Speaking to the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors at its 2001 convention in Chicago, Ebert described film in an ideal world as a way to expand America's understanding of a real world undermined by Hollywood's focus on the bottom line. He also talked about features sections as a way to encourage thought and move beyond the self-congratulatory nature of today's entertainment industry.

"It seems to me that movies are, among other things, the greatest empathy machines ever created," Ebert said, adding that such entertainment "allows us to stand in other people's shoes for two hours."

However, the recent slate of screen duds has done more than deprive audiences of great movies, he said. The emphasis on box office returns, Ebert contended, has led Hollywood to push films that are less likely to challenge society's values or to present American audiences with a different view of the world.

"We're not getting movies that are going to help us get through the world we live in," he said.

And even in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, Ebert said during a question-and-answer session, he sees no significant long-term changes in Hollywood.

"I believe that violence and action movies will continue to be the backbone of the industry because they're easy to make," Ebert said. And they're easy to sell because their prime audience is teen-age boys, a group that is "free to leave the house immediately to go to a 4 o'clock screening."

And features sections across the country play into the Hollywood hype mechanism, "as if we're selling you the movie," he said, by agreeing to interview celebrities only in the presence of their publicists, promoting the latest entertainment gossip and devoting little space to the arts that challenge values and beliefs.

"We now have created a readership that's more interested in the sex lives of the Backstreet Boys," he said. "And people who are the fans of the Backstreet Boys do not read your paper."

In an era of smaller features sections and papers driven by publishers rather than editors, it is more important that "writers should be leading readers," he said. "So much of our editing is following readers, nonexistent readers. What I can't understand is why so many features sections are edited for people who don't read them."

Now, as publishers rather than editors lead most papers, the focus of content is on marketing, grabbing the attention of younger readers and trying to compete with the tabloids or television and their entertainment coverage.

"We get brilliant things like our girl who goes to the bars," Ebert said. "We get a full page of drunks. We get photos of people who'll never read the paper."

"A lot of papers, if we had to sit at home and read them instead of editing them, they wouldn't be very interesting," he said. And sooner or later, that is going to catch up with newspapers and their features sections. "People (are) not going to subscribe to papers that tell them what they already know."

Ebert's solutions: "Find really good writers and let them write," and provide more book reviews that allow local writers to key to topics of interest to them or other readers. Local coverage of the arts or things like the arts also helps to promote the job of artists as those who challenge audiences' identities and tastes.

"Every movie that opens, opens in town. TV, it plays here in town. Books, they're here in the local Borders," he said.