The TV critic column: Is it influential?

On “Television Criticism”: The Pursuit of the Critical Examination of a Popular Art

“…Fewer studies have assessed television criticism written after the 1960s, perhaps related to significant shifts in the medium and nature of this "beat" that occurred at this time (Himmelstein, 1981;Littlejohn, 1976;Scher, 1974;Shelby, 1973;Rossman, 1975;Vincent, 1980). Spigel (1998) traces the connections between popular writing about television and the emergence of academic television studies in a detailed examination that addresses the tensions among perceptions of aesthetic value, industrial machinations, and the development of television criticism.…”

“…Rather than the sociological traditions used to study the previously mentioned art forms, scholars in the developing field of communication took different foci and applied disparate theories in their examinations of critics and their writings in the 1950s and 1960s. Studies often focused on calls to the profession regarding the practice of criticism (Kreiling, 1966-67;Magnus, 1966-67;McGrath & Nance, 1966-67;Steinberg, 1974), surveys of the characteristics of certain columnists (Lichty, 1963;Mayeux, 1969Mayeux, -1970Rossman, 1965;Young, 1966-67), surveys of the critical characteristics of certain publications (Shelby, 1966-67); or assessments of the effect or importance of criticism (Rossman, 1975;Shelby, 1973). These studies predominantly used textual analysis of critics' columns rather than the more sociological methods and theories common to the "production of culture" assessments of other critical traditions.…”