As news looks to the stars, is it reaching new lows?

Are we overdoing celebrity journalism in our newspapers?

Is it trivializing content and compromising our ability to find new readers and retain existing ones?

Some of America's top editors think so.

"I thought the volume and redundancy of the recent Michael Jackson coverage was numbing," said Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. "It's part of a larger trend of newspapers responding to economic pressure by dumbing down, downsizing, and pandering to what they perceive as readers' taste for amusement rather than understanding."

John Carroll, retiring editor of the Los Angeles Times, said the trend is increasing at a time when companies are scrambling to check circulation declines. "The public," Carroll said, "particularly the much-sought-after young reader, has an insatiable appetite for celebrity coverage. And newspaper-owning corporations are more interested these days in responding to raw market demands, no matter how demeaning."

Critics of celebrity journalism are everywhere.

• Author and former editor Pete Hamill likens celebrity news to a "virus."


• Edward Asner, actor and former star of the television series "Lou Grant," said he is "horrified" by the trend.


• Ethicist Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies says celebrity journalism has reached a "crisis point" in U.S. daily journalism.

Has celebrity news begun to crowd out legitimate news? Are editors working with a new definition of news that allows more celebrity content into our newspapers and other media? How have Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant found their way to our front pages? Have our news values changed?

Until recently, celebrity newsmakers were kept in their place: big-city tabloid newspapers, special scandal-hungry publications such as the National Enquirer, and later People magazine and television's Entertainment Tonight. No one disputed that the news should be covered, but rarely did celebrity happenings warrant top-line news play.

That has changed in the last dozen years. The proliferation of cable television broadcasts and other media, an infatuation with Hollywood scandal, and a pronounced focus on the personality of newsmakers are pushing serious news off news broadcasts and the front pages of newspapers large and small.

Asner said the fixation on celebrity journalism has led to moral decay of our society. Bob Steele, an ethicist at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said that the exaggeration of celebrity as a news value has reached a crisis point.

The balance between news and entertainment in the media changed dramatically and in short order. Many point to the O.J. Simpson murder scandal in 1994-95 as the turning point.

Sue Cross, Los Angeles bureau chief for The Associated Press, told an industry conference last year that "celebrity journalism has changed mainstream journalism."

She added, "It has made a difference in what we end up pursuing" as a wire service. She said that the AP bureau in Los Angeles spends a good portion of its time chasing rumors about celebrities that appear online and in other media. Staffers are kept from other stories, she said.