Page 42 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

In: Courting the Media: Contemporary … ISBN: 978-1-61668-784-7
Editors: Geoffrey Sykes © 2010 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 3

THE MAN IN THE GALLERY WITH THE

WRITING ON HIS FACE: DEPICTIONS OF THE
AUDIENCE AT THE DIANA INQUEST

Graham White
Roehampton University, U.K.

ABSTRACT

Press and media interest in the apparently peripheral social elements
at the Diana Inquest often centred on lack of public interest in the daily
proceedings and on the activities of the small band of members of the
public who were regular attendees. The focus in much press commentary
on the ‗oddity‘ and isolation of this group tended to identify them as the
misguided spectators of a charade, and their small number became an
index of the pointlessness of the proceedings. Using elements of
performance analysis derived from theatre and performance studies, this
essay argues that such media focus on these figures and their behaviour
highlights the interpretation of social performance as a significant
component in the narration of legal proceedings. Media commentators
tended to cast their own journalistic readings of the social interactions
and performances they witnessed around the courtroom as authoritative
and objective while deriding private spectators‘ own readings of such
encounters as delusional. This article considers how such interpretation of
social performance in the courtroom is employed in the range of
conspiratorial narratives circulating around the Inquest – both those
propounded by members of the public audience (which, for them, expose