Viewers shun CBS crash documentary

An attempt by a US television channel to exploit the death of the Princess of Wales by showing photographs of her dying moments has been a ratings flop. Audiences preferred Simon Cowell on the American version of Pop Idol and the crime series Law And Order to the CBS documentary called Diana's Secrets.

More than 17 million viewers switched over to the police drama, compared with barely nine million who watched the grainy black and white images of the princess trapped in the wreckage of the crash that killed her.

The documentary has also been a public relations disaster for CBS, which has been hit with a deluge of hostile coverage from the American media.

Newspapers and TV news broadcasts have given extensive coverage to the row in Britain over the use of the photographs, which are said to have been taken from a photocopy of the previously-secret French accident report.

They are believed have been handed over by Jacques Langevin, one of the first photographers to arrive at the crash scene.

The New York Daily News attacked CBS for a "shocking decision," saying in an editorial that it was "refusing to publish the ghoulish images in keeping with a previous near-unanimous media blackout on pictures of the dying princess."

In its report of the row, CNN said the original photographs had been widely offered for sale in the US at the time of the crash in August 1997, but that it had refused to buy them.

Another editorial in one of the biggest chains of American regional newspapers said the images "tested the limits of good taste", while Howard Kurtz, a media columnist for the Washington Post accused CBS of "sheer unadulterated ratings-grabbing exploitation".

Network chiefs at CBS were keeping their heads down, beyond a brief statement from spokesman Sandra Genelius that said: "We stand by our report."

Before the broadcast, the channel had justified using the photographs by insisting that they were neither graphic nor exploitative and saying that they were "shown in context of an interview with the doctor who first treated Diana at the scene".