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The New York Times documentary, Coaching Britney Spears, ostensibly tells the story of the singer’s treatment by the paparazzi and tabloids through 2007 and her apparent collapse, but it’s about more than Britney Spears.
The documentary clearly demonstrates the very serious damage the paparazzi and tabloids can do when they constantly invade people’s privacy and refuse to accept reasonable limits. Just because a person may be well known or high profile, they are just people. They have all the normal worries, fears, and stresses that we all have. They also have the added stress of being high profile, including being followed everywhere by a barking crowd. Being forced to live your life under this type of constant pressure and invasive and harassing behavior has real and serious mental health consequences that are clearly illustrated in the documentary.
The scenes where Britney Spears is harassed by the paparazzi while she is just shopping, sitting in her car or sitting in a restaurant are truly shocking. The very act of watching hordes of male photographers surround and chase a young female star – often with her young children – is scary; living is so much worse. Unfortunately, the reality is that these scenes are just a small part of her daily life where she is constantly followed, pursued and harassed – even when she is with her young children – and that can only make you bemoan what. she underwent.
This shocking behavior of the paparazzi is also highlighted in the recently released HBO documentary on Tiger Woods. In the documentary, the paparazzi are shown stalking one of the women involved in this story and not only physically harass and intimidate her, but they also verbally abuse her and say horrible things to her.
This conduct is odious and constitutes a flagrant invasion of privacy. I don’t believe the public wants well-known and high-profile people to be treated in this way. This type of behavior is simply not acceptable and we cannot continue to let it happen.
Ending this type of behavior would of course ideally begin with those who engage in it, benefit from it and directly encourage it. It may not be probable. In the documentary, we see a paparazzi declare after a scene involving him that Britany Spears had a “bad night,” and then notes that he made a lot of money as a result. He completely fails to acknowledge that he was, at least in part, the cause of his bad night rather than just a disinterested observer.
After the documentary aired, a magazine posted an apology on Instagram that read in part: “We are all responsible for what happened to Britney Spears.” While I guess this may be true in a macro sense, the reality is that the paparazzi and tabloids are directly to blame and need to start taking some responsibility for the damage their actions are causing.
Any suggestion that the type of behavior exhibited in the documentary is a thing of the past ignores reality and we need not look any further than the settlement and public statement between Splash UK and the Duchess of Sussex and her young son and their pending lawsuit against Splash USA over invasion of privacy by paparazzi photographer taking secret photos of her and her young son from a hidden position during a walk private.
Unfortunately, this type of driving continues unabated and the headlamps that the Coaching Britney Spears the documentary on this conduct calls for reconsidering what we are prepared to accept and what the law should allow. It is essential that there is a reassessment of privacy protections and an increase in respect for everyone’s right to privacy.
It is high time that privacy and harassment laws were improved and deployed to end this invasive conduct that causes distress and damage and destroys privacy. Everyone has the right to the privacy of shopping, dining or walking in the street with their children without being harassed.
The idea that high profile and well-known people give up their privacy if they participate in media activities or engage with the media and photographers is hopelessly outdated. This argument was eloquently rejected by the judge over the Duchess of Sussex’s recent victory over Associated Newspapers when he said: “At one point, it was thought that disclosures in a given “area” of a person’s privacy could defeat or at least significantly reduce the weight of any privacy claim against a person. other information from the same “zone”. This theory has been discredited. In modern law, it is recognized that respect for individual autonomy which is at the heart of Article 8 means that the starting point is that a person has the right to exercise close control over particular information concerning his private life: decide whether to disclose anything about a given aspect of his life and, if so, what to disclose, when, to whom. Why can’t someone decide to share 90% of their privacy and keep the other 10% private? It is their privacy and they should have the right to disclose or keep private what they want and what they want.
This documentary highlights just how outdated and outrageous this type of conduct is, and it must be tossed in the trash of history. Law in the UK, US and elsewhere must start to take everyone’s privacy rights – whether high-level or not – seriously to avoid a generational mental health crisis.
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