This week's issue of Time magazine has a big cover story on REVENGE OF THE SITH, wihch you can access online here.

The good news is that Richard Corliss, far from the worst film critic around, says the final STAR WARS film is much better than the previous two.

The bad news is that he writes this in the same magazine that recently did a cover story on ignorant loudmouth Ann Coulter, pretending that the bilge she spews is just harmless humor. Consequently, it is impossible to trust anything one reads in Time ever again.

If this sounds cynical, take a look at the articles assembled in the magazine, which include an interview with George Lucas, and try -- just try -- to imagine the magazine's managing editor allowing Corliss to say anthing like, "SITH is, in its own way, as bad as PHANTOM MENACE and ATTACK OF THE CLONES."

There's a phrase for this kind of thing: access journalism.

The phrase was coined a decade ago by a book reviewer in the Los Angeles Times, trying to explain how a good journalist like Bob Woodward could write a book like THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT (the basic premise of which was that Dan Quayle was an underestimated man who would prove everyone wrong by winning the presidency).

The basic theory of access journalism goes like this: journalists depend on access to high-profile subjects in order to have successful careers; politicians depend on journalists to tell (and in some cases sell) their story to the public. It's a mutal-benefit situation that is obviously prone to a certain amount of corruption: will a journalist dare say something bad about a source -- and thus risk losing access to that source?

What's true in political journalism is even more true in entertainment journalism. Time magazine got access to George Lucas, who doesn't give interviews to just anyone. Under the circumstances, we're within our rights to wonder whether there was not some kind of psychological pressure (if not a tacit understanding) to deliver a favorable cover story.

I'm not saying a quid-pro-quo deal was struck. I'm just saying that STAR WARS is big business, and the magazine obviously hopes that putting SITH on the cover will boost their sales. Once you've made that kind of decision, it's hard to turn around and say, "Oops, the movie sucks!"

Obviously, this kind of conflict of interest crops up all the time in entertanment journalism, and writers and editors figure out how to deal with it. But let's be honest, if big bucks were not involved, would any magazine even consider doing a cover story on a sequel to two films as bad as THE PHANTOM MENACE and ATTACK OF THE CLONES?

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