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King of Horror, Media Critic

By Matthew Felling

November 26, 2007 / 2:17 PM EST / CBS News

(CBS)

"I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about 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 [stuff]…

"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.

-- Stephen King, author, to Time, after wryly suggesting Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan be considered for Person of the Year.