TheDevil - // Andy the position i'm taking is that no one is specifically to blame, but everyone had a part to play but no one is responsible except Caroline at the end of the day. //
I am taking precisely the same position - there are a number of factors that have combined with such tragic results, but the finger cannot reasonably be pointed at any one of them as the sole, or even major cause, I believe it is the combination that has led to the outcome.
// I feel like your position is that the photos of her not looking good were a major attribute to her suicide and so, the papers who published them should be accountable. am I correct in this or am I wrong? (Not trying to be awkward genuinely curious to your stance on this topic) //
No problem - I am happy to clarify my position about the Mail's feature today -
I am saying that it is utterly hypocritical of the Mail, in the first place to have Sara Vine write a moralistic finger-pointing tirade against social media, while simultaneously absolving her employers from similar responsibility for what has happened.
Yes social media has poked and judged and pronounced and been poisonous about Ms. Flack - but the irony is that their star columnist makes a very good living doing exactly the same in the paper. Her pathetic excuse that the print media are constrained by the PCC seeks to infer that she and her ilk are occupying a higher moral plane, whereas the reality is that they simply have to be more inventive in the ways they couch their own moralising and finger-pointing judgement of people in the public eye.
My point about the image that sat beside Ms. Vine's piece in the print edition was the horrible irony that on one side of the page, Ms. Vine is defending her own and other daily papers' moral superiority, and on the other side of the paper sits an image of Ms. Flack going about her private life, and being snapped by a paparazzo who then sold the image to an agency, where it was bought for publication by the Mail.
I am not inferring that the Mail has used this image before, or that its use elsewhere had a detrimental effect on Ms Flack's fragile mental health, we can't know that.
What is inescapable though is the irony of using a paparazzi image next to a piece of moralising cant fluff intended to defend the paper's supposed morality in terms of intruding into the private lives of celebrities. That just beggars belief.