How sad

I can’t understand why you are all so interested

People will have lots of reasons. For me, it’s all a bit too close to home for comfort.

I’d just ask that anyone who doesn’t have a clue who she is, please keep your posts short and snappy. Some of us who knew who she was might not be able to handle a reply longer than a tweet or instagram.

I think it was me that started that; sorry if my ignorance offends in some way, but it was an honest point. I simply didn’t know who she was, 48 hrs on and I’ve had a bit of a google and watched some news reports… Turns out we were pretty much the same age which makes it even stranger I wasn’t aware of her. I suppose I have my own little media bubble like anyone else, it’s not a badge of honour or anything, there are plenty of famous people I have no knowledge of, we live in a world with too many “Celebrities” some of them are bound to pass a few of us by…

Anyway that lack of awareness perhaps gives me a different perspective on her death and a few things have struck me about the whole sad event.

There’s lots of blame being slung about, for “The Media” and for “Social Media” primarily coming from various forms of media and social media…
I can’t help wondering how sincere some (most) of these outpourings really are, and how keen some are to get ahead of some of their own bad press by jumping on the grief bandwagon.

Her employers, ITV (a media organisation oddly enough) didn’t really seem to know her in any real sense.
Every news bulletin they seemed to recite the same facts (the assault case, her “fragile state”, unnamed friends that said ‘this or that’, the CPS wanted a “show trial”… etc, etc) they read out a few of her tweets, but honestly I get the impression that she went on an enforced break from work, and nobody from the office actually bothered to call her because she was gaining attention for the ‘wrong reasons’…

Nobody seems to be acknowledging the audiences role in all of this really either. If people didn’t lap all this insta-celeb, no privacy for the famous, shite up, and share their insightful comments on Twitter/FB it wouldn’t make the news or crappy magazines/papers, fuelling yet more twitter blurb and leading to the sort of media led, troll stoked backlash that not everyone is equipped to endure…

The other thing that my missus pointed out to me was that gender almost certainly played a part.
Women in the public eye still seem to held to a “higher standard”. not just the dissection of their looks, makeup, clothing but also their behaviour and their private lives… She noted that Dec (that’s the right one I think) of Ant & Dec was “dealing with his issues” through the medium of drink driving about a year ago, and a few weeks ago received some sort of telly award, his indiscretions seem to have been far more easily forgiven and forgotten by the Meeja lovies and the gawping public, would that have been the case if he’d been a woman?

Either way a woman has had her private life spill over into her very public professional career, and then been bullied and ostracised to the point of suicide. The general response seems to be assigning blame and a general lack of real introspection…

Sir Geoffrey Boycott, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, Jonny Depp etc may disagree

Depp lost Pirates of the Caribbean and he was the one being beaten.

I can’t understand why you are all so interested

As a father of a teenage daughter who worries about what people say about her on social media i’m quite interested.
I also liked Caroline Flack – very sad turn of events.

I don’t know much about Caroline Flack but I will make the following points:

– It’s easier to blame others than accept personal blame (Media and their readers).
– There is a good reason for victimless prosecution in cases of domestic violence. It is rarely the first case of violence that is reported, and one or more people are vulnerable and potentially at serious risk (as murder statistics will attest) of violence or intimidation. Where there is sufficient evidence to go to trial it is absolutely the correct thing to charge a suspect. Cps et al are being lashed out at as scapegoats when they’ve done nothing wrong. If she has smashed a vase over the head of her sleeping partner, as I has been suggested, that suggests that she was potentially a high risk. The consequences of such actions could have been serious injury or death on another occasion? If it wasn’t an attractive female celebrity the reaction to the charge and her suicide would be very different in my opinion… To change from a system of victimless prosecution and positive action would lead to huge numbers of the most vulnerable in society being subject to further abuse and risk. The issue here is perhaps how appropriate it is for the media to report on unproven allegations?
– Her death is very sad. Suicide is terrible and leaves a massive hole in the life of those around them. My opinion is that mental heath or substance abuse is likely to have played a part (purely on the basis that suicide is linked to both – I have no knowledge of any issues). Nobody really knows what help or support was there for her, whether she had hidden any issues, etc. We can’t judge what we don’t know – there may have been a significant amount there?

Let’s wait on facts before jumping on any bandwagons, eh? The sad thing is that next week she’ll be old news to the tabloids and her ‘fans’ and it will just be her family and friends left dealing with it all…

Just been over to the homepage of the Sun.
9 out of the first 20 articles are about Caroline Flack or related to her suicide.
As mentioned above, the articles harassing her have been hidden or deleted.

We were talking at work the other day about just how terribly dated the film Goldeneye was (Freelance computer nerds manipulating defunct Russian cold war hardware for financial gain being the new great threat to global security).

And in contrast, how Tomorrow Never Dies was actually a cautionary tale (media mogul causes death and destruction to create stories and increase ratings)

Just been over to the homepage of the Sun.

I removed all of the red tops, Daily Mail, etc. from my news feeds this morning. Fed up with it, don’t know why I didn’t do it years ago.

@slimboyjim you asked people to wait on facts, after doing the exact opposite in the preceding paragraphs?