ABSTRACT
The terms of press criticism remain unsettled. We have a rough understanding of how to criticize, say, a book, a play or a restaurant, but there has never been a consensus on the forms or bounds of criticism of journalism, which is, after all, not a single artistic creation but a complex social institution—a major actor in politics, an industry with units ranging in scale from global to local, a technologically diverse product that blankets the nation every day and a fluid profession or quasi-profession with its own embedded traditions and culture. The scope of the enterprise is so much greater than the available critical range that in pessimistic moments I think of press critics as a mere cloud of gnats trying to keep up with a galloping elephant, which neither slows down nor turns right or left as it crashes through the underbrush. It is never certain whether critics can get the beast’s attention, let alone train it to do useful work.
