One aspect of the affair that did not occur to most British journalists at the time was immediately obvious to journalists throughout North Africa and the Middle East. This was the possibility that Diana might have been assassinated by the British secret services acting on behalf of the British royal family or the British state. For many Arab journalists, this version of Diana's death was a classic political conspiracy story, outdoing all others in even the most respected media in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. For them and their readers, the known facts implied that Diana may have been murdered by the guardians of Britain's state security because of the possibility that the mother of the future heir to the throne of the United Kingdom might have married a Muslim of Egyptian origin and converted to Islam herself.

This case, in which serious news media ran what to others appeared an absurd conspiracy theory, is not an isolated one. Throughout the Middle East and Africa, it is often assumed that events that appear to US residents or Europeans to be coincidence, bad luck, or human error-such as car accidents and plane crashes-are actually the result of hidden manipulation by powerful people, generally assumed these days to reside in Washington, DC. This partly explains why the United States has for so long been regarded in Iran as the Great Satan of international politics, a reputation it has inherited from Britain. In part, this is a legacy from the days when power in vast parts of the world was manipulated directly and unapologetically by groups of people in foreign metropolises. The historic 1953 coup in Iran, after all, really was engineered by the US Central Intelligence Agency, proving that conspiracies do exist, at least on occasion. In short, there are justifiable reasons why intelligent, sophisticated people in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere may assume that major political events are merely the visible manifestation of a hidden world of manipulation and intrigue; this explanation conforms to their experience with politics.

But this conclusion is also a reflection of a deeply-rooted philosophical or theological belief that everything has an ultimate cause, and that the notions of coincidence or chance explain nothing. In many parts of Africa, for example, there is a general reluctance to believe in coincidence. This has nothing to do with the facts themselves, but the attitude governs the way in which facts or supposed facts are arranged in the form of news stories. People may accept without difficulty that a car crashed because it had no brakes, or that a sudden death was caused by a particular virus. But what intrigues people is to know why the car crashed at a particular time. Why today and not yesterday? Why does one person die of AIDS and not another? These are questions of causation, not of fact.

Everywhere, news stories may be constructed by journalists, but they must fit with popular views about how reality is constituted if they are to gain currency. This is what gives the news its distinctive local flavor. In Britain, every tabloid journalist who writes about the House of Windsor is wittingly or unwittingly basing his or her story on the fact that the country has an antique constitution in which the royal family is central, ideologically if not politically. Royal activities are a vast national ritual, and hence they are more important than they may appear at first sight. In the United States as well, any major, successful, or long-running news story has to be based on some widelyshared assumption about "what is real" and "what matters." The OJ Simpson saga, for example, was a testimony to the United States' continuing obsession with race. It was a morality play with material to comfort the many beliefs and prejudices of both racists and antiracists.

Sources and Standards of News

While news is defined everywhere in the world by the form it takes and requires a degree of mutual recognition by its producers and its consumers, news in African countries differs in at least two crucial ways from news in the United States or in any other industrialized country. First, in much of Africa, news that people regard as "hard" is still to a large extent transmitted by word of mouth. Part of the reason for the appearance of seemingly bizarre stories in serious newspapers in Africa is that journalists often put on paper what people are talking about. Industrial or post-industrial society is so much in thrall to major corporations that it is hardly thinkable in countries like the United States that news could emanate from anything except an electronic or print medium. In African countries, it is more often the other way around. This attachment to the spoken word is an index of an authentic element of democracy in African societies in the sense that news is determined by everyone and not just by a coterie of professionals. All African presidents recognize the power of popular discussion and do their best to influence it, just as their Western counterparts use spin-doctors and spokespersons to influence the media. While many African heads of state struggle to persuade their citizens to believe what they read in the official organs of mass communication, they often do so in vain.

Second, many Africans have a view of reality in which material facts are considered to be no more than the superficial aspect of the true state of things. What is important is to know why things happen the way they do, and this involves a view of the nature of the broad positive and negative forces in the world and also of the relationship between the visible world and the invisible forces that are posited by all religious belief. All over Africa, people tend to believe in the reality of complex mystical powers, some of them comparable to what English speakers might call "witchcraft." Hence the stories about witch hunts in Zambian papers and about vampires in Tanzania. The more unlikely stories in the African press might shed some light on the alien-abduction stories that appear to be taken seriously by a surprisingly high proportion of the US public. The United States shares with African countries the characteristic of being a society with a high level of religious observance and belief. Many US residents, like Africans, suppose the existence of some sort of mystical force that can shape human destiny. Given the currency of this belief, all sorts of mystical stories become plausible.