TV star’s suicide prompts a blame game in Britain.
LONDON — On Saturday night, news broke in Britain that Caroline Flack — the former host of “Love Island,” a wildly popular reality TV show — had killed herself.
Within hours, British social media was flooded with tributes to the star, who died while awaiting trial for assaulting her boyfriend.
But those tributes were soon overtaken by something else: demands for a new law in Flack’s name, to stop Britain’s tabloid newspapers from publishing stories that relentlessly dive into celebrities’ private lives.
Flack had been a tabloid fixture, having had romances with Prince Harry and Harry Styles, among others, and socialmedia users accused the newspapers of harming her mental health.
“The British media is the cesspit of our society,” wrote one Twitter user, adding the #carolineslaw hashtag.
On Monday, an online petition calling for a law that would prevent newspapers from “sharing private information that is detrimental to a celebrity, their mental health and those around them,” quickly gained over 400,000 signatures. Politicians also lined up to criticize the tabloids, as well as hate-fueled socialmedia commenters.
The press “have to take responsibility as well,” Keir Starmer, the frontrunner to become the next leader of Britain’s Labour Party, told reporters, accusing newspapers of amplifying negative social-media chatter.
None of that debate was noticeable to readers of Britain’s tabloids Monday. The Sun — the newspaper subject to the most criticism, with some socialmedia users calling for a boycott — devoted seven pages to Flack’s death. Its front page led with criticism of the British Crown Prosecution Service for “its pursuit of fragile Caroline Flack” in forcing her to trial.
Authorities had decided to pursue the assault charge despite knowing Flack had self-harmed during the alleged assault, The Sun said.
Last year, The Sun featured blanket coverage of the assault allegations against Flack, even calling her “Caroline Whack.”
The rancor around Flack’s suicide is only the latest time British tabloids have come under scrutiny. It comes just weeks after Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who have complained repeatedly about press intrusion into their lives, again threatened legal action against several British tabloids over invasive photos.
But media commentators said they did not think calls for #carolineslaw would be any more successful than past campaigns to strengthen privacy laws in Britain. Nor did they expect the campaign to dent the British public’s interest in such stories, which tend to be popular on social media.
“This is one of those great hypocrisies of the British public, that they indulge in reading, and often writing, about these celebrities and then when things go wrong they turn on the media and say it’s all the media’s fault,” Roy Greenslade, a media columnist for The Guardian, said in a telephone interview. Greenslade once worked at The Sun and was also editor of The Daily Mirror, another tabloid.
Greenslade said he lived half of every year in Ireland and there seemed “less of an appetite” there to read about celebrity gossip. That was also the case in other European countries like France and Norway, he said. Gossip rags do exist elsewhere, he said — he cited the National Enquirer as one example — but they are not seen as also being serious newspapers like Britain’s tabloids.
Adrian Bingham, a historian who has written a history of Britain’s tabloid press, said in a telephone interview that British newspapers’ focus on people’s private lives first boomed in the 1930s as the publications competed for scoops. “People would have done anything then,” he said. “If they could have hacked phones in the 1930s, they would have.”
He did not expect anything to come from the calls for a #carolineslaw. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, while pursued by journalists “didn’t lead to anything meaningful” around press regulation, he said. Flack was not as big a celebrity and the newspapers were already using their platforms to divert blame onto other people, such as the Crown Prosecution Service or the producers of “Love Island,” he added.