Thread by @jeffjarvis

From the hot take factory: Hot take on critical takes arguing critics should agree with the audience. No. When I started Entertainment Weekly I had to suffer that argument from Time Inc. editors who claimed critics not liking popular works were "wrong."🧵
newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61…

It is *not* the job of the critic to predict or align with popular opinion as revealed in best-seller & box-office charts. The critic is not the predictor of mass market success. That is the job of producers. 2/

The critic, I always said when I was one, is simply the person who has the privilege of seeing/reading/hearing something before the public does and offer's one person's thoughtful view of it as a service to the public. 3/

My mission for Entertainment Weekly was to help people decide how to spend their ever-more scarce time and money on ever more entertainment. 4/

I insisted the critics I hired like the medium they criticized. In other words, I didn't want someone who hated TV to do nothing but grouse about it as that would be no service to the audience. 5/

However, hiring a TV-loving critic meant that person would be more profoundly disappointed upon watching shit on the tube and would be more adamant. The critic, I said at EW, should have high expectations. 6/

Entertainment Weekly had a rough launch. That is a story I hope to tell soon. The execs at Time Inc. came down on us. One editor took the time to calculate the grade-point average of the grades (my conceit) they gave in the magazine. He decreed them too tough. 7/

When @OwenGleiberman gave a bad review to Pretty Woman, that editor waved the hit box-office receipts in my face and shouted that my movie critic was thus "wrong." That would be to say that EW would have done nothing but liked blockbusters. What use would that have been? 8/

In the Rosenberg's over-long newsletter that inspired this over-long tweet, he pulls out the mass-media trope that Twitter is small; it's not everyone. That so misreads what Twitter--and what critics--are: Just individual voices. 9/

When I became the first TV critic at People, my editor, @petertravers, told me he didn't care what my opinion was so long as I argued it well. Right. We give our readers the opportunity to judge our opinions so they can better make their decisions. 10/

Irony is that Rosenberg paints himself the populist, standing up for Harry Potter fans but then attacks the platform where popular voices can be heard, Twitter, because there aren't enough of them. This is such a mass-culture perspective. 11/

Bottom line: There is not right or wrong in criticism, there is only conversation. Rosenberg dismissing the critics does just what he accused the critics of doing. We all have opinions about culture; that is how it is built. The role of criticism is to spark that discussion. /fin