Newsweek’s ‘Diana at 50′ Cover Stirs Up Controversy…
ow creepy is the newest cover of Newsweek? Newsweek digitally engineered a photo illustration, aka Photoshopped, of an age-projected Princess Diana with the former Kate Middleton, now Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. The image is an attention-getter. However, the Photoshopped, looking-you-straight-in-the-eye picture of Diana at 50 is only the start; in addition to the article, the story includes a fake Facebook page for Diana, and another doctored photograph of Diana with an iPhone.
Interestingly, the “plot” of the Newsweek article, in which an aging Diana gets Botox and moves to New York, is like-but-unlike the plot of Monica Ali’s new novel, Untold Story: A Novel, in which an aging Diana dyes her hair and moves to the Midwest. It’s been getting a lot of press, including the cover of this week’s New York Times Book Review – perhaps Ms. Brown had heard of it before the writing process began.
Moreover, Brown’s musings over “what ifs” are borderline freakish. One writer accused the head of NewsBeast (LOL) to be high on a gas leak!
There is no doubt she would have kept her chin taut with strategic Botox shots and her bare arms buff from the gym. Remarriage? At least two, I suspect, on both sides of the Atlantic. Always so professional herself, she would have soon grown exasperated with Dodi Al-Fayed’s hopeless unreliability. After the breakup, I see her moving to her favorite city, New York, spending a few cocooned years safely married to a super-rich hedge-fund guy who could provide her with what she called “all the toys”: the plane, the private island, the security detail. Gliding sleekly into her 40s, her romantic taste would have moved to men of power over boys of play. She would have tired of the hedge-fund guy and drifted into undercover trysts with someone more exciting—a high-mindedly horny late-night talk-show host or a globetrotting French finance wizard destined for the Élysée Palace. I suspect she would have retained a weakness for men in uniform, and a yen for dashing Muslim men. (A two-year fling with a Pakistani general, rumored to have links to the ISI, would have been a particular headache to the Foreign Office and the State Department.) Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative would have become her new post-palace power circles. She would perhaps have caused a press sensation with an unplanned pledge from the CGI stage to raise $50 million to help educate women in South Sudan.
Los Angeles Times and The Huffington Post ran brief posts and corresponding reader polls on the “jarring” cover image. Nearly half of the L.A. Times readers polled find the image “horribly offensive,” and 60% of Huffington Post readers think it’s “a bit too much!” The top trending tweet comes from Janice Turner, a columnist for The Times of London. She tweeted, “Astonishing. Why didn’t Newsweek just row to Althrop island, exhume & snap [up] Diana’s rotted corpse?”
Other publications have fudged covers before – Newsweek’s Martha Stewart, Time’s OJ Simpson, and TV Guide’s Oprah come to mind. But Newsweek’s presentation of Diana comes off as ghoulish and freaky.
Sources included:
How Creepy Is Princess Diana’s Ghost on the Cover of Newsweek? By Adam Clark Estes
Newsweek’s ‘Diana at 50′ cover: Shocking, brilliant or just plain cheap? By Matt Donnelly
Weekend at Di’s By Joel Meares
Newsweek Fantasizes About How Princess Diana Would Feel About Kate Middleton Today
Latest Newsweek Features Creepy Princess Diana Cover By Chris O’Shea
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