The monster that ate entertainment

Stephen King knows a horror show when he sees one.

The ups and downs -- mainly downs -- of Britney Spears' year became endless grist for the media mill.

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." (

Certainly Spears and Lohan -- and Paris Hilton, and Anna Nicole Smith, and down the list to Tila Tequila -- were capable of sucking all the oxygen out of the media room in 2007, all of the water out of the office water cooler.