Don’t everybody rush to the barricades at once. In a column last week, Paul Krugman lodged some preemptive complaints about the coverage of Thursday’s presidential debate. He fretted that the front pages would obsess over “how the candidates looked and acted,” at the expense of “analysis of what they said, and whether it was true.” Like Adam Clymer a day earlier, he had a pejorative ready for this foul, superficial practice: “drama criticism.”

It’s one thing to have your profession’s good name tarnished by producers. Their slights can be brushed aside as buck-passing, or misplaced aggression. But an unprovoked slight from the pundit class? It is more than any self-respecting drama critic can bear.

Flush with professional pride, I rushed to respond. The name-calling came easily enough. But when I tried to muster evidence to rebut the charge, the words dried up. Because, really, what could I say? Mr. Krugman certainly misunderstands how drama criticism ought to be practiced, but if he judges solely on how it really is practiced, the charge has the sting of truth.

There is no point in denying it: This is a dark time for drama criticism. Note that I do not say drama critics. On that score, we are probably today not much better or worse than ever – which is to say, not all that we ought to be. Consider the Harold Clurman standard: “To serve as something beyond a privileged press agent with a fancy vocabulary, the theatre critic must be an artist, a historian and a philosopher.” How many Broadway reviews are clearing that bar?

The real trouble towers above all the individual critics. A combination of factors make the whole enterprise suffer. The major citywide papers have dwindled, limiting the diversity of views. (The loss is offset only in part by the Internet, which allows some good people to publish.) At the papers that remain, some very intelligent critics are hamstrung in what they’re able to write, lacking the length to achieve depth, to wrestle with substance.

More harmful than the limited space is the way it is used. In all but the most immediate sense, service journalism (you’ll-love-it-go-see-it vs. you’ll-hate-it-stay-home) does a profound disservice, both to the theater it covers, and to the readers it purports to serve. It teaches audiences to accept what’s offered, and not to demand better. In an early review, Shaw derided the notion that because people in the balcony disliked a play, he should say the same in his review: “It is the business of the dramatic critic to educate these dunces, not to echo them.”

We don’t have to run back to our desks on opening night anymore, but Shaw’s blazing mission can still be daunting for the deadline-addled daily critic. The real failure in drama criticism today is at the second level of coverage, which has all but evaporated. Unless a celebrity condescends to entertain us, New York theater gets decreasing coverage from the national press, glossies and serious weeklies alike. A redesign at the

Village Voice has left Michael Feingold, one of our most authoritative critics, with less space, and less control over how to use it. During the recent, vaunted overhaul of its arts coverage, the Times hired the excellent Charles Isherwood to cover Off-Broadway. But we still haven’t seen the return of the essential post of Sunday drama critic. If you want a snapshot of how theater criticism lags behind the other arts, compare the lopsided coverage it gets every Sunday in Arts & Leisure.

It’s a sadistic paradox: Criticism seems less interesting just when theater is looking more interesting. Talk to people around the theater community, and you get the sense there’s a renewed impulse to engage with real life onstage. Sometimes it takes the regrettable form of bad agitprop, but sometimes it lives up to the theater’s old responsibility to challenge, agitate, infuriate. Who’s going to make sense of this – the profile writers? Who’s going to tell an audience why it’s important-the gossip columnists? Having abdicated the function of telling readers why theater matters, the critics’ spiral continues: less coverage, less attention, less audience.

Do not imagine that critics, in their zeal for the theater, ought to become its cheerleaders. (Seriously, don’t: It’s a scary image.) If anything, criticism deserves to be altogether tougher. Plenty of people mistake this for plain meanness, and you can see why. With their short space and lack of depth, contemporary reviews give people the idea that critics are capricious, tossing off insults because it pleases them. Actually if critics are passionate about why theater matters (we have to assume they are – if they’re not, it’s time to go), then its faults need correcting.

Rebecca West’s words are perfectly apt. In “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,” she called for “a new and abusive school of criticism.” Ridiculing pompously solemn writers would be one duty, as would “listening to our geniuses in a disrespectful manner.” It sounds like fun, but the stakes are deadly serious. Art can save people’s souls, she believed, if they can reach it. The critic’s ultimate duty, then, is “to keep clear the path of letters.” Love on one hand, outrage on the other. Every critic needs Shaw’s lantern, teaching readers to seek new paths; every critic also needs West’s machete, to eradicate what stands in the way.

The metaphor can seem awfully florid when you’re up against a deadline, and scrambling to come up with something – anything – to say about unremarkable Broadway fluff. Instinctively we fall back on amiability, and the safe banality of press releases. In this, theater criticism is certainly a product of its time. There is no essential difference between the straitened exercise of criticism today and the yielding coverage afforded to the White House: Both are an abdication of old duties.

We forget those duties at our peril – ours and the theater’s, and, to the extent that theater can open minds, and art can save souls, to society’s. Fortunately, reminders are as close as the bookshelf. Drama criticism is the tradition of Shaw, Hazlitt, Max Beerbohm, and Kenneth Tynan; in this country, of Stark Young, Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, and Stanley Kauffmann. It’s a valuable lesson for Mr. Krugman, and not him alone.