charles and diana saga was so extraordinary in many ways that there sirchlly won t be a repetition of that. and i think that people s attention is now pulled in many, many, many different directions. and that goes for actually quite rightly, it goes for royalty as well. all right. melber, everybody feels good about this couple. and it was nice. and they do actually seem to have a good relationship. but the paparazzi in the city where you are haven t exactly retired. i wonder if we will see a return to the usual british gossipy approach to, you know, basically hounding the people who are in that spotlight. yeah, i think that would be what we would expect. and i disagree with the idea that a sort of a disaggregated media means less celebrity coverage. if you look at what people like on facebook and twitter where this event was very popular, over 10 million comments on facebook over the day
internationally, is obviously more celebrity, personality driven. i think that s why this is such a challenge for the media. precisely because there s a great deal of attention on these stories as personal narratives, and they may rate well, but they may not be newsworthy. one other data point that i thought was very interesting is that about 65% of the social media discussion on twitter about the wedding and the run-up came from the united states. so while twitter, obviously, played a role in other stories, that s a place where, again, people want to do that. let me get matt in. the media drawing lines. i think you re right, but there is one crucial difference, and that is that diana and charles chose to play out their dysfunctional marriage in the media. they leaked things to friends who leaked things to the press. they made that decision. from what we know so far in the early days, the circle of friends around kate and wills is incredibly tight. they ve circled the wagons.
they know what the consequences are if you don t do that. i think they re all a little wiser. so despite that enormous amount of scrutiny out there and twitter feeds and facebook and all the rest of it, i think they themselves, especially if their marriage ends up being happy, will mitigate against the kind of temptations that charles and diana had. that s true. it does take two to tango in the sense that journalists may look for leaks, but you have to have somebody to provide the leaks. i was stunned that kate middleton, may be a lovely person, she s been dating william for years, that she talked to the press exactly once when the engagement was announced. so she s beenly shielded from this. i find that hard to understand given the american concept of celebrity where you re supposed to be out there all the time. i think matt s point is absolutely right, that there are different ways to play out any celebrity story. and i don t think there s a dimunition at all. when you have the s
these terrible eye vevents. and there was a dilemma about how to apportion their coverage. i think he did the right thing. i think at the same time you have to leave people there to cover this event because the public wants to see it, and the numbers speak for themselves. brian williams made a statement in favor of hard news. emily, the media, for so many years, had a lot to do with the soap opera that surrounded charles and camilla and lady di and the leaks and scandals. i wonder now that the glow has worn off and after the honeymoon if they ll want to have that again with the new couple. i think it feels the way that if you look at the world as it was 30 years ago when charles and diana got married, the media world has so completely changed. this will continue to be a compelling narrative and a soap opera for the uk and the world, i think that actually kind of the heat and the light surrounding that couple will be much diminished, not least because, actually, the whole