Legendary The Citizen editor Johnny Johnson had many flaws but few critics could fault his news sense.
Among those who sang his praises as a newsman were Nelson Mandela and Helen Suzman.
Johnson was not well on August 29, 1997. Uncharacteristically for a workaholic, he took time off. We didn’t expect to see him for days. But news intervened.
On the Saturday evening, a Mercedes carrying Princess Diana crashed in Paris. She died on Sunday. Johnson left his sick bed to take hands-on charge of the Diana coverage.
That meant reading through every hard-copy royal story and scrutinising every photograph with a magnifying glass. Then laying out the main pages. In his view, no one else could do justice to the death of the most photographed woman in the world.
For a long while afterwards the paper was crammed with Diana stories and photos. Always the photos. When a senior Afrikaans-speaking staffer asked him why he devoted so much space to British royalty, Johnson replied: “Ask your wife what she reads.”
The question was asked. Johnson was right. More than 23 years later, “minor royals” Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, don’t evoke the same rush.
A hyped interview with Oprah Winfrey and allegations of disquiet over the skin colour of Meghan’s offspring lifted the news profile. Yet here, on the southern tip of Africa, there are more newsworthy topics than trans-Atlantic family spats.
Neither Harry’s Southern African links, nor the trove of overt and covert racism will be enough to keep the Sussexes on our front pages . Meghan made page 11 in yesterday’s The Citizen.
Rightly so, although the Oprah interview was the third-most popular story on citizen.co.za. It would be wrong to equate Princess Diana’s violent death and Meghan’s Oprah interview in terms of newsworthiness.
There’s no comparison. But on a different level, there are attempts to compare Diana and Meghan. For example, Harry told Oprah his “biggest concern was history repeating itself”. Nudge, nudge. There are significant differences.
Diana was 20 when she married Charles, 32, who was next in line to become king, when she would be queen. As Jordan King writes in Metro.co.uk, Diana went from being a nursery school teacher to being one of the most famous women in the world.
She had not been to university or experienced a serious relationship before marrying into one of the world’s most-watched families. Meghan was 36 when she married Harry, 33.
She had previously been married. She has a degree and a successful career as an American actress, experienced in dealing with fame. She has more in common with Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee at the centre the 1936 abdication of King Edward VIII.
Except that Harry, fifth in line to the throne, has no chance of becoming king. Meghan wasn’t destined to be queen. All the fretting during the Oprah interview about whether their son Archie would be called “prince” revealed a lack of understanding about titles.
For republicans, antimonarchists and anticolonialists, this is all piffle. But you read it, as Johnny Jay knew you would.
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