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Monday, December 1, 1997
The People's Princess
by Clinton Fein
On March 17,
1997, PEOPLE Magazine decided, like so many times before, to
boost sales by placing Diana on their cover, comparing her
saintly efforts to eliminate the world of landmines to the
activities of Fergie, her lesser, frumpier, toe-sucking
counterpart, who was shamelessly plugging the latest diet product
from Weight Watchers.
With an accompanying journalistic masterpiece, this would be the first of the Windsor images that this tabloid of impeccable integrity would use to grace its lower-grade glossy covers in 1997. Just prior to her death in Paris, an August cover of Diana blurted the copy "A Guy for Di" in which the feature piece audaciously referred to the "characteristically overheated" prose of one of Britain's whore-like tabs, The Sunday Mirror's account of Diana and Dodi captured kissing on an Al Fayed yacht. Then the cash cow died. Of course, frantically cashing in on four more covers in the wake of her death, this gimcrack step-cousin of CNN milked the tragedy with the sappy mourning of an adulterous widow overdosing on Prozac. Syrupy sentiment oozed with feigned courteous empathy as shallow, meaningless and transparent as a Ted Tuner charity donation to the United Nations.
PEOPLE dutifully printed Prince Charles' plea to the media to give his sons the appropriate privacy so "they can come to terms with their loss and prepare for the future." But in its anxious quest to rise above the National Enquirer, PEOPLE missed perhaps the most pertinent message of all.
To drive this point home, and to perhaps hammer the final nail into the coffin of the brief life of self examination that the media awkwardly confronted immediately following Diana's death, PEOPLE turned on and vilified the very person who had held up a mirror at them in front of the entire world. With titillating detail, PEOPLE lured us with a December cover, perhaps the last Windsor-related one of 1997, elaborating on "Earl Spencer's Messy Split", including such meaningful analysis as to the passion evident in his kissing to the intimate dialog between he and his ex-wife in their bathroom.
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