Page 52 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

The Man in the Gallery with the Writing on His Face 43

who saw themselves as personally invested in the case emphasised their mis-
reading of their own status. Such a contradiction highlights the significance of
the interpretation of social performance in both spaces.
At one point in the proceedings, Mohammed Al-Fayed‘s spokesperson,
Katherine Witty, was reprimanded by the Coroner for disrespectful behaviour
after the Jury complained of her laughter in the courtroom, apparently in
mocking condemnation of the evidence of the police officer who was on the
stand at the time. This reprimand symbolised for certain commentators the
chief corrupting drive behind the whole Inquest, a bare-faced attempt by Al-
Fayed to make the facts bend to his analysis. This became the dominant
reading of Witty‘s laugh in subsequent media coverage, as characterised in
Andrew Pierce‘s Daily Telegraph column which attacked Witty for her
activities as Al-Fayed‘s PR, describing how she was ―publicly rebuked by
Lord Justice Scott Baker, the Coroner for ―inappropriate behaviour‖ as she
smirked during Michael Mansfield‘s cross-examination of a witness. Nice‖.
Pierce also asked and answered his own question ―just how much money does
it take to make you speak the unspeakable?‖ [Pierce] My own reading of this
incident, from a seat in the public gallery, was that Witty had responded to a
member of one of the legal teams who had sneezed in an accidentally comical
manner. Witty‘s helpless fit of giggles at this was of the order of a kid in a
school assembly who knows they should be quiet and desperately wants to but
who cannot - inappropriate, yes, disrespectful, perhaps, but certainly not aimed
at mocking the evidence of the witness on the stand. However, for me to
present a reading of such social performance as substantive evidence of
meaning and as contradicting the claims made both for it and for the typicality
of the Al-Fayed camp‘s attitude is, perhaps, to enter the realms of delusion
which Loughrey et al are accused of. The informality of my presence in the
Courtroom means that I am only able to register and to offer a local,
fragmented and partial version of the events. Yet, if such a localised reading of
an incident as contrary to the official interpretation of the significance, or of
the wider mediated symbolic narrative into which it is interpolated, speaks of
anything substantial, it is surely of the existence of a host of unmediated
interpretations of events which resonate outside of the courtroom, establishing
fragmentary and ‗minor‘ narratives beyond the grand narrative of truth or
conspiracy. And, indeed, media concern with the public audience at the Diana
Inquest clearly foregrounds anxieties about this narrative proliferation,
focusing on the unreliability of such public interest in the events as evidenced
by the unreliability – the eccentricity - of the regular attendees.