The Competition between High Culture and Popular Culture as Seen in the New York Times

The Sunday “Arts and Leisure” section of the New York Times for selected years is examined to gauge competition between “high” culture and “popular” culture. From 1962 through 1988 high culture consistently outranked popular culture in percentage of articles, but after 1988 popular culture gained steadily, and by 1993 accounted for 49 percent of articles as compared with only 39 percent for high culture. Most of the gain was accounted for by coverage of motion pictures. For two out of four sub-categories a significant correlation was found between editorial content and advertising, so that one cannot reject the hypothesis that advertising affects editorial coverage. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1997