For some years, critical reviews have been seen by the publishers and promoters of media as being an arm of their marketing department. This is a process I know not only as an observer, but also as a participant, in that I have frequently reviewed products pro bono in exchange for an honest review. And while some people may become shills for the companies they review for in order to maintain their privileges, I have always taken that honesty seriously. If I give an opinion on a work, it may not be a popular opinion, but it will be a genuine one. That said, even under the best of circumstances, there is going to be a tension between the reviewer as an honest opinionmaker and the role of the reviewer as being a source of encouraging blurbs for the marketing of what is being reviewed. Where the quality of the work being offered is sufficiently high, blurbs come easily with the gushing praise of those who consume the work first. Where the quality of the work is not high, blurbs are not as easy to uncover, and the pressure that is placed on reviewers to review a work more positively than they feel or than it deserves causes serious difficulties.

One of the consequences of an atmosphere where lower quality books, movies, and music is being released where the review process is viewed as being ancillary to the marketing department, is that there is a corresponding greater negativity against bad reviews. This has gotten to the level where companies are willing to pay money to aggregators of customer sentiment to bury bad numbers as being “suspicious” and to only show the positive reviews as a way of leading the unwary potential consumer to think that a given thing is viewed more positively than it is. In this environment, the attitude of companies towards those who review things negatively becomes extremely harsh. I myself have experienced authors and musical acts bringing their supporters to harass me because I had only mixed praise to give about a given book or artist, which has greatly soured my thoughts on such people even further if they could not handle a mixed but honest review. More and more often, companies and individual creators are simply unable to cope with their work not being liked even as they become less and less interested in making work that is appealing to others, particularly others who have different worldviews from the creators of works.

It should also be noted that this comes in the midst of an overall environment where businesses are obsessed with the need to have their customers speak highly of them in order to get that valuable word of mouth advertising. Those who simply use websites or eat or shop at a given place are frequently bombarded with the demand to answer surveys about how great the experience was so that the company can use this information as a means of furthering its sales and marketing. Speaking personally, at least, I am disinclined to give such information. It is a tremendous waste of time to give companies that kind of information when they are spending so much time and effort increasing their prices and decreasing their service, though they are hardly to be blamed for the problems of inflation. Still, the increasing desperation of companies for positive reviews when their declining offerings make customers feel mixed to negative about what they are getting from companies is a serious problem.

It is unclear how this sort of problem is to be dealt with. A great many companies face serious cash flow problems and the general economic climate discourages growth efforts and forces not only people but also companies to retrench. In this environment good news is rare, hard to give honestly, and all the more needed by those who are trying to survive and need the praise of others in order to do so. This is a toxic combination of elements. It is little wonder that companies try to nag and coerce and even bribe their customers to say nice things about them. It is little wonder that publishers and movie studios are increasingly hostile to negative reviews and seek to actively suppress them as being inimical to their sales and marketing efforts. Nobody wants an honest word, they only accept praise, even when and especially when it is hard to give praise that has been earned and deserved by the efforts put forth by these companies. Who knows when things will get better.