Feral Beast: Variety Lays Off Film Critic

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Variety Lays Off Film Critic

In today's journalism, that's the way the cookie crumbles. Seniority makes no difference. In his first post-Oscars column, headlined This thumb's for you, legendary film critic Roger Ebert uses his space in the Chicago Sun-Times to lambast Hollywood trade paper Variety for firing Todd McCarthy, a film critic there for the last 31 years. He was dismissed Monday as the industry publication announced that it would switch its policy to only publish movie reviews on a freelance basis as a cost-cutting measure. Ebert argues that as the chief critic for Variety and its longest-tenured staffer, McCarthy became “the bellwether of a film's future.” Ebert also writes that Variety could be signaling the end of an era for film commentary: “The glory days of the famous Variety critics are finished.”
Read it at Roger Ebert’s Journal. Hat tip to Tina Brown's Daily Beast for the link.

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Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

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