Petitions over Flack’s death unlikely to make truth clearer

Madeline Palacz, The Independent

We watched Caroline Flack’s meteoric rise and we watched her tragic fall. And with it, the conversation about the regulation of traditional media, as well as social media platforms, has been ignited once again.

The intense focus from some sections of the tabloid press of a life lived under the celebrity spotlight has been widely criticised following the 40-year-old’s death. Such reporting has also been blamed for fuelling backlash from “trolls” on social media.

And the media is not the only industry in the spotlight.

Much has been said already about who, or what, is to blame for the former Love Island presenter’s death by suicide. While it is public knowledge that she took her own life while awaiting trial following an allegation that she assaulted her boyfriend, at this stage, it is important to emphasise that the circumstances of Flack’s death remain unknown. Crucially, at the centre of all this was a vulnerable young woman whose death should not be oversimplified by discussions of who should take the most blame.

Within hours of the news of Flack’s death, an online petition calling for it to be a criminal offence for the British Press to “knowingly and relentlessly bully a person, whether they be in the public eye or not, up to the point that they take their own life” began to make the rounds. In just a few days, the petition gained almost 500,000 signatures. It is understandable that people want to see action, but knee jerk reactions like these are unhelpful.

For readers, Flack’s death must also be a time for reflection. I wasn’t alone when I clicked on articles about the Love Island villa. A few months later, I read with fascination numerous articles about Flack allegedly assaulting her boyfriend in their home. I must have contributed to such articles being promoted to the top of a publication’s homepage.

Stories of this nature would have delivered significant reader traffic for these news sites. It’s possible that the number of articles which were written about Flack in the weeks prior to her death were fuelled by this reader demand; it has been suggested by some media commentators that the presenter was the subject of more than 40 individual stories by The Sun in the eight weeks leading to her death. It does not appear that public anger at the media’s scrutiny of Flack in life has resulted in a reduction in the demand for such stories in her death.

To what extent the traditional media caused or contributed to the backlash Flack received on social media remains unclear. In any event, big questions remain unanswered on the ability of social media platforms to effectively tackle harmful content on the internet. We must all do better.

Our obsession with celebrity is not new, nor is the media’s specific fascination with a woman’s fall from grace. Take Princess Diana, Amy Winehouse, Jade Goody. In Flack’s case, her “fall” came following an allegation of domestic abuse. Perhaps notably, it was Boris Johnson’s neighbours who were vilified by some sections of the press after they called the police when they heard a “loud scream and banging” from inside the flat next door.

Of course, it was the media who informed me of Flack’s death, as I scrolled through Twitter. WhatsApp, which enabled me to share the news to my shocked friends and family; now, the press allows me to read about the life of a person I did not know but felt like I did. While the media is criticised for fuelling the abuse directing towards Flack, perhaps rightly so, it remains a platform through which we can voice emotions for someone we only knew from afar. Perhaps this makes us more human than ever.