ABSTRACT
The increasing weakness of the journals of opinion has therefore been due to the increasingly narrow professionalisation of the lives of those who might have been readers and who feel they haven’t the time to think about general things, or to read the literary or arts pages. The plight of the BBC in the Eighties and the passing of the 1990 Broadcasting Act were witnessed in almost total silence by the universities, the opinion-formers, the Great and Good, and even by virtually all those who have most profited from the BBC’s catholic programming. BBC Television prepared a short feature to expose this butchery. The commentator presented the issue as one simply attributable to Arts Council snobbery. Reviewers of the other arts, not in specialist journals but, again, in newspapers, seem just as lightweight; and some are routinely anti-Establishment; so that one comes to expect little in the way of good judgment.
