The assistant head of the LA division of The Associated Press, which once declared a full-on Paris Hilton ban prior to Paris’ arrest for DUI last year, has sent out an internal memo urging the fine journalists to cover Britney Spears as much as they think they can get away with without making their organization look like a gossip rag:

An internal memorandum from The A.P.’s Los Angeles bureau dictating coverage of the troubled pop star was published by several media blogs on Tuesday, prompting some punch lines at the news service’s expense.

“Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal,” Frank Baker, the Los Angeles assistant bureau chief, wrote on Tuesday morning, three days after Ms. Spears was released from the hospital where she had been admitted in the wake of a custody dispute.

“Boy, that qualifies as an understatement,” Tirdad Derakhshani, a Philadelphia Inquirer writer remarked in the online column SideShow. On Romenesko, a popular online media site owned by the Poynter Institute, a commenter added, “Not a good day for journalism as a discipline.”

In the memo, Mr. Baker said that not every rumor should be published by The Associated Press. But “we want to pay attention to what others are reporting and seek to confirm those stories that WE feel warrant the wire,” he wrote, adding, “And when we determine that we’ll write something, we must expedite it.”

In an interview last week, Lou Ferrara, the managing editor for sports, entertainment and multimedia, defended Mr. Baker’s message.

“If you’re an editor in L.A. and Britney Spears is in your backyard,” he said, “you want to know everything about that story.”

[The NY Times via WeSmirch]

So crazy sells papers, I guess. There are those illegally destroyed CIA tapes presumably showing banned torture methods used by the US government, there’s the election coming up, and the US Military Chief has said that Guantanamo should be closed. Hopefully the LA branch of the AP isn’t neglecting any of those stories while it’s covering all the details on the OMG important Britney case. I guess their other divisions can cover the real news though.

In your daily Britney news, she had a rant a photographers, she has to show up in court today or she risks losing all visitation rights with her kids, and the ever-reliable British press is reporting that she’s paying that Adnan guy thousands of dollars a week to be her personal assistant.

The Britney news is not going to go away, and while most of us here have a high tolerance for her because we’re interested in celebrities, what does it say about the news when the AP urges journalists to focus on her constantly? We don’t get a pass either. Go away Britney, go far away and just show up for court hearings.

I was going to cover the additional details on Britney’s breakdown from the tabloids I read over the weekend, but that all seems like old news to me now. Let me know if you want to hear all about it. I might resort to reporting on it, but I won’t feel good about myself afterwards. As it is I feel like I have to take a bath for even mentioning Britney at this point.

Britney is shown out with Adnan yesterday. Look she got new boots! Thanks to WENN.