Stephen King sounds off on waterboarding, YouTube and Britney Spears

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STEPHEN KING: So who's going to be TIME Person of the Year?

TIME: I really don't know, there's a very small group of people who make that decision.

I was thinking, I think it should be Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

Really?

Yeah. You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, "You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you're missing the whole fox hunt." Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who's gonna get custody of Britney's kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other ######. You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West's mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that's going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his... wife. And meanwhile, you've got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You've got a guy in charge, who's basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d'etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.

So you've got these things going on, which seem to me to be very substantive, that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip. So I said something to the Nightline guy about waterboarding, and if the Bush administration didn't think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn't think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture. And then the guy from Nightline said, "Well, obviously you've not been watching World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson." But I do — I watch 'em all!

You might be one of the few people who does.

We're news junkies in my house.

Do you actually think Britney and Lindsay should be on our cover?

Yeah, I do.

Sort of a, 'This is what the media's actually interested it, so let's just put it out there' thing?

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics — trying to play a serious part in the world — to a culture that's really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their f------ Representatives are.

But you've been well in the public eye for decades now. Is it pretty blatant how much worse it's gotten?

It's worse every year. And the guy says to me — the Nightline guy — I didn't get the guy's name. Granted, I haven't been feeling real well and it was a long day of interviews. But he said to me, "If we didn't cover cultural things, we wouldn't be covering you and The Mist, and promoting the movie." And I'm like, "Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan aren't cultural." They aren't political. They're economic only in the mildest sense of the word. In fact, if I had to pick somebody, some celebrity who has had some impact this year, some sort of echo in the larger American life, I would say Hannah Montana. That whole issue of online ticket sales and scalping fascinates me. There are [legitimate] issues there about the Internet, so that actually does seem to have some cultural significance. But Britney? Britney Spears is just trailer trash. That's all. I mean, I don't mean to be pejorative. But you observe her behavior for the past five years and you say, "Here's a lady who can't take care of her kids, she can't take care of herself, she has no retirement fund, everything that she gets runs right through her hands." And yet, you know and I know that if you go to those sites that tell you what the most blogged-about things on the Internet are, it's Britney, it's Lindsay. So I think it would be terrific [to have them as TIME Persons of the Year]. There would be such a scream from the American reading public, sure. But at the same time, it's time for somebody to discuss the difference between real news and fake news.

True, in terms of Britney Spears, she's still fairly young. When you were young, fame sort of screwed you up a bit, didn't it?

The difference is that Britney is now famous for being famous. Her sales have gone down with almost every album, bigger and bigger jumps, so that nobody really cares about her music anymore. They care about the tabloid headlines and whether or not she's wearing panties. I mean, is this an issue that the American public needs to turn its brainpower on? Britney Spears' lingerie, or lack thereof?

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1687229,00.html

[Dr. A ♥ O 203]

Steven King makes a good point. While he writes fiction for entertainment society has turnned to non-fiction and easy consumpition for their entertainment. Good for TV not good for books. I doubt that has a basis in his argument though.

Micheal Kirk one of the Producers for FRONTLINE and also a U of I alumni came and spoke with us last semester. He said he believe that nearly 90% of journalism now days is garbage. He's really unimpressed with the quality of what is coming out now days and the medias focus on celebrity trash instead of more soild and important world issues.

It really is sad IMHO.

Olivia

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I wonder if the the increased number of channels and media outlets has something to do with going for the lowest common denominator material to attract viewership?