Sir, - Princess Diana died because a sex-mad media preferred gossip about her sex life, to the truth about her charitable activities and her many campaigns to eradicate some of the evils that afflict our world. She was hounded by media which, not content with the photographs and film she was willing to give them, used every trick they could think of to obtain photographs of the most intimate moments of her life.
Princess Diana was a very beautiful and glamorous woman. The gossip that was printed about her, and the photographs that accompanied it, were ugly. The tabloids' defence of their behaviour in printing this gossip and these photographs has always been that there is a market for them, that this is what people want to hear and see. There is surely something really sick about a society where people are interested in such gossip and such ugly photographs. If there is anything to be learnt from this whole distressing episode, it is surely that truth is better than gossip, and that beauty is found not so much in the physical and the sexual as in the compassion for the sick and suffering which Princess Diana so abundantly displayed and which will be remembered long after her death. - Yours, etc.,
Ballydoogan, Sligo.