princess came as news to the news desks
JULIA HOBSBAWM
News happens, but it can also be made to happen. In public relations a known formu- la for trying to impose on the news agenda if your client is not clearly of automatic news interest is to create interest. An anniversary provides the perfect hook on which to hang angles and stories which can be relayed as news. A cursory look down the list of items on virtually any news bulletin or newspaper index will reveal a mixed econo- my of these 'real' and 'related' news stories.
Arguably a news story is only hard and fast within its first few hours, when basic information — the who, what, why, where, when — is being gathered and disseminat- ed. Then comes the spin-off from the real thing, the analysis. Last weekend the veter- an reporter Kate Adie commented from the Edinburgh Television Festival: 'There are not big stories every two hours. As a result, instead of straightforward factual news, there is added a new type of news . . . expert comment, prepared packages.' The media have a name for this: news features.
The preparation for the Diana anniver- sary was marked by special press features in the news pages, generally entitled 'One Year On', with television coverage running specific documentaries trailed on the news programmes and additional 'special reports' within the main body of the news programmes themselves. This desire to emulate the sense of drama and crisis of real breaking news with in-depth news fea- tures, particularly one like the Diana story, full of human interest, is quite rightly at the heart of the `dumbing down' debate, with the argument about audience demand (aka ratings and readers) running up against those of ethics, bias and values. United States networks know all about this already. CNN's heyday was during the Gulf war, which genuinely had people glued to that particular network because it was providing that nirvana of the news editors, `breaking news'. Then the war ended. CNN found its audiences slowly dwindling and then draining away in comparison to the heady war-torn days, and has been waging a losing battle of its own with the ratings ever since. Watching the coverage of the Lewin- sky story over eight months on CNN has been salutary: between the Starr subpoenas in February and the presidential confession on 17 August the network spun out this story virtually every night, using pundit talk shows like Larry King Live to try to attract enough soundbites to become legitimate news of its own to fill more airtime before the next real development took place.
But even quasi-news, the offspring that blurs with the real thing, has a life of its own, just like breaking news. The Diana anniversary vividly exposed this. Such were the media excesses last year that it became received wisdom that every man, woman and child in Britain had grieved heavily dur- ing this period. As Christopher Hitchens's Channel 4 documentary The Mourning After showed last week, the reality was somewhat different. This was confirmed on Friday by the Daily Telegraph Gallup poll revealing that 93 per cent of British people had no plan to commemorate the anniversary. Ear- lier that month, the September issue of Vanity Fair had published Sally Bedell Smith's vivid account of Diana's deep dependency on and collusion with the British press. As the PR agency represent- ing the magazine in Britain, we received lit- tle or no interest in the piece, and one senior journalist from a prominent news agency even went so far as to berate us for promoting a piece 'unfavourable' to Diana.
A week is a long time in politics and a fortnight is a cultural century in the media. The Telegraph poll showed a genuinely new development: that public interest was less high than previously reported or expected. Suddenly everyone was breaking rank, say- ing the unsayable, from Cardinal Hume condemning the 'hype' to a Sky News reporter on Saturday describing Diana as the woman 'who kept the tills ringing' for both media and commerce after her death.
So the public voice became the hook needed to turn a non-news story back into news. This was just as well, given the dearth of actual anniversary-related news. Few big events were held, and at least one charity commemorative event was a damp squib, losing its organisers thousands of pounds. There were no massive numbers anywhere, either of people or of floral tributes, and Dodi Fayed's father appeared to fail in his attempt to blame the bodyguard Trevor Rees Jones for having worn his seatbelt and survived when his beloved son and Diana did not.
The media thought they were playing it safe last year when the focus of coverage was the Everyman nature of grief. But even then public opinion was a huge part of what became the breaking news — the growing outrage, bravely voiced in the first instance by the royal biographer Anthony Holden of the Express, at the apparent lack of emotion being shown by the royal family, particular- ly the matter of the flag remaining absent at Buckingham Palace. Within days of this development in the news coverage, the flag was present, lowered respectfully, and the poignant scenes of Princes Charles, William and Harry personally talking with public mourners marked a turning-point which is proving crucial for the future of the monarchy.
This year public opinion, in my opinion, surprised the news desks, but that's no bad thing. It shows that amidst the battle for ratings and the moral high ground on what news actually is, the audience it addresses can directly influence it and have its say. Exhausted news editors can now grab a quick, delayed holiday before the political season starts, and news spin-off makes way for a different news species altogether: the spin doctor.
The author is founder and chair of Hobsbawn2 Macaulay Communications. Stephen Glover returns next week
Previous page
