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By DANNY SCHECHTER

The kiss of fame that began so innocently for Princess Diana on the tube ended gruesomely in a tunnel on August 31, as this global icon became the latest and most visible victim of "media overkill." The paparazzi chasing her, publications underwriting their aggressive tactics, and a public mesmerized by her mythic storybook and roller coaster lifestyle are all part of the same dynamic, feeding off larger, unseen forces.

Like the media itself, she had become, in writer Larry Gelbart's phrase, a weapon of mass distraction. Like Icarus, she was caught in a deadly spotlight at a time when too much of what passes for journalism is sensation mongering that justifies itself in terms of merely giving the public what it wants -- as if it plays no role in creating tastes or stimulating demand.

A part of the public may want heroin on demand. Do we just give it to them at the corner drug store, without prescriptions or treatment? Diana was the ultimate symbol of the media-fication of our culture. She often played to the cameras, using the media spotlight before realizing that their glare had turned her life into a soap opera and her celebrity into a caricature. She generated even higher ratings in death than she did in life. Now that she's gone, she will most certainly be replaced by a new larger-than-life persona. Who it will be is almost beside the point.

Why? Because the conventional wisdom justified by market research has "proven" that larger-than-life personalities sell. So do those captured in the "gotcha" spotlight of celebrity bashing.

Perhaps that's why Diana's brother Earl Spencer asserted that he won't allow Diana's children to be exploited by the same media attention showered on their mother.

But, will he succeed? Unlikely! As Maureen Dowd confessed in the New York Times, the media can't help itself. "We can't stop, the photographers can't stop. The reporters can't stop. The producers can't stop. The editors can't stop. And the consumers can't stop."

She blamed a mass psychosis, a national addiction to celebrity culture in which the media is deeply invested both financially and psychically. The elite Los Angles Times devoted seven full pages in its Sunday edition to splashy, full-color coverage of the funeral. Columnist Peter King offered a prayer for the end of "the whole gassy culture of image, of celebrity," without noting his own newspaper's fidelity to it. "Lord, Deliver us from tabloid reality in all its manifestations," he begged.

Deeper in the paper, TV critic Howard Rosenberg skewered the wall-to-wall TV coverage, branding it "another case of media telling the public what to think about, then using the interest they've created to justify their inflated coverage."

This is nothing new, and it's unlikely to "go away," a TV term for a story that is high on the agenda one minute and gone the next. We've seen the parade of these media- fostered personalities over the years get longer and nastier. The non-stop hype has a cumulative impact like an echo chamber. What the public doesn't see is that this is being orchestrated. We also don't realize that this media war is targeting us, as viewers, readers, and citizens. When a formula works, unfortunately, it's milked -- to death. As French actress Catherine Deneuve put it, the paparazzi are "dogs of war" unleashed by media companies. Many of them put their own lives at risk hunting down sexy images of the world's Dianas. They live for the "the money shot," the spoils of war.

"They were like sharks after raw meat," said one tourist who happened on the accident site. But whose bidding is done by these media mercenaries? You don't see the publisher of the National Inquirer or Rupert Murdoch chasing limos in Paris, night?

They don't get their own hands dirty with the work of media exploitation. This media war is being fought with marketing strategies and corporate logos that prize entertainment over information, diversion over democracy. It's about winning market share, seducing audiences, and building circulation. Celebrities are used to endorse products and services, and quickly packaged as products themselves.

Hyper-competitive media executives speak in the language of war, of "bombarding" audiences, "targeting" markets, "capturing" grosses, "killing" the competition, and, always, "winning." This hi-tech war "deploys" technologies whose goal, in part, is to expand, domestically and globally, an entertainment economy now valued, in the US alone, at $150 billion dollars annually. As the companies duel, countries, communities, and even individuals find themselves in the crossfire.

In her last few years Diana herself put her energies into protesting war and comforting its victims. I met her two years ago in Italy, while accompanying Croatian- American rocker Nenad Bach to perform at Luciano Pavarotti's concert to benefit the youngest casualties of the Bosnian war. Soon afterwards, she hooked up with the Red Cross to champion a campaign against the menace of landmines. She tried to use her celebrity for good, courting coverage of an issue that until recently was all but buried.

So, yes, we saw Diana on the front lines in Angola, weeping at the thousands crippled by landmines that were manufactured in the US, Britain, Russia, and China.

Unfortunately, as with so many issues, we got more images than information, like who profits from the misery. Diana was sincere even if much of the media coverage about her causes wasn't. As Earl Spencer noted, the media sneered at her good works while she lived; they conferred sainthood when she died. Throughout, she was treated as a symbolic messenger of mercy, not as a someone with substantive commentary to share.

She was even criticized for going after politicians whose policies promote virtually unreported carnage in the Third World. Once again, a weapon of distraction was given more media attention than weapons of mass destruction. As Larry Gelbart, the man who gave us M*A*S*H, complained to the Los Angeles Times, those weapons "take our eye off the ball. We're more concerned with who is sleeping with whom, and who is having a baby. The real problems in America and in the world go unnoticed while the prurient side of us is appealed to."

This is a deeply institutionalized problem, bigger than annoying paparazzi. Truth has become a casualty of the media war, as it is in most others. Paradoxically, one effect is the under-informing of the larger public while a smaller sector is inundated with more information than it can possibly absorb. "The irony of the information age," writes Ted Pease of Utah State University, "is that so called information has drowned out knowledge, and news of the world around us has been swamped by mere data.

Ironically in this glut of information, we may know less, not more about the world around us." How many people died in conflicts around the world on the night Diana died? How many of them did we know about? Think of all the news we missed as the media cashed in on a tragedy, partly of its own making. Fortunately, some leading journalists are now turning on their own industry.

"Many journalists feel a sense of lost purpose ... when serious journalistic organizations drift towards opinion, infotainment and sensation out of balance with the news," says a statement signed by 28 leading journalists associated with Harvard's Nieman Foundation who are now crusading for reform. America's TV anchor icon Walter Cronkite has blasted the bottom line greed of the media companies, while 60 Minutes founder Don Hewitt has spoken out against the merger of show business and the news business.

And in England, the land that gave us tabloid journalism, a press code has been adopted to restrain the picture boys and their circulation hungry editors. But more importantly, a summer institute in the spirit of Diana's work was held by leading war correspondents, forging a new role -- as peace reporters. So, hopefully, out of this tragedy and the questions its raises about media irresponsibility may come a refocusing of journalistic priorities and ethics.

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