Category: News

It was twenty years ago that someone currently called ‘Princess Diana’ died in a car crash in Paris.

Diana Spencer was a commoner ie not royalty, until she married Prince Charles, twelve or more years her senior. Diana became royal. When Queen Elizabeth II dies, Charles will become king and Diana would have been queen.

People apparently loved her. To me she was a clothes horse, hanging around with beautiful people and with as much intelligence as, well, a clothes horse. You can read all the stories about her and Charles. Did they have affairs? Is Henry (Harry, her son) the son of another man? And so on, let’s not feed that too much.

They divorced, and, as a courtesy title, she was allowed to be Diana, Princess of Wales. I don’t think she was ever ‘Princess Diana’, but I haven’t checked.

When her car crashed and she was killed (plenty of conspiracy theories about that too), everyone in the nation, we were told, wept. Tony Blair rose to the occasion. Real news stopped for days. Florists made a fortune with people who had never met her, or seen her even in real life, people who only know the propaganda about her, apparently too distraught for words, buying literally tonnes of flowers to leave on the streets of London to decay.

And so on. If you were alive then you will remember.

Now, to, um, celebrate, the tv channels here and elsewhere have been showing pretty thin ‘documentaries’ about all these events. And drama. How Diana affected my life… William and Harry talk about their mother. Even a special Songs of Praise with Aled Jones…

I look at these with total disgust. Not cashing in at all, are they?

I have long struggled to understand the term ‘fake news’. I know it is a term much favoured by Mr Trump and his assistants and supporters, and politicians from the UK and others have taken it in, but what does it mean.

For Mr Trump it means something he doesn’t like, something that casts him in a bad light, inconvenient stuff. Son Donald Junior met with senior Russian officials… fake news.

Most people, I assume, take it to mean ‘lies’. Mr Trump, of course, does not believe that words have meaning. He is happy to just say anything. His use of English is approximate. A telephone call from the President of Mexico is really a brief chat that they had at a summit some months ago, but, to most Americans, it is still acceptable as a statement even though it was a total lie. President Obama personally wire tapping Trump Tower is really someone vaguely associated with the Obama government may at some point have done some surveillance on someone in Trump Tower. The words mean nothing.

To me, fake news can indeed mean lies, but it can mean something else. Again, we have ambiguity with the words. Fake news can mean actually factually correct but not newsworthy. I had coffee for breakfast today – true but fake news.

It’s very easy to dismiss anything you don’t like as fake news. It’s too easy.