Diana

How many people are now quietly wearied by the endless speculation (much of it pointless and very un-newsworthy) about Princess Diana. Am I the only one who thinks Mohammed Al Fayed has been bribing Richard Desmond to keep alive his very personal and zealous crusade to challenge anything and anyone who accepts her death was purely accidental? The amount of news coverage she receives has been far, far out of of proportion to its actual importance. Are there not much more relevant issues and news stories for journalists and readers to be concerned with?
Looking back with hindsight as a new era of 24 hour rolling news unleashed itself on us, the deification of Diana's celebrity and the obsession by every aspect of her life from what she looked like to who she spent time with set a troubling precedent. Newspapers love to build newcomers up before they find something salacious to knock them down with.
Obsessing over un-newsworthy trivia about the lifestyles of celebrities has come to feed our hungry lust for gossip. We talk about people in magazines and newsapers as if we know them, when we barely know them at all. Of course, we know plenty about them, but then that is not quite the same thing, is it? And much of the media obsession with celebrity has its roots in the way Diana was treated. Do we get the media we deserve? Quite possibly yes.
If you were one of those people who saw Diana as a saint, prepare to be offended.
Supposedly, she modernised the monarchy and dragged it in to the new century. But have the core values of a our royals really shifted? Not that much really. The queen still embodies some of the true values that have made our country so special - namely stoicism, dignity and respect for others, which the majority of the population silently agrees with.
So Diana was the perfect emblem for Blair's Britain - shiny and pretty on the outside, always with an eye on manipulating a pose for a camera or fixing a headline, but deeply shallow and lacking substance underneath. This is not to say that Diana wasn't a very caring person and a wonderful mother. She was. But then so have been lots of other women that we never get to hear about. Mother Theresa died in the same week as Diana, but we hear nothing about her.
Sure Diana did many wonderful things and affected the lives of many in a very positive way. But lets have some proper and thoughtful perspective to her lasting impact.
There are too many people in this ocuntry who are incapable of thinking critically for themselves. The obsession with celebrity is a form of stimuli by proxy for them, really no better than out rubber necking at the misfortunes of others.