slutet på sagan prinsessan dianas död i press, radio och tv

papers and TV programmes, the public
constituted the largest category of sources;
in the morning papers and Ekot, photographers
and journalists topped the list.
Thus, the perspective presented was largely
that of an actual or constructed public.
The royal family, on the other hand,
was the subject of reporting rather than
the source of statements.
A great proportion of the sources used
by the studied media were vague and
unclear. Not infrequently, these sources’
statements were presented in the newspaper
articles with a dash for dialogue or
quotation marks, not withstanding the
fact that they were, if anything, the journalist’s
own speculations. This method of
creating illusions of reality was especially
common among the evening papers.
Graphic presentations were found in
the newspapers and used to depict the
course of the accident as well as the composition
and succession of the funeral procession.
However, the photograph was
clearly the most common type of picture
in the papers. More than three-fourths of
the newspaper pictures contained personal
motifs. After Princess Diana, the most
prevalent categories of people found in
the majority of pictures were members of
the British royal family as well as performers
and celebrities.
The most common motif in the TV programmes’
picture sets was interview subjects.
Almost as common were street milieus
and a mourning public. “Ordinary”
people were those found most often in TV
news pictures. These people, however,
were presented as an anonymous crowd.
The named individuals found in most of
the feature pictures belonged almost exclusively
to some type of elite group.
Princess Diana’s death and the news
spiral it triggered were extremely pictorial
occurrences. There was a plethora of
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pictures of the Princess in various situations,
and of other well-known people at
the scene of the accident and the funeral.
Pictures, naturally, dominated television,
and the reporters’ texts served primarily
to indicate the chronology of developments
and to clarify the pictures’ messages.
The abundance of pictures rendered
news reporting easy.
The language used to report on the
Princess’s death was a far cry from the
traditional journalistic ideal of objectivity,
balance and impartiality. Emotionally
charged words and metaphors rich in association
helped to paint a tragic and highly
dramatised picture of the events, in
news reports as well as in chronicles, editorials
and debate features.
The dramaturgy of the media
A semi-factual picture of Princess Diana’s
death came to be mediate, that is, a picture
including both objective information and
significant elements of bias. We can question,
for instance, how representative the
reported reactions of the public were,
whether pictures of the Princess actually
depicted what they were said to depict,
and not least the veracity of much of the
information.
The impression one gets of a semi-factual
telling of a fairy tale’s tragic end is
further reinforced by an analysis of accounts
of the main elements in the course
of events, the accident itself, the funeral
and the sorrow. The Swedish media’s coverage
of Princess Diana’s funeral was as
much reporting on the feelings and atmosphere
on the streets of London – and
the feelings of a few journalists – as it was
reporting on the actual, concrete developments.
The classic rhetorical perspective of
“we” versus “them” recurred constantly.
“We” was all of the ordinary people who