Britney: media darling, and inspiration to trailer trash everywhere

Rumor has it that the former ‘it girl’ is pregnant again.

Whether she is or isn’t, this train wreck of a life is just sad to watch roll downhill. I don’t even pay attention to celebrity gossip crap, or even watch televised news programs, yet I’m still subjected to stories of her partying it up with Lindsay and Paris – both of whom need a firm slap and an airlift to the Siberian steppe with a knife and firestarter – along with stories of how she doesn’t get along with her mother, how she flips out, how she uses the paparazzi to get help ordering food at a fast-food drive through, the list goes on and on.

Part of me feels sad for Britney and the circus that her life has become, but the people feeding this circus is the stupid media that employs people to follow her around, and the clowns that gobble up the incessant stream of filth that comes out of Hollywood on a daily basis.

Stephen King recently had a few choice words to say about modern mainstream media, in an interview with Time:

 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. 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.

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.

He goes on to say:

it’s time for somebody to discuss the difference between real news and fake news.

Print media has been consistently under threat from internet sources, which is a haven for the alternate news media. With Rupert Murdock owning major news groups around the world and especially in the US, the mainstream media is becoming increasingly untrustworthy.

There’s a documentary available online called Orwell Rolls in His Grave which covers a lot of these issues, in case anyone’s not heard of it. You can watch it online at the link, it has many interviews with former newspaper editors and TV producers from networks like CBS and others. The movie ‘It examines the current and past relationships between the media, the US government and corporations, analyzing the possible consequences of the concentration of media ownership.’ (quote from Wikipedia)Finally, if you still think Bush and his cronies are all well and good, check out this article that mentions some of the journalistic fakery his administration has been responsible for, including fake press conferences during and about the recent Southern Californian fires:

The mainstream media is dominated by a handful of mega corporations who control what many of us hear, read, and believe. The propaganda masters are censoring and suppressing the truth from the American people. There are many reporters who know the truth but dare not talk or write about it, and what some report they don’t even believe themselves. Those who are courageous enough to stand up to the establishment are often ridiculed, intimidated, and blocked by editors and producers who are acting as gatekeepers to the truth.