Newspapers, magazines and TV outlets also deny the power of the critics they employ.
Wednesday was a day of charges and denials, of the president pressing his drive to consolidate power, of conservative critics of the president pushing back and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying charges of prisoner rape and torture must be reviewed but could be substantiated only by "irrefutable evidence".
Washington lobbyists do have enormous power — more power, a lot of critics of Washington say, than federal regulators — but Mr. Perry did not mean to say that they are also charged with regulating anyone.
More than ever, critical authority comes from the power of the critic's prose, the force and clarity of her language; it is in the art of writing itself that information and knowledge are carried, in the sentences themselves that literature is preserved.
I am sitting there, rereading Michiko Kakutani's review ("misconceived and offensive"), wincing, laughing, biting my nails, marvelling at the power of the critic and also at the baseness of the critical pursuit, when I hear a voice, elegant, subtle, drifting from my Sony boombox (vintage 1994).
Fueled by the Internet, the trend is also a citizen uprising that undermines the power of food-critic gatekeepers.
Mr. Walser, in turn, insisted that his novel is less about the Holocaust than the power of the critic in the television age, and said he was appalled by the reaction and by the open letter of the newspaper publisher, Frank Schirrmacher.
Ran finally appeared in 1985, and in its portrait of a great man who has lost control of his offices of power, critics were quick to read the experiences of the director himself.
The power of collective bargaining, critics charge, is a cause of the states' fiscal situation.
The comedy premièred Off-Off Broadway in 1982, but the script has been updated with fresh references both broad (the revival of the revival of "Les Misérables") and insidery (the uncanny power of NY1 theatre critics), to skewer — and celebrate — the state of theatre today.
