LOS ANGELES • Is Jennifer Aniston at fault herself for inviting media scrutiny on herself?

British television host Piers Morgan kicked up furore by implying as much after the former Friends star penned a blog on Huffington Post criticising the media for the way it scrutinises female stars.

Aniston, 47, on Tuesday wrote that she was sick of the years of tabloid scrutiny of her figure and persistent pregnancy rumours.

"For the record, I am not pregnant," she wrote.

"What I am is fed up. I'm fed up with the sport-like scrutiny and body shaming that occurs daily under the guise of 'journalism', the 'First Amendment' and 'celebrity news'."

Her essay came out three months after she spoke of her excitement over being named for the second time by People magazine as the world's most beautiful woman.

Morgan, the editor-at-large of the United States edition of Britain's Daily Mail newspaper, published a counter-essay entitled "My dear Jennifer, if you're so fed up with having your body judged, stop trying to make it look so Photoshop-perfect on magazine covers".

"There's another reason why the media objectify and scrutinise famous women, and why little girls get confused about beauty and body image," he wrote, accord- ing to a story by Agence France- Presse.

"It's this: female stars like Jennifer Aniston deliberately perpetuate the myth of 'perfection' by posing for endless magazine covers which have been airbrushed so much that in some cases the celebrity is virtually unrecognisable."

Celebrities such as model Chrissy Teigen and Anna Paquin decried his comments.

In a series of back-and-forth tweets with Morgan, who is well-known for his controversial remarks, Teigen wrote: "My husband (John Legend) thinks you are one of the most misogynistic, condescending morons on the planet."

The couple last crossed swords with Morgan on Twitter last month.

Stars such as Melissa McCarthy, Jason Bateman, Margaret Cho and Olivia Wilde also supported Aniston.

"Everybody needs to stop tearing down women," McCarthy, 45, said on Entertainment Tonight, after declaring she was "one hundred thousand billion per cent" behind Aniston.

But publications such as the New York Post questioned if Aniston was right to blame the media.

Titling its piece, "Hypocrisy, thy name is Jennifer Aniston", it said she had posed, looking sexy, airbrushed and thin, on magazine covers and on advertisements over the years.