Having a movie critic make the argument for "Why we need movie critics" is sort of like asking bathroom attendants why we need bathroom attendants or Canadians why we need Canada: You're kinda going to receive the most self-serving response ever. Leave it to Slate to ask the hard questions, then! Enter Erik Lundegaard, who, at least according to RottenTomatoes.com, has published some 96 movie reviews, though we suspect more. But not only is Lundegaard a staunch defender of his practice, he's good with math!

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If most university students studying film criticism can't even name a single working movie critic, are we really overestimating the importance of their jobs? Young people might cruise through Entertainment Weekly to see what's at the cineplex this weekend, but they aren't noting the bylines. WORSE: They aren't even reading cinema blogs!

The death toll is ringing, writes Variety's Anne Thompson, and we're on the verge of displacing nearly all thumbs-uppers and thumbs-downers. Netflix recommendations are stand-ins for respected voices of cultural reason. And with newspapers practically running on fumes, or so their publishers would have you believe, the first jobs to get axed are in the arts-culture sections.

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Where have all the critics gone? News hit yesterday that Newsday movie editor Pat Wiedenkeller and veteran critics Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour were accepting buyout offers, which sent the world of film scribes into a tizzy as everyone tried to figure out whether this was more evidence of a Kill The Critic trend, now that newspapers are getting out of the business of reporting on anything other than Britney Spears. Those worried about the job security of the critic niche have ample evidence; the Daily News' Jack Matthews retired last month. And don't forget even Maxim had to fire its movie critic Pete Hammond, but that was mostly because he had terrible taste in film. So is there reason to trust all this fear-mongering? Let's put it this way: If you're paid to write down whether you love or hate something, your job is on the line.

Even the critics can see the books are dying. Only 76.5 percent of book critics think it's never ethical to review a book without reading the whole thing. We would have hoped that 100 percent of them would think reading the whole thing is important.

Then we tried to get through the National Book Critics Circle’s blog post about ethics in book criticism and we saw where the other 23.5 percent was coming from.

The intentionally provocative new show "Jihad: The Musical" (billed as "a madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism") opened to "packed audiences, mixed reviews and inevitable controversy" at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland this month.

"If there were a prize for poor taste," writes the Times of London, "the creators of this show might have been hoping for a podium finish."

A spokesperson for "Jihad: The Musical" explained, "We must laugh at those who seek to intimidate us." She then added, "Hey, on the plus side, at least it didn't bomb."

[ABC News]

Now with these newfangled blogs and such, everyone's a critic! Which means professional critics – whose bylines appear in respectable publications like newspapers instead of titles that end in ".com" – are losing their relevancy. Or at least their corporate employers think so! So the higher ups have been cutting back on the staff positions of the nation's opinionated pop culture critics, like those whose job it is to tell you whether that new USA series Burn Notice is worth investing in.

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