Don’t Blame the Press

It’s very strange for me to say ‘don’t blame the press’ because normally I’m ready to blame the press for almost everything. They mold public opinion and, as we can see from reports around the world, public opinion is filled with hate, short-sightedness, and a whole fuckton of ignorance and bigotry. Still, there are exceptions to every rule.
I’ve seen a couple of articles today talking about how much Princess Diana was ‘hurt’ by an interview with the BBC, I guess Harry said something about it, and I’ve seen quite a few people defending the BBC by saying the tabloids hurt her worse, which is probably true, the British tabloids are about as trashy as they come.
But, I don’t care. She chose that life, and she reaped the benefits of it, and she can’t have possibly thought, when she married Charles, that the newspapers were going to leave her alone. She was a rich girl, a British girl who hung out with a posh crowd, and she knew full well what marrying a prince was all about. Despite their age difference, his all around nerdiness, and the fact that in the looks department, she could have done better in any dance club, any night of the week, she married him. She wanted that role, the fame, the glamor. It’s not the fault of the press that things didn’t work out as she’d planned.
Sure, the newspapers may have hurt her. Happens to lots of celebrities. They can’t be blamed for her unhappiness. They certainly can’t be blamed for her death. That’s because her driver was going too fast in a tunnel and lost control, and she was undoubtedly telling him to go faster.
You could blame the paparazzi, I suppose, but I don’t. They’re just doing their job. Every celebrity has choices in how they deal with paparazzi. You can smile and wave and put up with it, you can live a secluded and mysterious life, or you can fight with them and try to outrun them, which is what she tried to do and it didn’t work out so well.
How many celebrities have said, before their deaths “Eh, we can fly in this weather, no problem” or “forget that warning sign, I ski this slope all the time.” Plenty. It’s as if they think the laws of physics don’t apply to them. Because those are the only laws that do.