Yes, but allow me to quote a bit from Tina Brown's book about Diana (p.459, Anchor books paperback edition of 2008): Situation is that Piers Morgan of the News of the World scooped the information that Diana had made nuisance calls to her lover Oliver Hoare. His boss Rupert Murdoch calls him after Diana told Richard Kay that the story was untrue and he duly printed it in the Daily Mail.
And I thought on reading this: WHAT?
But, alas, Brown continues in a very revealing way about how people like Murdoch, Morgan and Villemann work as journalists:
And describes how Murdoch told Morgan to expose Diana as a liar in order to sell more papers....
Why do I quote this? Because I got the impression that Villemann is as well one of the woolves who in a cynical way just would love to be able to expose Mary and Frederick.
There's nothing wrong with wolves, you know....
However, having said that, and even if you want to call them hyenas
, I tend to disagree at least on this particular point. I was getting pretty tired, and I know quite a few other people were too, of the way Diana's pals in the press spun everything so she was the sweet innocent victim of everyone else. In this case, not only did she and her pals deny that she'd made the nuisance calls, but they blamed someone else for it - a boy who had been identified by enough detail for his actual identity to be known by someone wanting to do a bit of elementary detective work. I don't know if they were fingering a child so he couldn't actually get prosecuted or what, but IMO that was a pretty unforgivable thing to do, and I don't think the press should have just rolled over and given up.
I do agree that they were hounding Diana, but that's at least partly because they knew they had a market and people would pay over the odds for personal stories and photos of her. In a free-market economy, as long as you stay within the confines of the law, the supply-demand business takes over. Then all you have to rely on are privacy laws and whether their enforcement has teeth.
One who seeks the confidence and trust of people close to Mary in the hope that they start to talk to her and tell her as much as possible about the CP couple. One who proudly tells that after the publication of her book the RF started a "witch hunt" for her sources.
Well, honestly, I'd hope that people genuinely close to Mary or the other royals would know better than to put their confidence and trust in any reporter. So far, and I'm not all that far through the book yet, I'd say that the lack of named sources is something of a weakness because there are so few actual named individuals. The royals are quite well placed to say "she made it up" because of this vagueness. In the British royal family, you even have people like Margaret Rhodes and Pamela Mountbatten saying somewhat less than complimentary things about some of the senior royals, so I assume it's possible to find someone who'll talk on the record. I don't know how common this sort of critical reporting is in Denmark, though, or whether the perception of the people around the royals is that this book really does constitute constructive criticism.
If this happened to a normal citizen, it would be called stalking, spying and prying, but as Villemann wrote here, she believes she owns the Royals as they live on public money. Like a self-made public prosecutor she requested weekly schedules of the CP couple in order to prove that they don't spent enough time working for the public who funds them - now who are they that they have to stand to attention for any self-proclaimed campaigner against their way to breathe life in the ancient monarchy of Denmark.
Yes, but the point is that it wouldn't happen to a normal citizen because there's no market for the stories. There may be a combination of motives here. Rupert Murdoch is a republican and you always have to wonder whether his papers are going after the royals because it sells, because it undermines the monarchy, because certain royals are in his bad books or what. Could be all of the above. In some cases it probably is a case of a reporter trying to force the royal family into giving value for money because of a perception that they're becoming freeloaders and damaging the monarchy and the reporter is trying to stop the rot. In some cases the motives of some of the reporters and photographers is pretty clear, but in some it really isn't.
I don't remember the Abdication personally (I'm getting on in years but I'm not quite that far gone!), but I remember reading about the year-long nationwide news blackout on the King's affair with Mrs Simpson and being appalled. My mother and grandmother, on the other hand, were both perfectly OK with it and thought that the King's position required this sort of deferential treatment by the press, and that his affair was nobody else's business and that it was fine for the upper echelons of society to know about it but for ordinary people (which included my mother and grandmother) to be kept in the dark. My problem with that (apart from the cynicism of the class system in their attitude that in an apparent democracy the vast majority of people didn't matter) is that if an institution controls the press, sooner or later they'll take advantage and abuse their position. Unfortunately, when you have the profit motive there as well, the press are also more than likely to abuse
their position when doing investigative journalism, but I think it's better to have a situation like that than one where one side gets pretty much free rein.
There seem to be rumblings all over Europe about the commitment and value of the younger generation of royals. In Britain, Denmark, and Spain in particular there seems to be the perception that while you have a dedicated and much loved monarch, the heir (or in the British case, the generation of William, Harry, Beatrice and Eugenie) is a spoiled lazy brat who wants the privileges without the responsibilities and isn't really supported by the people. William is a bit of a special case because of the Diana-Camilla factor, but there are still a fair few people wondering if he does anything other than go nightclubbing. Again, it could be the work of republican elements in the press or it could be reporters and photographers who are feeding the public's demand for celebrity news or what. But we're going to need reporters to ask hard questions about both the royals and other reporters or we could end up with the institution of the monarchy being seriously undermined. Whether you think Trine is one of the good reporters or one of the bad ones is another matter. I don't really know enough about the Danish royals or the Danish royal reporters to be able to tell for certain what anyone's motives are. All I can say about the book at this point is that most of it isn't about Mary, and I'm not sure why so many people are focussing on her. That last chapter of the book seems to have really unbalanced it.