The ‘serious’ news media always turned up their noses at tabloid misbehaviour. But were they really much better?
It’s a case of life imitating art. As audiences binge their way through the dramatic portrayal of the Diana years in season four of Netflix’s The Crown, journalists are facing a reckoning with how the chase for her story rotted the media from within.
It was always thought that “quality journalism” stood against British media’s ethical deterioration, but we now have reports of the apparent misleading of the Princess of Wales to score an interview — by the BBC, of all places.
This wasn’t just any interview. The interview, with the BBC’s rising star Martin Bashir, produced the gobsmacking 1995 “there were three of us in this marriage” moment on the broadcaster’s longest-running current affairs program Panorama. The interview broke the royal family’s resistance to divorce, and drove the public backlash when “the people’s princess” died just two years later.
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