TVGuide collects the reflections of TV journos as the 10th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana approaches:
ABC’s Barbara Walters: “When Peter Jennings and I walked near Westminster Abbey, we saw people winding through the streets, crying. All the stores were closed. There was just this terrible grief that everyone seemed to share, including those of us who were there.”
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams: “I was like a lot of red-blooded American males of that age. For a long time I had a huge crush on her from a safe distance. I felt for her and what life had become for her.”
Fox News Channel’s Catherine Herridge: “I arrived in Paris from London just after 6am. It was the most amazing scene I had ever seen in my entire life. There were people streaming into the tunnel where the accident happened, and coming out of the tunnel carrying pieces of concrete from the pillars that had been damaged, like this very macabre souvenir hunt.”
CBS’s Mark Phillips: “The royal family allowed whatever sentiment people had about the way Diana was treated by them to vent itself through the week of mourning. But it was a mistake to try to translate it into politics, as some of us did at the time. In terms of making the royal family less ostentatious, none of that has happened.”