Hailing from the state that recently elected a celebrity governor, I may not be in the best position to criticize California for putting Arnold Schwarzenegger in the governor’s office.

But it seems Minnesota may have started a trend when it elected Jesse Ventura in 1998, and while you can argue about whether these Hollywood governors are really all that bad politically, it has become clear that they have found ways to alter the campaigning process, and not for the better.

The blurring of the line between entertainment and news has been underway for years, but Schwarzenegger took it to new levels in his short campaign for the highest office in our most populous state. He found ways to avoid questioning by serious media and was perfectly comfortable getting his message out on late-night talk shows, Oprah Winfrey and Access Hollywood. The scary thing is that it worked.

From the time he announced his candidacy on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, it was clear this was not going to be a traditional campaign. Schwarzenegger was able to use his celebrity from the start to get a large audience and to reach people who might not pay much attention to the news media.

All through his campaign, &uot;Ah-nuld&uot; chose carefully planned photo-ops over substantive news conferences or interviews. Of course, many political candidates have become fond of staged events, but Schwarzenegger took it as far as refusing to answer questions from real reporters who showed up at his events. His staff tried to avoid the problem entirely by inviting news outlets who were more likely to send a camera and no reporter.

Newspapers and other serious media in California attempted to cover his campaign critically, but it turned out Schwarzenegger didn’t need them, anyway. He won a comfortable victory by getting his message out mostly through entertainment media where he could expect nothing but softball questions.

Here in Minnesota, Ventura set a new standard for dealing with the press during his term. He often preferred to do interviews with national media who saw him as a cute story and a curiosity rather than answer serious questions from the Minnesota media. Of course, he made a habit of bashing the local media at every turn, made it difficult to get interviews and was uncooperative when he did talk to the press.

When his friend Arnold was trying to decide whether to run for govenor, Ventura cautioned him against it, warning him that the media was going to have the audacity to criticize him, ask him questions and hold him to a high standard. It turned out Ventura was wrong. Schwarzenegger was able to largely ignore anybody who would ask him real questions, and he got elected anyway.

This is the problem when you get political novices who are accustomed to controlling their message through publicists and PR machines. They have enough fame to bypass the news media and can promote themselves as candidates for an office the way they would promote a new movie.

Political campaigns are already tightly controlled and orchestrated, but the California recall election set a new standard. The traditional news media is beeing squeezed out, and if that continues, people will have less of an opportunity to get substantive information about the people they are voting for.

(Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor. His column appears Sundays. E-mail him at dylan.belden @albertleatribune.com.)