Oops, I did it again. I forgot to care about Britney Spears. Even the comedian Craig Ferguson on the “Late Late Show” announced last December that he would stop bashing the pop singer/ridiculously bad dancer, saying that there comes a point when people whose lives have gotten out of control aren’t funny anymore and become pathetic. He urged others to leave her alone to let her figure out her life, especially with the job of being a mother now.

Unfortunately, this month’s issues of Glamour and Rolling Stone magazine don’t agree, which is disappointing to loyal readers.

Tabloids are everywhere, but I can’t blame people for falling to yellow journalism. They probably graduated from the University of Iowa, and we shouldn’t make fun of them for their education choices. There’s good money to be made in writing trashy columns for gossip magazines. Their photojournalists don’t even have to have skills!

Of course, with this job you will have to put up with the possibility of getting ran over by a car, Britney denting your car with a green umbrella, or ruining people’s lives. But the ends justify the means, right?

Reading gossip mags is a lot like watching “Judge Judy.” We get to silently judge people while realizing how great our lives are in comparison. Plus, after looking through them at the grocery line on a bad day, you can tell the cashier to hold off on the few pints of Ben & Jerry’s you sneaked in under the vegetables.

But alas, I digress.

Spears has had some troubled years. At just 17, she became successful with her popular song, “… Baby One More Time.” The innocent southern belle charm changed the world of pop music in the same way that the first “Survivor” started reality TV.

Only two years later, she started the fashion of not wearing clothes and dancing to bad choreography. Her competition with Christina Aguilera only fueled her downward slope. Her concert attendance soared, but it is sad that society didn’t pause to realize this girl — yes, she was still a girl — was only 19 and just beginning to enter a world in which she was able to make her own wardrobe and music decisions.

That’s not to say her audience and appearance on magazines led to her later downfall, but it certainly is hard to deal with while in the limelight. Psychiatrists who have observed and followed, but most importantly did not have any contact with Spears, say she seems to suffer from bipolar disorder.

Bipolar disorder, or manic-depression, is a condition in which a person suffers from extreme mood swings. There are a few causes, but it is essentially unavoidable. People with this disorder are known to sleep often and feel very unloved, and then switch in an instant to not being able to sleep or concentrate and make very rash decisions. These changes can happen several times a day, depending on age and severity. With some people, episodes seem to stop for quite some time and the person feels cured. Spears has definitely shown these symptoms, and this is not something a person can change without help.

The fact her seemingly amazing comeback has been splayed on the cover of Glamour and Rolling Stone magazine has me a bit rattled. In the ’70s and ’80s, Annie Leibovitz’s work dominated Rolling Stone magazine. Her photos were exciting, profound and inspiring. Her most famous work was the cover featuring a naked John Lennon hugging a fully clothed Yoko Ono. Lennon was killed only hours after the shoot. The photography has definitely taken a downward slope in her absence.

Spears has been on the cover seven times in her career, just as many as Lennon and Madonna, according to Jodi Peckman, Rolling Stone’s director of photography, on Rolling Stone’s Web site. Even though this is supposed to represent a comeback to her normal and sane self, she is shown slightly pushing down her jeans and sporting a cropped shirt, baring her stomach.

OK, her stomach has gotten into shape after two kids. We get it. That doesn’t make her music any better. We know about the day the music died and last week’s column by Justan Spaid mourned the death of MTV, but this is definitely the month Rolling Stone magazine died.

In the interview in Glamour magazine, in which she is shown wearing nothing but a white

T-shirt to show her innocence, she admits her returning to the land of the norms is a joke.

“I have ‘come back’ so many times, people are just like, ‘Is this another one?’ It’s kind of like a joke to me now,” Spears said to the interviewer.

During a class in which we were asked to visit Web sites to see how different they are from print journalism, sophomore Annette Beswick commented on Britney Spears being everywhere. “I really don’t care,” she said. “Good for her for getting her life back together, but I’m over her comeback.”

The moral of the story is gossip can be enjoyable, but there can be too much of a good thing. Hopefully those of you attending Iowa State will make a difference in letting magazines know that we’re over Britney. In the upcoming years, hopefully  written journalism, photojournalism and Rolling Stone can get back on track again.