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For the last fifteen or twenty years the fashion in criticism or appreciation of the arts have been to deny the existence of any valid criteria and to make the __1__words “good” or “bad” irrelevant, immaterial, and inapplicable. There is no such thing, we are told, like a set of standards first acquired through experience and __2__knowledge and late imposed on the subject under discussion. This has been a __3__popular approach, for it relieves the critic of the responsibility of judgment and the public by the necessity of knowledge. It pleases those resentful of disciplines, it __4__flatters the empty-minded by calling him open-minded, it comforts the __5__confused. Under the banner of democracy and the kind of quality which our forefathers did no mean, it says, in effect, “Who are you to tell us what is good or bad?” This is same cry used so long and so effectively by the producers of mass __6__media who insist that it is the public, not they, who decide what it wants to hear __7__and to see, and that for a critic to say that this program is bad and that program is good is pure a reflection of personal taste. Nobody recently has expressed this __8__ philosophy most succinctly than Dr. Frank Stanton, the highly intelligent __9__president of CBS television. At a hearing before the Federal Communications Commission, this phrase escaped from him under questioning: “One man’s mediocrity __10__is another man’s good program”.
