Can someone tell me what kind of crack the Times’s David Carr was smoking when he wrote the profile of Bonnie Fuller that appeared in this morning’s business section? I know, that’s probably a poor choice of metaphor to describe a guy who has famously written about his past addiction to cocaine and he is justly celebrated for being a better writer than most media reporters (for whatever that’s worth). “He writes like an angel!” a New York magazine writer once gushed to me, invoking Arnold Bennet’s famous description of William Faulkner. So maybe it was angel dust he was smoking.

Fuller, as media mavens know, has been the editor of Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Us Weekly and, most recently, the Star, taking the American Media publication from a tabloid to a glossy during her tenure there. In fact, you could say she is best known for giving tabloid culture a sort of glossy veneer. “Celebrity magazines, which once seemed to be multiplying weekly, are full of Ms. Fuller’s fundamental conceptual scoop,” writes Carr. “Stars, however stellar they may appear, are just like us — if you don’t count the parts about unusually beautiful and impossibly wealthy. The sight of an A-lister having a Slurpee or taking out his garbage has become a huge get in the current media ecosystem.”

The problem is that Carr writes about that trend, with which he credits Fuller, as a good thing, if not an inevitable thing in the evolution of human culture. After gushing over her Midas touch and “astonishing success” with the titles she reinvented, and inevitably dumbed down (and after passing lightly over the horrible reputation the woman has as a manager) he seeks out other cultural critics to second his opinion that a celebrity culture that has led to, among other things, the public self-immolation of Britney Spears, is a good thing. “What she has done is gotten at a kind of essential truth that is less about the specifics of the gossip,” says Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco. “This endless speculation and estimation about the lives of these people has become the stuff of culture.”

This is not just people who cover a business celebrating someone who has profited from feeding the hogs a particular brand of slop. This is media critics standing knee-deep in pig shit and pretending that it’s dulce de leche.

Fuller has just left American Media to start her own digital company, Bonnie Fuller Media, which aims to supply more slop, I mean, celebrity news, as well as fashion and romance for today’s always-on, on-demand types who live by blog, Pod-cast and RSS feed. I hope someone told her she won’t be able to review that stuff on paper.

I worked for Bonnie Fuller for one day at the Star. This is not all that note-worthy; the streets of New York are filled with literally hundreds of editors and writers who worked for Fuller for one day, or a week, or a month if they had armadillo skin. It’s not so much that she’s nasty as she is discombobulated; I was being paid my standard day-rate to do whatever and I recall one of my day’s duties was writing a quick piece about Courtney Cox’s new line of beauty products. (Hey, tell me what low thing you’ve done for money.) I had some notes from a stringer who had gone to a press conference where the former Friends star was talking about skin cream or whatever and of that a short “feature” was to be cobbled. What I remember was writing the copy in the morning, doing a bunch of other things that afternoon – and then getting galleys of the piece back from Fuller at the end of the day — “She only works on galleys,” I was told — and it was marked up like a manuscript page of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Some of her questions and comments were smart but, if answered, they would make the 300 word story 2000 words and there was no room for that on the layout, and no reason for it in the first place. And it also meant that everyone involved — not just me, but the reporter and the fact-checker and the designer and the managing editor — would stay extra hours to no avail: The “story” wasn’t going to run any longer and had to ship that night. And this was just one page of a hundred.

This is not simply a criticism of the woman’s time-management skills. (“Ms. Fuller is known for her hellacious hours, indifferent people skills and an approach to deadline matters that is more akin to ritual sacrifice than publishing protocol,” Carr allows.) It is a comment on a culture, micro and macro, that cannot tell what matters from what natters. Joyce wrote about shit, by the way — and urine and vomit and snot and jism. He was interested in all manner of human excretion and our fear of it and pushed against taboos in his writing and his life. (He liked to carry a pair of his wife’s panties around with them and give them a sniff in public — drop that fun fact at your next book club meeting!) But he knew slop from nourishment and liked to make fun of those who confused the two. When a boy farts in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man another says, “I thought I heard an angel speak.”

Give that kid a Slurpee.