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.)

November 25, 2003 11:47 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on November 25, 2003 11:47 AM.

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