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How did the networks handle the death of Princess Diana?

Don't know about the networks but at the time of Di's death we had a radio station that went to voice tracking which was somewhat a new thing. Somewhat because Dick Clark did it in 1963 at Richmond, Virginia's WLEE, Anyway the "dj" they hired to do voice tracking lived in Indiana and the station was in Virginia told Princess Diana jokes which was not very nice. Myself I would had pulled the plug go live that night but they decided to stick with voice tracking even it meant Princess Diana jokes on the day of her death.
 
I was at a rural property that my family owned where you could get exactly 2 over-the-air TV stations.
I recall ABC went with wall-to-wall coverage the morning after.
 
My mom, stepdad and I got home from a daytrip someplace around 8:00 ET that night (August 30), and my stepdad and I went on the porch to read while my mom went upstairs to change to her nighties, and a few minutes later she came downstairs saying "It's all over the TV, Princess Diana was in a car accident in Paris with her boyfriend. He's dead, she's still alive so pray for her." We only had OTA TV at the time and I went in my room, turned on NBC, watched for a few minutes, then sometime between 0000 and 0100 put NBC back on and that's when I learned that Di was no more. Allowing for the time difference, she died on August 30th, 1997 U.S. time.

The next day (August 31) BTW was opening day of the National Football League regular season, the only time that RS NFL games have been played in the month of August.

gr8oldies, re CBS's newsroom being unmanned, it *was* Labor Day Saturday night in the States. :)

ixnay
 
I actually was watching the coverage on MSNBC, and when Brian Williams mentioned they were about to be joined by the NBC network, i knew something was up. When that happens, you know something big is happening.
 
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ixnay said:
gr8oldies, re CBS's newsroom being unmanned, it *was* Labor Day Saturday night in the States. :)

ixnay
Click to expand...

Correct, but the other networks managed to do the job. The best CBS could do early on was to have periodic crawls at the bottom of the screen. I recall the early information was that she had suffered a broken leg--so I guess they kind of off when it came to accuracy.
 
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