Roy Peter Clark, writing on the website of the Poynter Institute, uses the tragic decline of Britney Spears as an opportunity to explore our culture’s “pervasive cynicism about addiction and mental illness.” He urges the media to back off covering Spears’ daily soap opera, and instead turn their attention to “critical and analytical pieces on celebrity, addiction, gender and mental illness.”

Reflecting on a photo of a pre-meltdown Britney, Clark concludes:

I’m keeping that image of Britney in my office for a while. I hope it will serve me as a symbol of regret, regret that a real person, a human being, is falling apart before our eyes; regret that I’m part of a culture that watches such destruction with prurient curiosity and the most mean-spirited schadenfreude; regret that, as I’m distracted by Spears, the mentally ill who walk by me every day on the streets of this city might as well be invisible.

Clark is vice president and senior scholar of the non-profit Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, future journalists and teachers of journalists.

See earlier posts here and here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 12:42 pm and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, celebrities, media, mental health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post