The week Pete Hamill published his latest book, News Is A Verb, could not have been better if the publishers' publicity people had laid it on. In that week Rupert Murdoch's tabloid, The New York Post, devoted its front page to the fact that New York had gone "Spice Girl mad" and that their New York gig had sold out in record time. The second event was the huge coverage given to the death of Linda McCartney.

It was a case of "I told you so" because both events were exact examples of what he sees most wrong with American journalism: celebrity journalism and something he calls, "necrojournalism" - the journalism of dead or nearly dead celebrities.

American journalism is very keen at beating its breast at the moment. Books upon books, hundreds of articles in journals and magazines ask what is wrong with journalism? Most are written by worthy broadsheet commentators, many by academics. Hamill's News Is A Verb, is different in that it is written by a tabloid journalist, a man who started out as a reporter in 1960 on the same New York Post, though not then owned by Murdoch. "I am proud to have spent most of my working life as a tabloid man at the Post, the New York Daily News and New York Newsday," he says in his book.

Speaking of his tabloid colleagues he says: "Let the New York Times be the New York Philharmonic; we were happy to play in the Basie Band."

Hamill, however, is much more than a tabloid hack. He is that quintessential American being, the journalist who writes. Like Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, even Ernest Hemingway, he is that tough reporter who turns to fiction, reporting and commentating with what appears to be tremendous ease.

He comes from an Irish American working class background. He has worked as a reporter, war correspondent, sports writer, and columnist. He has been editor in chief at the Post and more recently and controversially, at the New York Daily News, where he was let go after only five months. He has also written eight novels, including the best-selling Snow In August. He has written screen plays and his memoirs, A Drinking Life.

An interview in his publishers' office on East 50th Street was all wrong, of course. It should have been one of New York's press drinking haunts. The publicist running in and out saying how long more Hamill had with The Irish Times before talking to National Public Radio or the Village Voice could have come right out of his book, where publicists are portrayed as getting media space for "celebs".

The title of his book, News Is A Verb, comes from his critique of celebrity journalism. Journalism cannot be just about names, "there must be a verb to tell us what they have done. It cannot just be a banal verb, like shopping. It must be unusual, it must be news", he says.

In the US the word "tabloid" used to describe the size of a newspaper. It is now used as a derisive term to describe the quality of reporting, says Hamill. In the US the so-called supermarket tabloids' celebrity-obsessed value system has spilled over into the mainstream tabloid and broadsheet newspapers. "Supplemented by tabloid television this value system has helped contaminate all of the mainstream press."

Celebrity journalism is a virus, he says. Any magazine stand will illustrate that. It is "the most widespread phenomena of the times".

Newspapers spread a coarser, blander version of the same obsession, he says. "True accomplishment is marginal to the recognition factor. There is seldom any attention paid to scientists, poets, educators or archaeologists. Citizens who work hard, love their spouses and children, pay their taxes, give to charities and break no laws are never in a newspaper unless they die in some grisly murder."

The focus of most media attention, almost to the exclusion of all other subjects, are those big names. We have become so celebrity and name obsessed that we have forgotten to examine why people are celebrities. "In reality there are only 13 or 14 celebrities in America," he says.

Newspaper people know better than most that big names are mere creatures of hype and self-promotion, he says. After all, it is journalists who "take the calls that are soon eagerly converted into stories".

He reserves his most eloquent outrage for Donald Trump: "There are many real estate people of more solid achievement and greater power than Trump's, and certainly many more accomplished businessmen. But such men and women usually prefer to live outside the spotlight; like people who really have money or those with truly interesting sex lives, they don't brag about them. They don't invent their lives in cahoots with press agents: they live them."

No offence against taste is beyond Trump and his journalistic collaborators, he says. Months after the death of Princess Diana, Trump gave an interview to the New York Daily News. It ran a piece on page one, under a headline that screamed "I Wish I Had Dated Di".

Trump is virtually a genre now. Another is "necrojournalism", the journalism of dead or near dead celebrities. Princess Diana was the greatest example, he says. Her death demanded extensive coverage, but after the known facts were printed, the mysteries of the car crash defined, the paparazzi accused and the "drunken limo driver, conveniently dead, arraigned in the public dock, the coverage kept on going. And it swiftly degenerated into a flood of mindless, sentimental custard."

But, he says, he is not suggesting that celebrity coverage be banned, it is simply that it should be journalism. Celebrities and movie stars, if they must be in newspapers, should be covered the way everything else is covered. Celebrity reporters need to have knowledge, opinions and something to pass on to readers to help them understand how entertainment functions, what is at stake, what it is all about and why they should care.

News Is A Verb, by Pete Hamill, is published by Ballantine in the US. Price $8.95