is passed away from a u. s. senate majority leader harry reid has died at the age of 82. the democratic senator was nevada's longest serving member of congress in office from 1987 up until 2017. he played pivotal roles as an opposition figure to president george w bush and then by helping accomplish for president barrack obama's agenda. reed had been battling pancreatic cancer. ah, exactly, for 30 gmc, you're watching out to syria top stories. countries around the world are struggling to deal with the army kron outbreak with some reporting, their highest infection rates. since the pandemic began. many a ramping up testing and vaccination, while several, including france, have introduced restrictions in hong kong. the police have been reading the office of stand news, an independent online media outlet, 6 current and former staff members have been arrested on suspicion of publishing

a seditious publication. among them is a former politician and prominent pro democracy singer. the niece ho, there have been mass arrests and curbs on press freedoms since china imposed a sweeping national security law on the territory. more than a year ago. the palestinian president mark motor boss has had his 1st formal meeting with and is ready official in israel in more than a decade. he was hosted by the defense minister benny gans, gans said the disgust, security coordination and economic his use. among others. his hairy force. it, i think there are a couple of things prompting this american pressure almost certainly to see progress or at least some indication of willingness to talk by the israelis with the palestinians. at the same time as the prime minister natalie bennett is still rejecting the idea of the u. s. reopening, it's palestinian focused consulate in jerusalem. also the security situation in the occupied west bank and inside east jerusalem as well in recent weeks has

deteriorated. and so there is some imperative air for the 2 sides to talk. one of russia's most prominent human rights groups has been ordered to shut down by the supreme court memorial international documents abuses committed by the former soviet union. prosecutors accused the group of distorting history. the secretary of states has condemned on the site by me and laws. military was killed at least 35 people in kaya state on christmas eve, women, children, and 2 star from save the children. among the dead indonesian officials say they will not offer refuge to a group of more than $100.00 rush anger. there on board. a stranded boat near the province of ha, you are right up to speed with all the top stories so far to day here on al jazeera up next, it's the stream. i'll have more news after that. i'll see that. and we'll fill out a wild alarm is if we

listen, design is are making serious effort in order to impede underserved to turn the windows. we meet with global use maintenance. talked about the stormy, stung. imagine analogy. hi anthony. ok, a welcome to the stream. a new documentary from the new york times about the artist brittany spears takes a look at how her life not to some music, became entertainment. go on, lucas. if you'll throw in the show on you cheer. you know what you can do just jumping to the comics section because what we're asking wrestling with is why does some media outlets treat women in a specific way? and how does that impact people who aren't even celebrities? that's the conversation with me to be part of it. the media's treatment of britney

spears is complicated. at 1st, the media treated her like a goddess because she embodied a stereotype of such hold as our ability, so blonde, so toned, yet voluptuous, a living birby. that was a powerful and problematic message in and of itself. on the other hand, the media treatment of her mental illness was savage and datsuns, the powerful and damaging message, especially to girls and women too. that there is something shameful or stigmatized about mental illness that people who identify as female can't recover from such illness. and that you should either be perfect as the media define it or your scum . men are treated that way. stand by for a new else conversation already had a hm. so i guess a so ready for this conversation to hadley hello to you came hello sachi. hello wendy. really good to see. you can tell our audience who you are and what you do.

hi, my name is kim carmen, and i am the former senior director of marketing at jive records. i was britney spears is marketing director for 1st 4 albums at the label. and i've been in the music business for a little over 30 years. having worked with universal music, sony music and warner music with various artists from the rolling stones to led zeppelin, 2 girls. only nice to have e. thank you for being with us today. and i sought gigi's yourself to i international audience. sure. i mean, a soft call. i'm a acculturated for buzzfeed news based out of new york. i'm of britney. stan, as we all should be. and i'm also the author of the aptly titled one day will all be dead and none of this will matter. thank you for being with us, britney. stan and wendy. welcome to the stream. introduce yourself to happiness. thank you. my name is wendy williams. i am the president of the society for the

psychology of women, which is a division of the american psychological association. and i am also the dean of a school of education here at mills college case. i want to start with a rolling stone magazine cover from 1999. and i really want to get your instant take on this. i know you've seen this before. when do you start? what are you seeing here? 16 o. britney. i see a sexualized girl who is merging and merging those notions of being sexual but also just being a, just being a girl and how, you know, the private spaces that girls tend to have and can have in their homes, me make public and, and the ways that she knows that you're looking, but has also engaged in an activity in which it's truly likely that most people wouldn't be looking on a girl in her room perhaps on the phone at home. so she will, do you see in that very famous rolling stone cover?

yeah, i agree. it's complicated because it's hard for us to know exactly how much control that she had over that kind of imaging. at the time she was very young. i also know for myself, i mean when that cover came out, i maybe was late 10 and so it was also really enticing and confusing and it was something that you wanted to be a part of. but you didn't know how and you didn't really understand how, how your sexuality worked and what it meant and what the power structures were is it's very complicated. can, can you take us into the room or the space or the conversations where a 16 year old is put on a magazine cover, like a famous magazine cover and those conversations that are happening and that is a good decision making process help us understand how that happened while i was there for this particular cover i was working at jive at the time. this was to promote part of the end of her 1st album and it was

a cover that was shot by david la chappelle who everyone knows who to talk for. there are bits of control that really she had, but it was really up to rolling stone and to the top or for she actually has very little control nor did the label. have any control over the styling of that photo shoot, shoot took place actually at home in louisiana. and the set was built against that backdrop. but it really kind of took on a life of its own. and many of us as a label like many of us, my personal feelings about it were that i really disliked it intensely because it really didn't reflect who i knew was. and i thought that it was kind of creating a tangent in her career and her image that really didn't need to happen. and

so unfortunately we were left with it that this was the cover. yes, it's my conduct, but as far as what i see in it, i see a character when do you decide why did you decide i side because i think that what we're experiencing in seeing in and see that that image is the tension that our culture has around sex and what our culture, that tension our culture has aroused. that's in the ways in which we supplant that in place on top of children, particularly girls and girls of all black backgrounds and the ways in which girls of diverse backgrounds are treated similarly and sexually similarly. but also how that sexualization is handled differently and watching that happen over time. so just hearing the background story. busy that it actually wasn't her home, but also the tensions that folks are having around. how to portray that and, and what types of energies or sort of centering and what types of motivations are

sorta entering their different decision making about that. and where that control data did not lie, it seems to me that seems to me that the tension around the questions our society has and particularly a u. s. society has around sex and sexuality and youth. and young people really comes to bear with that decision making process. and you choose, we have stewart cotton, i'm going to give stu it's question to you che, you can't exploit somebody who want to now it say, if somebody is being exploited, they're allowing esal chain. do not have to agree with this call may be able to fulfill, serve and go as absurd. it's absurd. it doesn't, it doesn't take into account, like many century avow exploitation words, namely with women and girls. i mean, it's just, it is not true. i, you know, sometimes you don't know you're being exploited until later. and, and, and frankly,

i don't know if that's the case here. i don't know. that still sort of suggests that i understand something about britney spears, that she herself wouldn't know. she's and told us a lot, so i don't think i can make a lot of sweeping generalizations like she was willing to v a party to her own exploitation. i think that's absurd. no, she wasn't. she didn't see exploitation until as you say, after the cover came out, i think everyone was kind of taken aback. and i think that you are correct when you say not in control. she was a 17 year old girl. this was her 1st. her story was rolling stone magazine being shot by this very famous, very infamous photographer david la chappelle, who was known for sexual as in all of his subjects. and every one was conners that he was doing this. and she was thrilled just to be on the cover of rolling stone, but after it came out with the teletubbies in her arms to me,

there was all this innuendo. no one really thought that that was a brilliant piece of art. it was seen as exploitive. i would bring in the voice of professor lisa peacock habit and she outlines the idea of we have the celebrities, they reach a peak, and then somehow that peak then descends into some awful kind of tragedy. this is how lisa something i have a listen. the media both helped to create britney spears and destroy her. the depictions allowed grown men to sexualize her and prompted young girls to walk to be just like her. her downfall was really treated like reality show that we were all watching in real time. and the media depictions of brittany taught women that their social value was implicitly tied to their body. but more importantly,

once their sexual capital was no longer a commodity, the world no longer had a use for them. when do you start than such a you pick up i wow, you know, and i, i think that is just so, so spot on in terms of the messages that women get about. they're using usefulness and the messages that we crap and disseminate to young girls very, very early. and it's a very different type of messaging than we craft and set up and, and share with young boys about who they are, what their bodies are, how their bodies are to be used, what they're for. i'm so i can completely see that. i have a lot of thoughts about it. however, because the story about brittany happened 20 over 20 years ago and thinking a lot about the ways in which media is not just copyright see, or media happening or towards and when,

but also the media that we make of ourselves and put out there. so, you know, i had a reaction to the question that she responded to by the, the, the, the youtube community member, the blaming of someone. yeah, the blaming of a child. and i think that there's, there's the blaming of a child. but i also think that what is being blamed and what is the demonized a bit, is that child's ambition, which i watched a documentary and i was really proud and excited for her to go for her during. and the idea that going for your dream means that you are said to be subjected to the very sexualized violence. and i would say that there was a sort of public sexualization of the type of violence terms of chasing her down the chase and capture to chase and capture of images, but also to capture in spaces of mental vulnerability at peak times of distress. for her as a young mother and as a young person just completely profound. and so the ways in which that sort of is on display and that documentary, and in some of the images that we now have an opportunity to look back on. this is

microphone such a go, hey, there's something so strange about the way that we're looking for responsibility in this topic. i'm. it's like we all want to find who we can blame for this and it's never ourselves. so even in that question, you know, can you be exploited without your her involvement? while we did it to redid it to her. i mean we consume that we like it, we want it warm it, i mean, you know anything about traditional media and copper oxy and stuff like that. i mean that would not be an ecosystem that was successful. had we not consumed what they were producing. so to act as if like, it's just her fault or it's just the of the outlets that are reporting on her this way. it's not something that is many fold and super complicated and later and we're all a party to it. we're then worse. so mostly female figures.

kim kim, this is a few things i want to show you here. and these are some of the big academic studies that have been done about the impact of when young girls and actually women see celebrities portrayed in this way. the centralization of girls, this is from the a p, a task force. the sex line of girls is linked to common mental health problems and girls and women eating disorders, no self esteem, depression, and a p. a task force reports, american psychological association. one more here. this is from unicef. so then look at this as a global issue. i want to bring in melissa henson and i'd love to came to come off the back of this as i am wondering if the music in the entertainment industry do they even care that some kids and some women are being impacted negatively as go to melissa hanson fest so to the extent that girls are sing primarily are exclusively highly sexualized or eroticized images of young women in the media. it

shapes sir, expectations about what their life is going to be when they mature and what's, what society expects of them. girls who consume highly sexualized media, for example, we know are more likely to suffer from eating disorders. the more likely to initiate sex at a younger age are going to have more sexual partners over the course of their life time. they're also more likely to have an unwanted pregnancy. they're more likely to experience episodes of depression came this is show business. is it even a factor it's really, really important that hasn't really been discussed, at least from what i've seen in the publicity on this documentary. and that is the question of diversity in this, in this whole situation. and the fact that brittany,

being a white southern woman and having this culture because she came from this culture of sexualized him. you have to understand that what she was doing was not just something that the record company created or took advantage of. but this was also part of her culture to be beautiful, to be attractive, to attract a husband and ultimately get married and have a family. this is, this is very much a regional cultural mandate. the other part of this is the sort of double standard of women of color and in the rap community and in the urban music community. how we have artists like carney be and megan this sally and knowledge and they are very, very sexualized and very proud of it and talk about it and associate themselves with it. busy openly and yet it brittany doesn't get a pass and i think that what that does is it marginalizes women of color even more

because this is supposed to be part of who they are. do the record companies take advantage of it? do they care? i think they care to an extent they have limits, obviously. but you know, because nobody's doing anything you know pornographic, but they want to make money. so they're going to use what people advertise are asking for. and i'm not condoning it at all. as a feminist myself, i find it a little bit frustrating, but i see it happening all the time and i think it's getting even worse because i think the media, especially in television production, with reality tv shows like the bachelor actually read or just reinforcing these now you're gonna be only a phase a tom in this law? yes. no. she came. i live. let me. let me give this to you. this is jennifer jennifer is watching live right now. jennifer, thank you. subject of personal responsibility. why don't we take more of

a stand as women to actively shown these types of behavior coming from men, media, or even other women? feminist kim? why? why are we, we, they know of, if we keep saying this over and over again, we saw it in the fifty's. so in the 60, so in the seventy's, we keep seeing woods. why don't we say when doing that? well, you know, some women are saying that they're not going to do that. i think that once you get to a position of power, when you look at taylor swift or adel, for instance, you're not seeing them crating around in a t. we need the teeny, they are taking a different role. you have to get to a place of power. and unfortunately for women at least in show business, they have to kind of walk through the fire of becoming famous and becoming horrible to do that. the other problem is that at least in the music business, i can say there's not enough women executives at the top of the food chain that are really making these decisions to say, no,

we are not going to do that. we're not going to have our artist look that way. we're not going to sign artists that want to look that way. and we're not going to promote that. that violence that hasn't changed in the time that i've been working in the business and i've been in it for over 3 years. so that's, that's what has to change. sadly, i have to give this thought to this is from jack jack is watching right now. he wants to know your opinion, in fact, get all of your opinion on social media. because isn't this a different era now where people and i'm paraphrasing jacket, where, where people have more control, celebrities have more control, we will have more control about what do we want to put out there? who is telling the story? do we have our own story to tell that you died? yeah, i think it's a very different environment now than it was 20 years ago when brittany was sort of coming up. you have different mechanisms to control your narrative. now you have instagram, you can post in

a notes apology on twitter. if you feel like you did something, i mean there's like a 1000000 ways to be able to get out ahead of a story. you don't really need to do a glossy diane's fire interview. and then in terms of the question of like control and why to us as women allow that to happen, i mean, i feel a great deal of control when it comes to my own sexuality. and i know a lot of women away and a lot of girls feel that way. i mean, that's sort of the time when you're playing with figuring out what it means for you and what that power means for you. so i don't think we can look at what one brush and say like, well we should all just shut that down. it's not feasible and it's not possible. but i mean, social media allows a very different kind of conversation to happen. and you, as the person in the forefront of it can control it to some degree. you mentioned dian soil, which, which takes me back to an entry she did with brittany space in 2003. when do you watch? the sort of, i am wondering,

is it possible that an anchor reporter would approaching to the display in 2021? listen. i have to ask a couple of things, but of course he has gone on television and pretty much said, he broke his heart. you did something that caused him so much pain, so much suffering. what did you do? i was applying for a while we both. i think we're both really young and it was kind of waiting to happen when day. if she saw it this week, when would it make it get to have even oh gosh, i don't make those decisions. but i would hope that i, you know, here's an interview about her and her career and it's focus on the boy. she dated

and i had the back that's given so much time and attention in a national interview for her is, is striking. you know, i wonder in the, in the era of me too, as well as, i think a more empowered moment for us as a society and as a society of women and also men and all of us just sort of st. you know what enough is enough in terms of the sort of gas lighting and blaming i. i think that the, i'm remembering back i grew up in the ninety's and i, remembering back to those tabloid articles and how it really was about the relationship that celebrities were having with one another and how they came together, what their experiences in time the relationship look like when they were together and also what their breakups were about. that was really the focus of the news. and, and i wonder if i don't think that we're in a space where we would value that as much. but it, it, it truly is, you know, it, it's, it's troubling to watch and also to watch her break down even further. and in that particular spot, it was hard to watch brittany's kind of as a case story for,

for this conversation. i case history for this conversation, but it happened to multiple celebrities where people apologizing to decades later, 3 decades later, got really wasn't good at behavior. we're sorry about this. i'm wondering if a document you can really change the way we think can we fill in? can we do better going forward? leanne simmons says yes. have a listen to this kim. i think that will look back on this new york times documentary as a source catalyst for change within the media. i do think it has opened a lot of eyes. it's got the conversation started as far as the way women and girls are being depicted by the media. and a huge part of that was the fact that this documentary was female driven, you know, who better to understand the intricacies of womanhood and feminism than women. kim,

you will keep your eye, eye lovely on so much. she is so brilliant and she's absolutely right, samantha star, who is the director of the documentary, did such an amazing job and it was a cruel of women talking about women, which i think is so important. she's absolutely right. do i think it's going to change things maybe a little bit? it's really going to be driven by social media, because unfortunately, this documentary is only on hulu. and if you don't subscribe to hulu, it's going to be difficult for people to see it. i hope that it becomes such a force and such a conversation that eventually it actually gets re aired on fx and fox network, which is so ironic in itself. if that happens, then fantastic. i think that really will be a catalyst for change. but i think that before that happened,

we really have to get control of what the network see as good as national programming. we've got to get rid of these shows where women are being exploited on a regular i'm talking about again, the bachelor and bachelorette and the reality tv shows that, you know, passed for programming because the networks don't want to spend money on production . yeah. you know, that's going to sorry, taken up the sale to i am hate watching. got to the right now when i cooking every like you can, you can thank you so much. talk to you, appreciate you, wendy. appreciate you to have a look here, my laptop, because maybe i'm not sure of a documentary will change the way we think, but they're certainly apology flooring, brittany's direction, clamor, mac, we are solely brittany. were all to blame for what happened to britney spears, a one more here. justin timberlake. i'm sorry. and i well see little too late. bye

joe joe. that wasn't me. that was the poster. thank you so much. we checked up to dow, has audi 0 ever come to britney spears story? we don't think said, but this is probably the only time and thanking you cheapest. but being part of that conversation. i see you next time take. ah, january. when i just, you know, 20 years ago the euro was brought into circulation. we investigate how the euro again benefited from having an official currency. be part of the st. enjoy im out social media community. se early owns recovery from civil war, continues. we month to decades since the end of one of africa's most brutal complex, the bottom line. steve clemens dives headlong into the u. s. issues that shape the rest of the world. as we enter the 3rd year would have it 19. we go back to whoo hm

. where it all began and investigate how far we've come. since the pandemic january on, i just see it up in the far reaches of the new siberian islands. gold rush, fever is in the air, hunted, searching for priceless woolly mammoth tasks of anna, the holy grail. an incredible journey into the realms of science fiction. when cloning and synthetic biology have scientists playing god. witness genesis 2 point oh, the hunt for the woolly mammoth on al jazeera. and i've always been fascinated by space. but the story, the space raised isn't just about the men who wished their lives to travel and see unknown. but the ones who held those lives in their hands. grandfather and his colleagues worked on the space suits they designed the space suits. aladdin was his

triumph, oregon, all around, and the policy to design spaces for his legacy. putting man on the moon on al jazeera ah journalists, editors, and a pop singer, arrested by hong kong police on suspicion of publishing a seditious publication. ah, hello and welcome on peace adobe. your watching all to see are alive from doha, also coming up, stranded in indonesia and waters more than a 100. right.