(Image: PopEater)

BY MEGAN NOE

ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY

You're watching multisource world video news analysis from Newsy. 

Princess Diana would have celebrated her 50th birthday Friday.

And fourteen years after her death, the popular Princess is still gracing magazine covers, this time as a digitally-aged mother-in-law on Newsweek.

“When you read the article in Newsweek magazine, it also actually has a fashion face-off between Princess Diana and Kate Middleton and showing what their styles were. It also has a fake Princess Diana Facebook page. And then it’s also digitally modified another photograph that shows her carrying an iPhone. The article also goes on to say if she was alive she would have remarried twice and she would have had more than 10 million Twitter followers.”

But the piece has stirred up controversy.

The LA times sums it up with this headline: “Shocking, brilliant or just plain cheap?”

Tina Brown, Newsweek’s editor-in-chief and author of the article defended her decision to MSNBC.

“A novel came out about how she was going to be living in suburbia and stuff, I don’t see that at all. I saw Diana very much as being this kind of global, mover-shaker kind of a woman, Clinton global initiative kind of a woman. She loved the limelight, but she also would have really sort of professionalized all that humanitarian giving that she was doing, because she actually was one of the first to do that.”

But a blogger for UK’s The Telegraph calls the image quote- “a disgrace.”

“What inspired the once awesome Tina Brown to become Newsweek’s grave-robber? Did she think this would help flog her biography of Diana, or did she wish to show the world that she no longer felt any loyalty to the Royal family back in her homeland? Whatever the motive, the outcome is a stain on her, and Newsweek’s, name. The ghoulish cover exudes bad taste.”

Still others, like Boston’s WFXT anchor, find the jarring cover intriguing.

“I do understand the appeal of this idea. She was on more covers than anybody. I think there’s still a standing loss there. People see Kate Middleton and they think, oh, what would their relationship have been like? And so this Newsweek allows people who have felt that way, which I think is many, to maybe get a glimpse into what that would be like.”

Finally, a blogger for The Stir calls the cover crude and says -- the whole thing belongs in a tabloid.

“How on Earth is this dream of a maniac in any way worthy of being in a publication that aims to print serious journalism?”

Brown previously penned a biography about Princess Diana which turned out to be a New York Times bestseller.

 

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Transcript by Newsy.