ADMITTEDLY, there's something uncanny about the publication of "The Diana Chronicles," Tina Brown's book about the princess of Wales, just as America's own blond headline-grabber, Paris Hilton, was making her way (back) to jail. It makes it too tempting to draw all sorts of parallels between the two women. And we all know who wins that contest.

This approach isn't merely facile, though, it's lazy and ultimately dishonest. Diana may have been more dignified, more naturally beautiful and less heavy handed with the peroxide, but she's also the one who paved the way to fame for Hilton and future generations of the under-talented and overexposed.

As Brown notes in "The Diana Chronicles," the princess of Wales could manipulate the media with astonishing sophistication and, at times, an appalling lack of scruples. Her participation in Andrew Morton's book, "Diana, Her True Story," according to Brown, consisted of the princess more or less spilling her guts and then forcing the author to attribute the information to other sources. Her November 1995 interview with BBC journalist Martin Bashir (the source of the infamous quote, "There were three of us in this marriage") was, according to Brown, similarly choreographed to elicit maximum public sympathy as well as a divorce from Prince Charles, which the queen requested a month after the broadcast.

Of course, fast forward 10 or so years and these machinations look pretty quaint. In our age of YouTube and camera phones and citizen-generated tabloidism, "media manipulation" is less a learned skill than an involuntary reflex. Diana may seem as anti-YouTube as it gets, but, had she lived, she wouldn't have been able to resist the undertow of trashy media culture any more than Hilton can.

Sure, Diana would be older, wiser and less likely to forget to put on underwear when she went out. But to hold Diana up as a beacon of decorum while casting Hilton as the poster child for society's trash problem is to subscribe to the exact fairy tale that got Diana into her royal mess in the first place. The prospect of snagging the prince was, for Diana, the only ambition her family really encouraged. She had a grandmother and two aunts who were royal ladies-in-waiting and a 500-year family legacy of ties to the monarchy. Her prince just turned out to be the sort who remains a frog even after you kiss him.

That faithless marriage and the disapproving monarchy, though, gained Diana something else: a kind of victim status that is simply unavailable to Hilton, or really any contemporary American woman (who, unless she is Hillary Clinton, presumably can get out of her marriage — and open a pottery studio or write a bestselling tell-all — if her man betrays her).