Opinion: 20 years later, readers don’t have much to say about Princess Diana’s death

After she died in a Paris car wreck 20 years ago this week, Princess Diana — everything about her, including her royalty, love life, charity work, funeral and the circumstances of her untimely death — filled The Times’ letters pages for weeks. But in 2017, when media treated the 20-year anniversary of Diana’s death as an important news event, few Times readers had much to say.

The somber occasion drew several letters to the editor, to be sure, but the amount of submissions and their tone came nowhere close to matching the outpouring of grief and anger by readers that appeared in The Times after Diana’s death on Aug. 31, 1997.

Here are some letters sent to us this week, 20 years after that fateful day in Paris.

Berta Graciano-Buchman of Beverly Hills still tries to make sense of the princess’ death:

Princess Diana may have well been the precursor of today’s fascination with reality shows, but the impact her untimely death has had in the world is a clear statement of how strong the emotional connection we can feel for someone that most of us never met in person.

This connectivity has often eclipsed reason, and I, like millions of people, cried on that awful day 20 years ago upon learning of the accident that took the lives of Diana and her friend.

Although two decades have gone by, many of us are still trying to make sense of her reported last words: My God, what happened?

Betty Turner of Sherman Oaks says the lives and deaths of long-ago royals isn’t news:

While no fan of the cult of celebrity, I don’t begrudge The Times for running reports and opinion pieces reflecting on the legacy of Diana. I understand there’s an audience for fluffy articles on the vicissitudes of anachronistic British royalty, and, well, you need to sell newspapers.

But come on, can’t The Times reserve its front section for real news? Royal families’ marriages, divorces, extramarital affairs, offspring and so on may provide titillating fodder for gossip pages, but none of that impacts life on this side of the Atlantic.

It’s true, as op-ed article writer Autumn Brewington aptly noted, the rubbernecking didn’t stop with Diana’s fatal car crash. So let cheesy tabloids exploit such vapid voyeurism. Quality periodicals shouldn’t indulge loopy obsession with British royalty.

In Santa Monica, Lawrence Booth examines the infrastructure that contributed to Diana’s death:

The largely unreported cause of Diana’s death was not the sobriety of her driver or the paparazzi chasing the car. The actual cause was the incredibly dangerous condition of the Pont d’Alma tunnel in Paris.

The tunnel was built with pillars separating one side from the other. With high-speed cars in use, this design became unsafe: If a car swerved into a pillar instead of sliding along, say, a rail protecting the pillars, it would destroy the car. That is exactly what happened with Diana’s vehicle, which was turned into a mass of smoking metal.

Only one person survived because he was in the right front and not just because he was the only one belted. If the princess had been wearing a seat belt, her fate might not have been any different, since the car was almost totally crushed.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook