The Britney Spears Narrative Is Mostly B.S.

By Kyle Smith

February 20, 2021 6:30 AM

Britney Spears attends the premiere of *Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood* in Los Angeles, Calif., July 22, 2019. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

A New York Times documentary presents a reductive, heroes-and-villains vision of complicated, messy lives.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE S ee if you can spot the fallacy: Britney Spears received a lot of attention from the press. Britney Spears went crazy. Hence the first occurrence caused the second.

As a former member of the celebrity-industrial complex, I can reveal: It isn’t actually that hard to be a celebrity. They control their coverage far more than you’d think. (Angelina Jolie, for instance, adjusts hers as though finessing a volume knob.) I was the music editor at People magazine for some of the peak years of Spears’s career (when she happily sat for interviews to be our cover girl), and I can tell …

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