NO LIMITS

Jeannette Walls, the gossip columnist for MSNBC.com, complained yesterday in her newsletter that there were "nine camera crews from Japan alone" covering Michael Jackson's arrest in handcuffs. I wonder if her own editors ever read her newsletter.

MSNBC.com's entertainment section gave the Japanese a run for their money with eight stories in a row: "Jackson tells fans he's innocent"; "Liz Taylor says Jackson is innocent"; "Scoop: Team Jackson goes on offensive with P.I." (Walls' column); "Dateline NBC: The case against Jackson"; "Newsweek: From moonwalk to perp walk"; "Jackson's friends react with silence"; "'Thriller' nixed from parade lineup"; "Will arrest affect Jackson's sales?"

This from the No. 2 news site on the Web -- CNN is first -- with pretensions to high-quality, original journalism? Please. Like the MSNBC cable channel, its sister operation, which panders for ratings, the Web site has an editorial mission that is neither high-quality nor original. In fact, it largely consists of gathering wire reports available on almost any other news site and dressing them up, often with dopey "votes" to create the illusion of reader participation.

Ever since the departure of its founding editor, Merrill Brown, MSNBC.com has been on a downhill slide as a journalistic enterprise. Brown, too, prized celebrity stories, but he knew their limits. MSNBC.com's Microsoft masters forced him out, journalism be damned, and his replacement, compliant editor in chief Dean Wright, seems happy to execute their wishes. It's a shame.

(Full disclosure: I used to be MSNBC.com's entertainment & arts editor under Brown and left five months ago after Wright took over.)