Tony Blair’s former director of communications Alastair Campbell has criticised coverage of pop star Britney Spears’s decline into mental breakdown.
Writing in The Times, he said that being a “hard-nosed journalist” does not require reporters to “suspend basic humanity”.
He said: “You do not have to be a qualified psychologist to see Britney Spears has serious mental health issues. Does there ever come a point when judgement forms that says, let’s just leave her alone? Even as I pose the question, I can hear the sighs of hard news men and women wondering whether I have gone soft.”
Both The Sun and The Daily Mirror, where Campbell was once political editor, today have Britney front pages – both labelled exclusive – after she was sectioned in California yesterday and placed in a psychiatric ward for her own safety.
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