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 11 the words "good" or "bad" irrelevant, immaterial, and inapplicable. There is no such thing, we are told, like a set of standards first acquired 12 through experience and knowledge and late imposed on the subject under 13 discussion. This has been a popular approach, for it relieves the critic of the responsibility of judgment and the public by the necessity of 14 knowledge. It pleases those resentful of disciplines, it flatters the empty-minded by calling him open-minded, it comforts the confused Under the 15 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 16 cry used so long and so effectively by the producers of mass media who insist that it is the public, not they, who decide what it 17 wants to hear 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. 18 Nobody recently has expressed this philosophy most succinctly than 19 Dr. Frank Stanton, the highly intelligent president of CBS television. At a hearing before the Federal Communications Commission, this phrase escaped from him under questioning: "One man's mediocrity is another 20 man's good program".