Time Magazine recently conducted an interview with the best-selling novelist Stephen King that quickly turned into a discussion about media, news organizations, and politics.
The
interview started with King asking who Time's person of the year was going to be. After Gilbert Cruz, the interviewer, told him that he didn't know King suggested that it should be Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.
Cruz was apparently stunned and asked King if he was being serious, which led to a long rant about what is covered in the news media:
"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. 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.
At this point, the rant turned to his thoughts on torture. Stephen King suggested that if the Bush Administration does not believe that waterboarding is torture then they should do some "personal investigation."
(For those of you who want more info on waterboarding, please
check out previous coverage on DigitalJournal.com)
He said:
"I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture."
Cruz once again asked him if he really thought Lindsay and Britney should be on the cover to which he replied, "Yeah, I do" and went on to explain:
"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."
The rest of the interview focused on an upcoming play put together by King and John Mellencamp called
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County and the movie version of the popular novella
The Mist.
