"Britney, I am so sorry. I feel terribly if I hurt you": Framing Britney Spears prompts celebrities and the media to reckon with their treatment of Britney Spears

The New York Times

Sarah Silverman apologized for mocking Spears this week after backlash over The New York Times Presents FX on Hulu documentary. “Britney, I am so sorry. I feel terribly if I hurt you,” Silverman said on her podcast after earlier expressing regret via Twitter. “I could say I was just doing my job but that feels very Nuremberg Trial-y, and I am responsible for what comes out of my mouth.” Meanwhile, Glamour magazine apologized to Spears via Instagram. "We're sorry, Britney," Glamour wrote. "We are all to blame for what happened to Britney Spears—we may have not have caused her downfall, but we funded it. And we can try to make up for that. Link in bio to read more about the new documentary on the #FreeBritney movement." As The New York Times' Julia Jacobs writes, "In 2007, the celebrity magazines stacked up in dentists’ waiting rooms or on the racks by supermarket checkout lines had a favorite cover story: the trials and tribulations of a 25-year-old Britney Spears. That breathless, wall-to-wall coverage of her travails by glossy magazines, supermarket tabloids, mainstream newspapers and television shows alike is now being re-examined in the wake of a new documentary about Spears and her troubles by The New York Times. Fourteen years after Spears’s most publicized crises, some see the hypercritical fixation on her mental health, mothering and sexuality as a broad public failing." In an interview, Samantha Barry, the editor in chief of Glamour, said of society’s treatment of Spears: “Hopefully we’re in a place where we won’t do that again, where we won’t lift up these celebrities — in particular women — and then proceed to rip them down.”