Gossip Mongers: Feel Bad for Us, Not Britney

You might think the people who make a living off celebrities' misfortunes are hard-hearted, selfish vipers. Actually, they have a lot of compassion -- for the stars they cover, yes, but especially for themselves.

That much was clear at a panel on "the 24/7 celebrity news cycle," hosted this afternoon by The Atlantic. David Samuels, author of the magazine's recent cover story on the Britney Spears media phenomenon, moderated a discussion between American Media editorial director Bonnie Fuller, Page Six editor Richard Johnson, New York Times television writer Virginia Heffernan, and Regis and Brandy Navarre, co-founders of the paparazzi agency X17.

Much of the conversation focused on Spears and whether living under the media microscope has exacerbated her (alleged) mental health problems (a question I've considered here).

"I think we all know that she isn't a well woman, but I think it's given her a sense of importance that she could go out and have 20 reporters following her," said Fuller.

"Are we enablers, then?" asked Johnson, only half-seriously.

Regis Navarre didn't think so. "I think sometimes we are a catalyst to what is already happening. We are triggering something but I think it's not really the cause of her mental problems," he asserted.

Then he went one further, asserting that the spotlight of the tabloid press sometimes encourages celebrities to seek help for addiction or other problems. "For Lindsay [Lohan], the fact that the media was there accelerated the healing process," he said.

Well, lucky Lindsay! And Spears, too, is fortunate to have the paparazzi around, or at least her kids are, according to Fuller: "Britney was doing such dangerous things...things that were imperiling her own life and the lives of the people in her car [such as driving with a baby in her lap]. And I don't know if there hadn't been video that there would've been an intervention."

That's not to say no one is getting victimized in all this. Johnson, for one, was positively bursting with sympathy. "I think the photographers got a bad deal in the whole death of Princess Diana," he said. "There's no reason the driver had to drive 80 miles per hour just because there were photographers around."