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.