Analysis shows level of press scrutiny of presenter in six months before she died

The death of Caroline Flack was first and foremost a tragedy for her family and her friends.

But it also provoked a furious backlash; the tabloids, particularly the Sun, turned on the Crown Prosecution Service for pursuing the domestic violence case against her.

Critics of the papers blamed them for hounding a vulnerable woman. A full inquest may help to establish the background and circumstances of her death, but what is not in doubt is that Flack’s career and love life have been a staple for the press over many years, and that the assault charge against her caused a media frenzy.

A Guardian analysis shows the Sun published the most articles mentioning Flack in the six months before her death – with a total of 99.

The figure is around a quarter of the 387 stories published in print by all of the UK’s national newspapers in the same period.

A review of the stories shows that a quarter of all these articles took a negative tone, slightly higher than those with a positive tone, which accounted for 18% of the total.

Last October, for instance, Channel 4 announced Flack would present a new programme called The Surjury – in which members of the public would be given free plastic surgery.

However, this was described as “a new low for television” – and has since been cancelled.

The majority of stories about Flack during the six-month period were neutral in tone – many focusing on her successful stint as presenter of ITV’s Love Island.

That ratio changed in December, after she was charged with assaulting her partner, Lewis Burton. In that month Flack received twice as many negative headlines as positive.

According to the Guardian’s analysis, the proportion of negative headlines about her increased to 35%, while 18% were positive.

Many of these articles included graphic references to the alleged assault.

In February, the month of her death, there were an equal number of negative and positive headlines.

This analysis is by no means definitive. It looked at stories in which “Caroline Flack” featured in the headline or body of the article between 14 August 2019 and 14 February 2020. Three journalists then reviewed them into “positive”, “negative” or “neutral” categories.

What the analysis does reveal, however, is that Flack was under enormous media scrutiny and negative coverage notably increased after the alleged assault.

• The graphic on this article was amended on 27 February 2020. The chart showed an analysis of UK print media titles between August 2019 and February 2020, however an earlier version referred to the dates as 2018 and 2019. This has been corrected.