Page 55 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

46 Graham White

the collision of facts and representations in this case. In a few days attendance
at the Inquest I would place in this category the mis-reading of Witty‘s laugh;
the revelation of a bathetic series of issues in the life of James Andanson, the
paparazzi photographer held by conspiracy theorists to be the owner of the
white Fiat said to have collided with the Mercedes in which the victims were
travelling, which seemed to knock that particular conspiracy theory firmly on
the head; the strange mixture of formality and joviality in the interplay
between QCs; the inscrutability of a certain class of British judicial
representative; the self-presentation in the case of French witnesses called to
give evidence by video, as if bemused by this glimpse into overdressed British
legal process; the particularity of the employed personalities surrounding Al-
Fayed; the banality of British security service internal procedures and the
extraordinary and tragic emptiness of the images of the crashed vehicle,
underlit as they largely were, capturing a stationary car with its doors closed,
traffic still passing in the next lane, then surrounded by men whose approach
seems neither urgent nor connected, as though looking at a vehicle which is
about to be towed away, not – and it took me some time to register this – a
vehicle in which people were dead or dying. All of these elements registered a
particularly affective power and seemed to me to be revelatory of aspects of
the case which are, as meanings and significances, worthy of analysis and
comment alongside formal reportage. These elements suggest that the
meanings of an Inquest held on the grounds which the Coroner originally
outlined – to allay public fears and suspicions - resides in part in the
preparedness of members of the public exactly to read its significances in their
own paranoid, delusional or conspiratorial way – and that, in evaluating social
performance for themselves, such figures may be contributing to the building
of a body of meaning from the events in the Courtroom which is as revelatory
of instances of ‗truth‘ as the supposedly informed, authoritative journalistic
perspectives offered by commentators. Performance in the legal environment
creates a supplementary text to that with which law is apparently interested,
one which is mined and examined both at the moment of its enactment and in
the subsequent ascription of meaning to it by commentary and media
reportage. Beyond the Coroner‘s verdict, perhaps the most resonant element of
the Diana and Dodi Inquest, was the reading of Al-Fayed‘s own appearance in
the witness box, during a day of cross-examination in which the significance
of this figure in relation to the British Establishment was thoroughly explored,
examined and judged. Journalistic coverage of this stage of the event looked
closely at the absurdity of the claims advanced, rendering, with a tone of
reserved sympathy for this grieving father, the collapse of theories of