In this week's Tuned In podcast, A&E Web editor Sharon Eberson and I discuss TV coverage of the deaths of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Billy Mays. Listen or subscribe at post-gazette.com/podcast.
***
Allow me a moment to be self-serving: The Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales writes in support of a dying breed: The TV critic. As Shales notes:
Sadly, there are people abroad and afoot in the land who maintain that TV critics are anachronisms, unnecessary luxuries in a fidgety digital age. At many major and minor newspapers around the country, the job has simply and callously been abolished. Imagine, critics turned out into the cold with no marketable skills other than complaining.
The irony is (and there has to be an irony), a critic's informed guidance is arguably needed now more than ever - what with the 500-channel ("and nothin' on") universe having taken over, and considering the fact that Old Man Webber - you know, the Internut - has exponentially multiplied viewing choices for global villagers.
What's a viewer to do? Consult a critic, for one thing.
Posted
Jul 01 2009, 11:59 AM
by
Rob Owen