Italian, Spanish, German and French necrophilia
Last week's decisions by the Italian magazine Chi and the Spanish magazine Interviú to publish a photo of the dying Princess of Wales must rank as one of civil society's low points. The notion of "press freedom", if it means anything, must mean the freedom of the press to ensure personal freedom, which includes the right of the dying to dignity and the right of families to private grief. For these two magazines to invade the sacred space of a person's ebbing moments of life goes beyond the reprehensible. It is wanton cruelty.
Umberto Brindani, the editor Chi, had the gall to say that the picture was not offensive, describing it as "touching" and "tender". Which proves that if you are the kind of media vulture that preys upon corpses, you are damned to lie. The fact that Chi published the photo under the headline "World Exclusive: the Last Photo" says all one needs to know about the motives behind this unique act of exploitation. We are talking about a commercial decision here of the coldest kind, and to add insult to injury, Chi included autopsy diagrams of the princess's injuries in the article. Necrophilia!
Which brings us to Europe's biggest selling daily paper, Germany's Bild Zeitung. On Saturday, it outdid the Italians and the Spaniards in hideousness, in that it published the death photo of Diana, but under the guise of a report about the revulsion being felt in England at the breaking of the taboo. If there is one thing worse than the cold-blooded Italian and Spanish circulation calculations, it is a cold-blooded circulation calculation shrouded in hypocrisy. To its credit, BILDBlog ripped apart the paper's duplicity, which was crowned with the inclusion of a colour photo of the smiling princess, embellished with the saccharine caption: "This is how we wish to remember her". The same page, though, carried a black-and-white photo showing an oxygen mask being placed over the face of the dying woman.
The actions of these magazines and newspapers (Corriere Della Sera, to its eternal shame) has to be seen in the context of the build up to the publication later this month of a book by the French writer Jean-Michel Caradec'h called "Lady Diana: The Criminal Investigation". This will contain many more photos from the scene of the fatal 1997 crash in Paris and the publisher and author will be hawking them using the pretence that they could help solve unanswered questions about Diana's death. Clearly, insincerity in search of profits knows neither limit nor moral.
All this should serve to remind us that photographers pursuing the princess to her death took these pictures, an agency sold them, and editors and writers are now hoping to use them as a ticket that will pay for expensive meals, new furniture and luxury holidays. The next time someone complains to you about the abysmal nature of the Chinese or American media, remind them of the time when French, Italian, Spanish and German publishers, editors, magazines and newspapers turned journalism into vampirism.
