Celebrity authors

I'm still in technological limbo, alas, and so only intermittently in touch with the outside world. Hopefully this state of affairs will be put right soon. In the meantime, however, I couldn't restrain myself from this short rant. What's the point of having a blog if you can't rant occasionally?
The news item that caught my eye was the story about Wayne Rooney's fiancee being offered a five-book publishing deal. Which means she joins the ranks of such literary lion(esse)s as Jordan (or whatever her real name is) - those celebrities who don't even pretend to have written (or, I suspect, even read) the books that appear under their names.
Oh, you're just jealous, will be the response. Well, actually, no: after all, if someone offered me a contract to ghost-write a novel for a celebrity I don't suppose I'd turn it down - I bet it pays well enough. And footballers' WAGs seem to make money enough that the odd publishing deal is probably small beer to them anyway. No, that's not what I'm ranting about.
What gets me about this is that for years publishers have been trying to justify their existence by claiming that they in some way mediate between the writer and the reader: the reader expects that a commercially published book has been chosen and edited so that it is guaranteed to be of a certain quality. I have heard publishers say this, more than once. But what are we to make of this? Here are books, commecially published, that are offered to the public on the strength of nothing more than an endorsement by someone who - how can I put this politely - isn't exactly renowned for her taste in reading (apparently Rooney was once asked what his fiancee had on her bedside table, and his reply was "the radio"). Why should readers continue to trust publishers when they're prepared to stoop this low?
I'm beginning to wonder now whether self-publishing my fourth book was such a bad move after all. Either people will wake up to what publishers are trying to do them, and will start looking for other ways to select their reading, or else they have totally lost any vestige of judgement and don't care what they read. Either way conventional publishing is doomed and we might as well all start scouring the catalogues of print-on-demand publishers for real books by real writers...