News To Her

Reality is for people who can’t face academia. As reported by Matt Eagan in The Hartford Courant, one academic, in commenting on the vanishing breed of scribes known as newspaper film critics, showed that she herself has a hard time distinguishing between breaking stories and popular features.

“It’s just part of the disappearance of news from daily newspapers,” Jeanine Bassinger of Wesleyan University says. “As newspapers are cutting back, there is a feeling that readers will get their reviews from somewhere else.”

“Those of us who were used to reading newspapers are disappearing.” Bassinger directs the film studies program at Wesleyan.

“As recently as a decade ago, no self-respecting mid-size daily newspaper would have dreamed of publishing without a film critic,” Eagan reports. “These days, only major cities have them…”

The next question is, has anyone but Bassinger noticed?

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.