DATE: Tuesday, September 2, 1997            TAG: 9709020012

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TONY WHARTON, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  119 lines

WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE ?THE PICTURE-HUNGRY PAPARAZZI MAY HAVE HOUNDED PRINCESS DIANA TO HER DEATH, BUT DO WE SHARE THE BLAME?

THE CHAIN of evidence is simple:

The photographers who chased Princess Diana for years sold the pictures to newspapers and magazines. Those publications printed them. The public bought them.

The question is, who's guilty?

Where in that sequence of actions does the responsibility truly fall?

``I think everyone, from the media to the paparazzi to the people, should feel responsible,'' said Janice Delaney, 34, a child care provider in Portsmouth. ``I am guilty myself, standing in the grocery-store line and reading those magazines.''

There were reports Monday that alcohol played a role in the fatal crash as well. But the shattering news of Diana's death, and its unique, almost surreal, circumstances, had the effect of a slap in the face for many people, a brutal warning that somehow we - the tabloids, the ``mainstream'' press and the public - may have gone too far.

The rationalizations came out quickly Sunday morning, attempting with a surgeon's precision to cut the chain.

Steven Coz, editor of the National Enquirer, carefully drew a line between paparazzi and ``stalkerazzi,'' which he claimed were a new and more aggressive breed of photographer that the Enquirer doesn't do business with.

People magazine, similarly, scrambled to find a perch far from the blood in Paris.

And Ted Turner, founder of CNN, declared: ``It's the tabloids that have done it. Dollars for juicy shots of celebrities. I don't think it's the fault of the legitimate news media. But we all have to suffer for the sins of a few.''

But it was Diana's brother, Charles, who set the moral tone and best captured the public fury.

Speaking from Cape Town, South Africa, he said that any publisher and editor who had paid for intrusive photographs of Diana ``has blood on his hands today.''

Certainly that left many responsible journalists looking hard at their own hands.

Celebrity journalism has exploded into an industry in recent years, with the success of ``Entertainment Tonight'' and the more aggressive ``Hard Copy'' on TV. Those shows feed on photos and video footage.

The more conservative print media have prominently featured color photos of celebrities as well.

The Virginian-Pilot, like most American general-circulation newspapers, hasn't paid any paparazzi for celebrity photographs - directly. But there are few papers that haven't run pictures of Diana, however innocuous, from wire services that were shot in the same times and places as paparazzi photos.

The public, like Charles Spencer, isn't making fine distinctions.

A correspondent outside Kensington Palace, Diana's home, noted Sunday that a news van's window had been smashed. Mourners cursed and screamed at news photographers, many of whom were probably as sick and stunned as anyone.

``If there were not such a feeding frenzy about those people's lives - maybe we could just step back and think about ourselves,'' Delaney, of Portsmouth, said. ``If we were in that position, how would we feel?''

``I think there are a lot of ethics problems with the media,'' said Elizabeth ``DeeDee'' Deans, 33, of Norfolk. ``I know there are public events, but she had a personal life, too. If Diana said, `Look, please leave me alone,' the media should have listened.

``But I know we buy it. We read it. It seems to me that gives us some responsibility. If we didn't buy it, you wouldn't write it. I think we should all be ashamed.''

Journalists say, ``Follow the money.'' It can lead you to a crime, because money, like blood, leaves a trail.

In this case, following the money is simple but dangerous. It leads to nearly everyone. Paparazzi couldn't buy film for their cameras if someone weren't buying the newspapers and magazines which pay for the photographs.

The truth of this is ruthless, and there are many parallels.

Colombians and residents of other drug-producing nations, when pressured by the United States to clamp down on cocaine and other crops, ask why Americans don't just stop buying it.

Hollywood producers and directors, warned to control sex and violence in movies and television, point out that somebody must be watching it.

``Maybe it's us,'' a teary-eyed Sheila Smith said outside Kensington Palace. ``We buy this stuff.''

Some noted that Diana had her uses for the media, and that they made her someone Buckingham Palace couldn't easily ignore when she and Prince Charles broke up. The relationship, then, could go both ways.

Ann Leslie, special correspondent of The Daily Mail, told the BBC that the public shared the blame: ``If the public hadn't run around buying the newspapers, buying the magazines that showed Diana, whom they loved to bits, then frankly these kids on motorbikes wouldn't make the money.''

Leslie's phrase, ``whom they loved to bits,'' echoes horribly in that Paris tunnel.

What all of this finally revolves around, what all of us are buying, is celebrity, the rather murky urge to adore someone wealthier, luckier, more beautiful and talented than we are.

It's not new - the British public lionized Admiral Horatio Nelson into near-godliness in the early 1800s.

But Nelson never faced an explosion of popping flashbulbs, nor a pack of racing motorcycles.

Diana's death gave us an instant measurement of her public regard. The mountain of flowers and cards outside the Paris hospital, Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace - even the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. - show that the tabloids had taken their readers' pulses precisely.

Janice Delaney found herself struggling with that Monday. She said she felt like this was the John F. Kennedy assassination for her generation, and she wasn't sure why.

Her voice thickening, she said, ``It feels ridiculous, because it's someone I don't even know. But I got up in the morning to watch her get married, you know?

``She looked beautiful, but her personality, when she would bend down and touch children with AIDS, you knew she was for real. She reached their level. She made herself accessible.''

DeeDee Deans saw a terrible, even destructive relationship between the public and Diana.

``How much can we as the public ask to be involved in someone else's life?'' she said. ``They eat, sleep, breathe go to the bathroom the same as we do.

``I tell you, it made me think yesterday, that had she been alive, I would have invited her to my house to just sit down and talk like a human being.

``We made her non-human. And that wasn't fair.'' KEYWORDS: PRINCESS DIANA

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