Critics: The Man with the Popular Mind

His column is concocted of bile and bilge. There is no barrier of good taste that he won't breach daily.

—TV Producer

The only TV critic in the nation who is rude, inaccurate, un-Christian and vengeful.

—TV Star

He's a murderer. Anyone who gives him the time of day has lost his mind.

—TV Network Executive

This man writes with his glands. I avoid him, because 1 would probably hit him if I saw him.

—TV Press Agent

To all such acrimony, TV Critic Jack O'Brian, 50, responds with the unruffled self-assurance of a man who has managed to outstay most of his manifold detractors. His column, On the Air, has appeared in Hearst's New York Journal-American for 14 uninterrupted years. "I don't blame the people who hate my guts," says O'Brian. "I do have a capacity to cut very close to the bone, and these people must react. They can't very well blame themselves. So they blame me."

The Muscle. O'Brian's column ignores the conventions to which most TV critics subscribe. He seldom, if ever, indulges in lengthy think pieces; he finds he can contain his reaction to any given show or performer in brief, sharp, personal observations. And TV being TV, his prevailing attitude is aggressively hostile: he frowns on most of what he sees. Steve Allen, a TV performer who has repetitively borne the brunt of O'Brian's scorn, once assayed the critical content of a single column and counted 33 pans against only three bits of praise.

O'Brian lards his critical comment with gossipy, digressive asides. Before this year's presidential election, he solemnly informed his readers that Lyndon Johnson was Jack O'Brian's man. When Lawyer Roy Cohn, a personal friend, put in a guest appearance on TV, O'Brian seized the opportunity to describe his buddy as "articulate, poised, informed, brilliant and even humble"—virtues rarely lumped together in a description of Senator Joe McCarthy's onetime sidekick.

O'Brian's critics might forgive such departures from duty if he took a better view of them and their product. But the performers who bask in O'Brian's favor —Bert Lahr, Perry Como and Walter Cronkite, to name most of them—are vastly outnumbered by those who do not. O'Brian has excoriated Danny Kaye for 15 years on the grounds that Kaye's comic talent never escaped infancy. He is equally steadfast in his disapproval of Ed Sullivan ("Old Smiley"), David Susskind ("Little David"), CBS News Commentator Mike Wallace ("a vacuum") and scores of other performers who fall short of the O'Brian standards. "I'm not a Hessian soldier," says O'Brian. "I can't write what I don't believe. The muscle in my column is opinion, and I can't write anyone else's opinion but my own."