A new story in the NY Post brings up an interesting question: Are tabloid magazines racially biased? In the wake of the relatively light coverage of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s wedding last weekend, some are speculating that the disinterest from the tabloids was racially motivated. Gatecrasher’s Ben Widdicombe did some actual journalism for his column this week and found some disturbing results.

Are the celebrity media racist?

A top tabloid editor tells me that Jay-Z and Beyonce’s wedding was played down by the weeklies because “African-Americans don’t sell covers.”

Of the big five celebrity glossies out midweek, only Us Weekly gave Beyoncé the top spot on the cover. Other magazines gave her second billing to the likes of Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Aniston.

“None of the magazines landed an exclusive on wedding pictures, which would have made the story bigger,” said one tabloid insider, justifying why Beyoncé was relegated to a small cover box on his magazine.

But even wedding photos make less money for black stars, says another source. “Eva Longoria can get $1 million for wedding photos, but without the expectation of cover sales, Beyoncé might have gotten as little as $250,000 if she had sold hers,” says a top editor.

Magazine publisher and black gossip pioneer Flo Anthony responds: “That sounds to me a very racist statement. Beyoncé is one of the biggest stars in the world, much bigger than Eva Longoria.”

Anthony publishes Black Noir for women, as well as Toy Box, a black parenting magazine with a celebrity focus. She said: “It is hard for African-Americans in magazines. Only a few people, like Will Smith and Halle Berry, are mainstream. Editors really still think that only blond hair and blue eyes sell magazines.”

As another tabloid source says: “We have a saying, ‘Only Oprah.’ Oprah is the only black celebrity big enough to put on our cover.”

But Us Weekly editor in chief Janice Min tells me: “Janet Jackson has been on our cover twice, for two of our best-selling issues we’ve ever had.”

Min is also the only non-Caucasian to helm a top celebrity magazine. She acknowledges there is a perception in her industry that black stars don’t sell covers, but adds: “Typically, you will hear that discussion among a group of all-white editors.”

[From Gatecrasher]

I do agree that the tabloids tend to focus more on white celebs- especially the unholy trifecta of Spears, Lohan and Hilton. I’m not sure why- maybe there are more white celebs who are screwing up in public than black celebs? Or maybe, as the Gatecrasher article suggests, it comes down to money. However, comparing coverage of Eva Longoria’s wedding to that of Beyonce’s wedding is not a good analogy for this argument. Eva Longoria courted the press every step of the way when she got married- from the engagement to the wedding plans to the numerous ceremonies and parties. Beyonce and Jay-Z are both huge stars and if they had chosen to go the Longoria route with their wedding, they would have been on every magazine cover last week. However, the couple chose to get married under the radar- even their guests are staying mostly silent about the nuptials. The only reason US Weekly had the wedding on the cover is that Beyonce’s sister Solange went to the mag with an exclusive. Other than that, the magazines didn’t have any info on the wedding. If the couple had shopped wedding photos around, I’m sure there would have been a bidding war over them. But just like their long courtship was kept fiercely private, so was their wedding.

The latest US Weekly and People cover images from coverawards.com via Gossip Rocks.

France has passed will vote next week on a new bill that makes it a crime to promote extreme thinness. Breaking the law is punishable with actual jail time. If the bill is passed, it will be the first anti-anorexia law in the world. Although several fashion houses and magazines have created their own standards to promote a more healthy body weight, never before has it been potentially legislated by a government.

The world’s first use of the law to tackle eating disorders is broadly aimed at the media and fashion world, but especially at the websites and blogs of the so-called pro-ana movement. While many are support groups, others promote starvation as a “life-style choice”, with girls and young women posting their wasting images as “thinspiration” for others. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have come under pressure in Britain and other countries recently to ban their pro-ana entries.

Last month a website that originated in France caused an outcry for encouraging children as young as 9 to embrace plastic surgery and extreme dieting in the search for the perfect figure. The Miss Bimbo site invites users to create a virtual doll, keep it “waif thin” with diet pills and buy it breast implants and facelifts. The website attracted 1.2 million players in France.

[From the Times Online]

Breaking the proposed law could result in fines as high as $48,000 and up to a two year prison sentence for members of the fashion world that “provoke a person to seek excessive thinness by encouraging prolonged restriction of nourishment” if it risks damaging a person’s health or could cause death. The sentence is raised to $70,000 and three years in jail if someone dies.

Some experts and fashion leaders oppose the Bill, which is expected to be passed by Parliament within months. “You do not solve this kind of problem with the law but with understanding,” Jean-Paul Gaultier, the designer, said. Didier Grumbach, head of the French Couture Federation, said it was not up to the state to legislate on beauty and aesthetic criteria.

[From the Times Online]

This is an interesting idea, though it seems like there are still a lot of holes in the law bill. For instance, let’s say Teenage Girl A dies from anorexia. Like most teenagers, she read a lot of fashion magazines which have very thin models. She also occasionally visited pro-ana websites. Who is responsible? And how can the government nail down WHICH magazines? And who at that magazine is the criminal? What about websites – is every pro-ana website Teenage Girl A ever visited responsible for her death? Is the responsible party the person who owns the website, or their ISP? It seems like an interesting start, but judges will probably need to figure out exactly how to define “excessive thinness,” and how to hold people accountable.

The header photo is from Italian fashion line Nolita. They used a picture of an anorexic woman on leaflets they handed out during Italy’s fashion week that say “No Anorexia.” This image was banned in France.

Update by Celebitchy: Thanks to Bellatrix for letting us know that this law has not yet passed yet, and is only a proposed bill. She writes:

“The law has not been voted yet. It is still just a law proposition. It will be voted next week on Tuesday (April 15).
I thought you’d might like a check about that, so here’s a link to an online version the “Le Monde” newspaper” [link is in French]

“The law proposition has been made by Valérie Boyer, a UMP (the party of the French president) politician. Needless to say that “la gauche” (the left wing) is united against this law as it does not treat anorexia as an illness and will not solve it.” [E-mail from Bellatrix]

A guy named Chez Pazienza who runs Deus Ex Malcontent and was until earlier this month working for CNN as a producer on American Morning got the Dooce treatment for blogging. He was called into his boss’ office and told they were concerned about the fact that he was blogging online under his own name and thought that it might reflect poorly on their efforts to remain neutral. Pazienza has a personal blog and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post along with our friends at Pajiba.

Instead of asking Pazienza to reel it in or add a disclaimer to his writing that it is in no way a reflection on his employers, his boss had a talk with him and summarily canned him the next day, giving him no severance or warning. He had been working for CNN for nearly four years and always received good reviews from his superiors.

Panziena notes that the employee handbook is vague about employee’s outside writing, and has no provision for blogs or online media:

For 20 months after starting DXM, I continued to work as a producer on American Morning, one of many charged with putting together the show. During that time, I received consistently favorable reviews (while in Atlanta I was told that I was well on my way to becoming an executive producer) and, more importantly, neither my credibility nor objectivity was ever called into question. Like anyone who considers him or herself a respectable news professional, whatever my personal opinions were, they were checked at the door when I walked into work. Having grown up in a household in which the highest ideals of journalism were never more than a conversation away — my father was an old-school investigative reporter — I knew full well that you couldn’t avoid having opinions and viewpoints, but you never let them get in the way of your journalistic responsibility

As far as CNN knew, I was a valued employee, albeit one with almost no say in the day-to-day editorial decisions on American Morning. This held true even as I began contributing columns to the Huffington Post, giving my writing more exposure than ever before.

Then, last Monday afternoon, I got a call from my boss, Ed Litvak.

Ed, seeming to channel Bill Lumburgh from Office Space, informed me of that which I was already very well aware: that my name was “attached to some, uh, ‘opinionated’ blog posts” circulating around the internet. I casually admitted as much and was then informed of something I didn’t know: that I could be fired outright for this offense. 24 hours later, I was. During my final conversation with Ed Litvak and a representative from HR, they hammered home a single line in the CNN employee handbook which states that any writing done for a “non-CNN outlet” must be run through the network’s standards and practices department. They asked if I had seen this decree. As a matter of fact I had, but only about a month previously, when I stumbled across a copy of that handbook on someone’s desk and thumbed through it. I let them know exactly what I had thought when I read the rule, namely that it was staggeringly vague and couldn’t possibly apply to something as innocuous as a blog. (I didn’t realize until later that CNN had canned a 29-year-old intern for having the temerity to write about her work experiences — her positive work experiences — in a password-protected online journal a year earlier.) I told both my boss and HR representative that a network which prides itself on being so internet savvy — or promotes itself as such, ad nauseam — should probably specify blogging and online networking restrictions in its handbook. I said that they can’t possibly expect CNN employees, en masse, to not engage in something as popular and timely as blogging if they don’t make themselves perfectly clear.

My HR rep’s response: “Well, as far as we know, you’re the only CNN employee who’s blogging under his own name.”

It took self-control I didn’t know I had to keep from laughing, considering that I could name five people off the top of my head who blogged without hiding their identities.

Uh-huh, as far as you know.

When I asked, just out of curiosity, who came across my blog and/or the columns in the Huffington Post, the woman from HR answered, “We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees.”

Jesus, we have a Gestapo?

A few minutes later, I was off the phone and out of a job. No severance. No warning (which would’ve been a much smarter proposition for CNN as it would’ve put the ball effectively in my court and forced me to decide between my job or the blog). No nothing. Just, go away.

Right before I hung up, I asked for the “official grounds” for my dismissal, figuring the information might be important later. At first they repeated the line about not writing anything outside of CNN without permission, but HR then made a surprising comment: “It’s also, you know, the nature of what you’ve been writing.”

[From The Huffington Post]

This news came out on Monday but we just heard last night. It seems like CNN has a lot to answer for. While you could understand that they might be concerned that an employee shows any kind of bias, he wasn’t on the air. What’s more is that they’re going to come up with these type of situations all the time. Do people who work in the media have to keep their opinions to themselves for fear of being canned for any reason? I know that in the US most employment is “at will,” which means you can be fired if you look at someone the wrong way, but surely it’s short-sighted to let someone go for writing their personal opinions online.

Panziena wrote an apology to the American public just last month last year for the drivel he was putting out on CNN, saying of Anna Nicole that “I’m sorry that so many supposedly venerable news organizations have elevated the all-but-inevitable self-destruction of a B-list former-stripper, Playmate, hack-actress, gold-digger, tabloid-queen, and all-around piece of human flotsam to the lofty heights of near-Shakespearian mythology.” His very passionate articles make you smile and wonder how CNN could have changed if they would have worked with him to improve their quality of reporting. Instead they confirmed what he was saying all along by kicking him to the curb for daring to criticize them.

Note by JayBird: As I am a full-time cable news junkie -or at least I was until I became a full-time celebrity gossip junkie - Celebitchy wanted me to note a few thoughts on CNN. While they were the first big cable news network, they’ve really fallen from glory in the last several years. Most of their shows are generally ratings losers next to MSNBC and Fox, with a few exceptions. When the retooled their lineup a few years ago, instead of making themselves more relevant, they added Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room” - what felt like ten hours of flat, dull programing. It’s actually just three hours, and it’s interminably long. “American Morning” has generally been seen as a “launching pad” for anchors to move on to bigger and better things. One would think that being in a constant state of flux like that could make the entire staff uneasy. It’s really sad that Chez Pazienza was fired, but if nothing else, by reading his blog, you can tell that he’s incredibly sharp, and a savvy network will likely snatch him up pretty quickly.

The Daily Mail cracks me up. Whenever they can’t find something decent to write about, they just pick apart people’s bodies. Which is probably better than making up stories. It’s definitely funnier, though more at the Daily Mail’s expense than the celebrities’. Earlier this week they picked apart Kelly Osbourne - showing her one day with blemished skin and the next day looking perfectly airbrushed – under the title “Kelly Osbourne transforms from spotty to spectacular in just 24 hours.” Today they attacked Paul McCartney’s bedraggled look in an article with the confusing title, “Macca’s hard day’s night as he wears the same outfit the morning after the night before.” Not content to just criticize one celeb a day, they moved on to Eva Longoria, who apparently has “rather unsightly knees.”

The Desperate Housewives star has clocked up an impressive six outfits in just two days since arriving from LA to promote her new film Over Her Dead Body.

But despite her array of frocks, it was her often her unsightly knobbly knees that really caught the attention of onlookers.

[From the Daily Mail]

The article goes on to pick Eva apart. While I am by no means her biggest fan – come on! They’re knees! Does anyone have a good looking pair of knees? I’m a firm believer that God was not paying attention to aesthetics when he came up with knees. Same goes for elbows. Aside from airbrushed models, have you ever seen a knee that made you say, “I must have him/her right now! Look at that sexy patella!” The Daily Mail also has a hysterical photo collection at the bottom of the article where they zoom in on Eva’s knees and outline them in red circles. Because otherwise we couldn’t find them and truly appreciate how disgusting they are.

Picture note by Jaybird: Eva Longoria doing publicity in London on Thursday and Friday. The last photo is Eva at the Mandarin Hotel in Miami on 1/18/08. Images thanks to Splash Photos.

So much of what’s been reported about Heath Ledger’s death has been speculation. In our speedy society where we need all the information right away, people just don’t seem to be able to wait. But death investigations take a lot time, from the police to the coroner to the toxicologist. Since people are so eager for information and answers right away, a lot of local and major news networks have been reporting a great deal of speculation – and not always clearly citing it as such. Though it’s rare, in this particular instance it seems like bloggers have been more restrained and ethical than traditional media. When we’ve written things that were speculation, we tried to make it very clear that’s all it was, and we were in no way reporting facts. For the time being, there is not much left to this story. Heath’s funeral will take place, and there won’t be much information until the toxicology results are back. Because people are so interested, news networks seem to keep rehashing the story over and over again, and report on every possible detail. CNN’s Anderson Cooper finally had enough, and wrote on his blog that there would be no more Ledger coverage on 360.

For the last two nights we have reported on actor Heath Ledger. His shocking death is clearly a story a lot of people are interested in, but tonight we will not be reporting more on it. The truth is there is not really anything new to report.

The full results of the various tests done on Mr. Ledger will not be ready for perhaps a few weeks and there is very little new information. I have no doubt other networks will spend a lot of time tonight discussing his death and the various rumors about what might have caused it, but I am not a fan of speculation, so unless there is something really new to discuss we probably won’t be covering it anymore anytime soon.

[From CNN.com]

I think that part of the human condition is a difficulty in letting go, especially when someone has died. There’s this feeling that you aren’t honoring someone if you go back to business as usual. But rehashing the same old thing over and over doesn’t do anyone any good, and reporting on gossip and speculation is downright detrimental. Even Star Jones has said enough is enough – and hopefully other reporters will jump on the bandwagon. It’s not disrespectful for the rest of us to move on – and it will give Heath’s family time to grieve in private.

Apparently I’m not the only one feeling pretty fatalistic about Britney Spears’ future. I can’t claim to know much about journalism ethics, besides the obvious, but I was a little surprised to learn today that the Associate Press has admitted they’ve already written Britney Spears’ obituary - and they’ve been working on it for the past month. It’s hard to know if it’s that they’re so certain she will die, or if they just really like to plan ahead. But I can’t help but wonder how ethical it is to do that - though to be fair, it’s not like most people aren’t thinking about it. It seems like they’ll probably need it.

The Associated Press began preparing Britney Spears’ obituary within the past month, Usmagazine.com has learned.

“We are not wishing it, but if Britney passed away, it’s easily one of the biggest stories in a long time,” AP entertainment editor Jesse Washington tells Us.

“I think one would agree that Britney seems at risk right now,” Washington adds. “Of course, we would never wish any type of misfortune on anybody and hope that we would never have to use it until 50 years from now…but if something were to happen, we would have to be prepared.”

[From Us Magazine]

I’m pretty sure the AP thinks they’ll have to use it in the next 50 days, not the next 50 years. To say that Britney is going down Anna Nicole Smith’s path is an understatement. To be fair, Anna Nicole wasn’t hounded like Britney was, so we don’t know the excruciating minutiae of her every activity in the last months of her life. Maybe it was as weird as Britney’s. But we definitely know that Britney is behaving more and more bizarrely, and doing it around a lot of other people. And not only are those other people not trying to stop her, they seem to be encouraging her. Hangers on and yes-men is one of the keys in the downfall of Anna Nicole, and it will certainly be Britney’s too. She obviously courts the paparazzi… does she ever read what’s written about her? Does she realize everyone’s placing odds on when she’s going to die? I know this sounds awful, but I hope she starts to. She’s got all these yes men around her who obviously are catering to her every crazy whim and telling her what she wants to hear. I hope that she starts reading some of the reports from people who aren’t on her payroll, and who think she’s going to end up dead very soon. It’d be really terrible to see, but if she somehow realizes that the five people who have a lot to gain from her materially are saying something totally different from everyone else, maybe it’ll at least put that idea in her head, and over time she’ll reject the people that are using her. I saw that because it’d be nice, but now I’m trying to figure out if we should write her obit too, just so we have it on hand.

Picture note by Jaybird: Britney and Adnan Ghalib last night. Images thanks to Splash Photos.

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.

Have you seen those commercials with Montel Williams? He drives around on a bus, doling out prescriptions (or I guess prescription assistance) to Americans who don’t have insurance, all the while assuring us that America’s drug companies really do care about our health. How calming and reassuring. It turns out Montel isn’t just the pretty face for their television ad campaign. He actually does go around doing publicity for the Partnership for Prescription Assistance. No word on if he actually does it in the big PPA bus though.

Montel was giving an interview in Savannah on Friday when Courtney Scott , a high school intern reporter, asked him, “Do you think pharmaceutical companies would be discouraged from research and development if their profits were restricted?” Seems like a fair and well thought out question. Apparently Montel didn’t agree. He very angrily responded, “I’m trying to figure out exactly why you are here and what the interview is about. I’m here as a patient advocate talking about the fact that medications available today are saving people’s lives, that’s what’s saving mine and after that, this interview is done.” Seems awkward and weird, but I doubt anyone would have made anything of it. Except that was just the beginning.

When the Savannah Morning-News reporters later returned to the hotel for an unrelated assignment, he approached one of them - high school student Courtney Scott, an intern at the newspaper. “As we were preparing to film, Montel walked up with his bodyguard and got in Courtney Scott’s face pointing his finger telling her ‘Don’t look at me like that. Do you know who I am? I’m a big star, and I can look you up, find where you live and blow you up,’” said Joseph Cosey, a web content producer for the newspaper. “At this time he was randomly pointing at all of us.”

Scott said she wasn’t sure how to interpret Williams’ comment. “I’m not sure if he meant ‘blow me up’ and ruin my career or really blow us up, but it was threatening,” Scott said.

Williams, a patient advocate since being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, later issued a statement apologizing for the outburst. “I mistakenly thought the reporter and photographer in question were at the hotel to confront me about some earlier comments,” Williams said. “I was wrong, and I apologize for my overreaction.”

[From the Huffington Post]

Sounds like Montel might want to consider adding a few antipsychotics to his pill regimen. I’m guessing that’s the equivalent of swag with the PPA. From his apology, I don’t think Montel quite understands what he did wrong. The problem wasn’t that he threatened the reporters even though they weren’t there for him; the problem was that he threatened them at all. Even if they were there for him, it’s probably not a good idea to threaten to blow people up. Especially in a public setting. Oh, and especially with reporters. What with that great access to the press and all. Probably also not the greatest plan to threaten to harm a high school student. Again, that’s just me, but I’d at least aim my comments at the adults. But I’m old fashioned that way. When I threaten to blow someone up, I get a glance at their driver’s license first, just to be safe.

Time Magazine has a new interview with prolific horror author Stephen King, in which he bemoans how celebrity-obsessed the media is at the expense of actual news. He says that Time should declare Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan the people of the year so that we’ll have a discussion about why we’re elevating these do-nothing trainwrecks by paying so much attention to them. This is similar to Liz Smith’s suggestion that Internet Celebrity Gossip should be person of the year, since we never get a break from it anymore.

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 shit…

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.

[From Time.com via Fark]

That’s great how he just lays it out there and says she’s trash, and that it’s ridiculous that we pay so much attention to her when she contributes so little to society. We’re a gossip blog and Lindsay and Britney have received so much undeserved press that we’ve decided to stop covering them for stretches at a time. I know in King’s estimation we’re part of the problem, and that’s true, but hopefully our gossip is just part of your balanced news diet. When they’re aren’t a lot of other options of what to pay attention to, that’s just sad. Kind of like Britney’s life, which consists mainly of the pursuit of mindless entertainment like shopping, eating, and staying at hotels.

Stephen King is promoting his new horror film, The Mist, which was out in the US on November 21 and stars Thomas Jane, and Marcia Gay Harden. It is getting mixed but mostly positive reviews.

Stephen King is shown with Marcia Gay Harden at the NY after party for the premiere of The Mist on 11/12/07, thanks to PRPhotos.

The announcement of the writer’s strike today will have some immediate repercussions for movie and TV fans alike, as well as some long-term effects on movies in pre-production.

With emerging markets and new ways to deliver content, the writers justifiably don’t want to be screwed out of royalties. The movie companies counter by saying that since internet delivery, for example, is still a developing trend, negotiating profits for new media is premature. A prolonged strike could have big consequences for the entertainment industry.

The daily talk shows such as, well- The Daily Show for one, will likely go into re-runs. Unconfirmed rumors say that The Tonight show will continue production, but consist of only Hometown News and Kevin Eubanks doing guitar solos. With all the major fiction writers on strike, the continued operation of Fox News is also in question.

Among the wonderful movies in pre-production that might suffer in quality are the sequels Saw 6, Rush Hour 5, and Chuck and Larry get a Divorce. Experts predict that because of the writer’s strike, these movies will rely on nonsensical plots, stereotypical cliché, scatological humor, and graphic but implausible action and violence in the place of quality scriptwriting.

Also without the creative minds of Hollywood writers, entertainment executives will not know which toys from the 80’s, video games, or 70’s movies to rip off for next summer’s blockbusters. Rumors are floating that among the projects being shelved are My Little Pony- The Movie, a film based on Madden 08, and a Farrelly brothers adaptation of The Goodbye Girl.

Tina Fey is shown picketing outside of NBC Headquarters in the header image.