(Photo: Punchstock; Illustration: D. Fith)

Once upon a time, a little newspaper had been promised an interview with a big star. The star's new film, which was getting major buzz, was about to open, and even though the paper was small in circulation, the studio wanted to give it the interview because it was on a major wire service and its stories ran everywhere.

But the star's publicist said the studio wasn't supposed to offer him to the little paper, and canceled the sit-down. This really annoyed the paper's features editor, who felt he had accepted the offer in good faith. If the PR company didn't produce the star, he said, then the paper would not do business with that company anymore.

And they didn't. This seemed to amaze almost everyone in Hollywood, since the PR company was one of the biggest in the business and controlled access to many major actors. But months went by, and the little paper stuck to its guns.

Finally, someone from the big PR firm asked what it could do to get back in the good graces of the little paper. The answer was this: "Your boss [a powerful legend in the PR business] has to take our features editor out to lunch and be really, really nice to him."

So she did.

This is not a fairy tale. This actually happened when I was working for the Los Angeles Daily News back in the late '80s (the star, film and PR firm shall remain nameless), and it's the kind of occurrence that could never happen today. In the 20 years since, PR firms and personal publicists have gained more and more influence over the entertainment news process. During the same time, the number of news outlets has grown exponentially, particularly on TV and the Web, which has created desperate fights over access to the stars. As a result, too many outlets have allowed themselves to become little more than mouthpieces for the PR machine, and many entertainment journalists are now being forced to put up with practices that were unheard of two decades ago:

* Publicists now regularly sit in on interviews, vetting questions and cutting the already minuscule time short (one-on-one interviews used to last a full hour; now you're lucky if you get 20 minutes) if they don't like where the reporter is going.

* Many reporters sign legal disclaimers stating their story, and the photography accompanying it, will not show up in any publication other than the one they work for. This means freelancers cannot resell stories even if they own the rights, and newspapers supposedly cannot put their staff-written pieces on the wire. Only a handful of outlets refuse these extortionate agreements, and they are usually punished (read: denied access) for doing so.

* Publicists demand guaranteed play, i.e., "You get the interview only if we get a cover." Most outlets happily agree.

Thanks in part to all of this, the term "entertainment journalism" has practically become an oxymoron, often uttered derisively. It has become more and more difficult to pitch stories with any kind of depth. Except for a handful of publications -- The New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and occasionally Entertainment Weekly -- almost no one is covering the film industry as an industry anymore, and even fewer are dealing with it as a cultural force whose images influence billions of people around the globe.

Needless to say, all of this is shortchanging you, the reader, who is being force fed a steady diet of warmed-over, surface-thin interviews -- gossip disguised as news and cheerleading pretending to be criticism. Editors assume this is what you want, so they regurgitate the same tired stories about film openings, celebrity bad behavior, features that read like ad copy and stories about why such-and-such [insert term here] is the latest cutting-edge [insert additional term here].

Can anything be done about this? Probably not, given the craven state of entertainment coverage these days, but I do have at least two suggestions, naive though they might seem.

First, film journalists can refuse to do business the way flacks want them to. If just a few major outlets took a principled stand -- no, we won't sign your disclaimers; no, we won't guarantee a cover -- publicists would eventually get the message. If nothing else, the studios and distributors, who are not the villains here (most studio publicists will confess off the record how much they despise the personal publicists), would confront the personal publicists about changing their ways.

More importantly, editors must stop assuming their readers are idiots. Just because US Weekly and InTouch sell millions of copies doesn't mean that's all anyone wants to read about showbiz. I know this from experience: The most reader feedback I've ever gotten was not from any celebrity interview I've ever done, but from in-depth feature stories that probed topical Hollywood issues. (Remember what happened last year on this site when I called out the sycophantic press corps covering Borat?) Readers actually like, and respond to, provocative reporting -- same as it ever was.

So why don't editors understand that? Maybe it's me, just a dinosaur whose time has passed. But back in the '80s, when I broke in as a freelancer with the LA Times, editors encouraged entertainment writers to write about their beats as if they were actually part and parcel of a bigger, more complex world in which movies both reflected and shaped the culture -- where politics, racial and sexual attitudes, sociology and historical context all played a major role. It was actually exciting to write -- and read -- about the industry because it meant something. If those days are past, then we're all the poorer for it.