Nowadays you'd be lucky to find an editor who knows who Louis Malle is. A critic is more likely to get called into his editor's office because he didn't like "Men in Black II," as happened to a critic I know. Or he's likely to be stopped by an editor who tells him that his 11-year-old daughter thinks "The Sixth Sense" is the best movie she's ever seen, as happened to another critic of my acquaintance.

These are rotten times to be a movie critic. In a bad economy, an independent voice delivering judgments on a multibillion-dollar industry that represents a tremendously lucrative source of ad revenue is likely to be perceived as a detriment. It has become increasingly common for critics to be pressured by their editors (who themselves may be under pressure from the sales department) to change their opinions. Pressure that no paper would think to bring to bear on their Op-Ed writers is routinely applied to movie critics. This has nothing to do with the quality of a critic's writing but solely with the content of their opinions, the area where a critic is supposed to be given free rein.

It risks the elitist label to say that critics should know more than their readers about movies, but it's really just common sense. Don't we expect a foreign correspondent to know more about the Middle East or equatorial Africa than the readers do? Do we second-guess our plumbers about our clogged drains, or our doctor about our clogged arteries? But expertise in an area where everyone assumes they are an expert is assumed to be snobbery. That proceeds from the assumption that a critic is telling his or her readers how to think instead of helping them to think for themselves -- whether or not a reader's conclusions are in sync with the critic's.

So we have incidents, as happened a few years ago at a New York paper, where an editor tried to pressure a critic to take the foreign films off her year-end 10-best list because, he claimed, readers would not have heard of them. And the assumption behind that is that the only purpose of a critic is to tell people what they already know. In any area of journalism, that spells death.

To Bart and to the people he is speaking for -- editors and publishers as well as studio execs -- a world in which only highly promoted movies would be covered and praised would be paradise.

In the current climate, where many local critics are being replaced by syndicated writers (in effect standardizing opinion), where critics are under pressure to praise the big movies, where so many media outlets share the same parent company with Hollywood studios and where conglomerates are trying to get the Federal Trade Commission to relax its antitrust laws to make even bigger conglomerates possible, I would propose that the truest measure of any newspaper or magazine's commitment to the free exchange of ideas and to journalistic ethics lies in the freedom it allows its movie critics.

It may be that the only reason movie critics still exist at all in many newspapers is that it allows the editors and publishers to cover themselves with the fig leaf of journalistic ethics. In the back of their minds they may well have entertained the thought of how many people would be happy -- themselves, their advertising department, the studios ready to spend those ad dollars -- if there were no critics at all. The people who don't figure into that equation are the readers.

The most common type of letter my colleagues and I get from readers is from someone who has seen a movie and come home to search out reviews. Whether they agree with us or not, the fact that they want to read criticism tells me that Peter Bart and his ilk are dead wrong about the purpose critics serve. And the power to make sure that outlets accord their critics editorial independence lies with you, the reader. Let publishers and editors know that you value movie critics, that you want critics to operate free of advertisers' interference.

Bart ends his piece by saying, "I'm not a film critic. And I intend to keep it that way." A statement of pride for him, it should come as an enormous relief to everyone except studio execs. For critics and moviegoers, being told that Peter Bart has no intention of becoming a movie critic is like being told that Frank Abagnale isn't managing your mutual funds. But the voices Bart speaks for are increasingly influential in journalism, and should be revealed for what they are -- forces who want to do away with the only independent monitors of a hugely profitable industry.

Some years ago, the dance critic Arlene Croce penned a line about the relationship between critics and the people they write about. It can also stand as the definitive summation of the relationship between critics and their critics: We are frequently wrong about them. They are always wrong about us.

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