norbert blei | dark thoughts near the end of another (media) year

NOTES from the UNDERGROUND…No.129 | December 29, 2007

Dark Thoughts Near the End of Another (Media) Year

Stephen King knows a horror show when he sees one. In an interview last month with Time magazine, the master of the macabre asked who the magazine’s person of the year would be. Then he offered his own candidates: Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

The news media, he observed, is being overwhelmed by entertainment gossip. “[I told ‘Nightline,’] ‘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? … You’ve got these things going on … that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip.”

Or, as George Carlin put it earlier this year:

“If you’re born in this world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. If you’re born in America, you’re given a front row seat.”