Page 50 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

The Man in the Gallery with the Writing on His Face 41

wider British population‘s engagement with the Diana myth. Here, John
Loughrey represented the perfect summation of the wilder shores of public
Diana grief, with Ros Wynne-Jones commenting in The Guardian that ―John
is as much a part of proceedings inside Court 73 as anyone, representing as he
does the more troubling aspects of the public‘s relationship with Diana‖
[Fryer]. Figures such as John Howsam provided indexical accounts of another
form of distortion, seemingly in contradiction with the above. Howsam
appeared as a conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, an individual who had
stepped too far into the hall of mirrors which was the ‗conspiracy‘ and who
operated as a tragi-comic avatar for the wider tragi-comedy of Al-Fayed‘s own
theorising. Press suggestions that the misguided nature of Al-Fayed‘s
accusations was proven by his own legal team‘s unwillingness to pursue any
but a handful of them in court were provided with an official stamp of
authenticity by the Coroner‘s final conclusion that there was ―not a shred of
evidence‖ [Baker] to suggest a conspiracy on the part of any group or
individual. In such a context, Howsam‘s self-presentation was read as being as
clearly delusional as Loughrey‘s and, by implication, Al-Fayed‘s. Loughrey,
Howsam and their fellow gallery-hangers became encoded as indexes of those
national attitudes – from emotive immersion to distanced scorn – which have
characterised the reading of Diana and her many meanings, but their presence
also opened a set of questions about the purpose of the Inquest, with the self-
conscious playing of their participation being read as an indication of the
degree to which this event had become a wasteful circus [Wynne-Jones]. They
also stood in for a wider body of conspiracy theorists, those for whom the full
bookshelves of the Coroner‘s opening remarks were stocked. And these
conspiracy theorists become themselves part of a conspiracy – a conspiracy by
the irrationally involved to maintain a critique of the authorities beyond the
bounds of any plausible justification [Rifkind].
Outside of these narratives of audience identity and engagement, media
coverage tended to focus on those elements of evidence which seemed
significant in providing substance to either side of the case - perhaps in
bringing forth the weakness of the most extreme conspiracy theories - or
which themselves foregrounded elements of revelatory social performance,
representing some form of hostile, sensational or salacious airing of private or
secret relationships and behaviours. As well as the evidence which went to the
central mystery of the case – what caused the crash in the tunnel - revelations
of the private relationship between Diana, her lover, Dodi and her father-in-
law, Prince Philip became the leading news items, along with insights into the
management of her life and affairs through the negotiation of private space by