Remember, the media's widespread slandering of Britney was happening while she was releasing some of her best music.

Gaga's situation was/is very different, but the principle of how the media tried to handle the situation is the same. The comparison I'm making is that in both cases, the media latched onto something, overexaggerated it, constantly fed it to the public so they could carve that 'fallen angel' narrative they wanted to happen, and then cheered on while both respective artists started crumbling under the pressure from the backlash that the media played a part in creating. For Britney, it was that she was a 'slut' and was a horrible influence on young girls (among many other things) after she started showing some skin onstage and dancing more provocatively; for Gaga, it was that 'Artpop was trash' and that somehow meant she had automatically become an irrelevant has-been (despite the fact that roughly every significant pop artist has released a less-than-superb album that wasn't well received: see Madonna's American Life and David Bowie's Never Let Me Down).