Two weeks ago, Canadian sociologist Sarah Thornton won £65,000 in a libel action over Lynn Barber’s 2008 review of her book Seven Days in the Art World, published in British broadsheet The Daily Telegraph.

In the review, Barber had expressed surprise to see her name in Thornton’s list of interviewees, claiming she hadn’t actually been interviewed. She also alleged that Thornton had offered interviewees final copy approval on their contributions.

The court found both allegations to be malicious falsehoods. In his judgment, Justice Tughendat called Barber’s review “spiteful … personal and disparaging”.

Yet, importantly, Barber didn’t defame Thornton through personal denigration, but by wilfully impugning her intellectual honesty and journalistic ethics — the building blocks of a freelance writing career.

Merely being spiteful is actually a cherished spectator sport in the literary community, from Alain de Botton’s “I will hate you till the day you die”  to Clive James’s famous up-yours poem, The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered.

Sometimes it’s even a contact sport, as when Gore Vidal was punched at a dinner party by Norman Mailer, only to retort, “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.”

But more often, reviewing is like hugging with knives. As Francis Wheen points out in the Financial Times, the longer you work in the book biz, the better acquainted you are with your fellow authors, critics, editors and publishers, and the more a frank opinion can seem like back-stabbing.

I’m reminded of Anthony Trollope’s still startlingly contemporary satire The Way We Live Now. Lady Carbury, author of such slapdash potboilers as Criminal Queens: Powerful Women as the Playthings of Love, energetically coaxes positive reviews from her literary acquaintances. She appeals to one, Mr Booker, promising to review his book favourably if he’ll do the same for her.

“Bad; of course it is bad,” Mr Booker remarks to a friend of this quid pro quo arrangement. “How many very bad things are there that we do! But if we were to attempt to reform all our bad ways at once, we should never do any good thing. I am not strong enough to put the world straight, and I doubt if you are.”

Book reviewing is certainly fraught in Australia, a market so small and marginal market that, as Louise Pine writes at Overland, reviewers feel pressured to pull their punches. Gideon Haigh’s 2010 essay Feeding the Hand That Bites is pretty spot-on in describing this cosy culture.

But as Ben Eltham opined earlier this year, and as The Age’s Craig Platt wrote in the context of comedy reviewing, the industrial climate at the most widely read review publications often forces reviewers to cosy up to safeguard their careers.

The Los Angeles Times recently sacked its review freelancers, many of whom were career reviewers rehired as freelancers after being dropped from the paper’s staff. The market no longer values their critical judgments, built on years of accumulated cultural capital.

So, who’s replacing them? Often it’s other authors, and experts in a given book’s field. This doesn’t always produce well-considered assessments, because the reviewer is not only addressing the text but also his or her stake in it. This can make reviewing seem like a community that speaks to and about itself, rather than a technique of disinterested critique.

Think of the retired politician shamelessly name-dropping and recasting his contemporaries in his own ideological image; the rival biographer trashing her competitor; or, in Barber’s case, the art critic retaliating to a book that unflatteringly depicted her actions as a Turner Prize judge.

Other mainstream reviewers are staff writers without critical backgrounds, but with an interest in books; media proprietors can meet review coverage obligations by leveraging the enthusiasms of their existing employees.

As a result, those who aspire to be career critics can find it harder to build a reputation based on a distinctive, authoritative voice. Meanwhile, the mastheads they write under continue to attract prestige. Authors and publishers are always pleased to get reviews in The Age or The Australian … but it’s less important who writes them.

It’s cliched to talk about “bloggers versus journalists”, but younger critics do struggle to be respected for what they write, rather than where they’re published. I understand Luke Buckmaster’s anger at the Melbourne International Film Festival’s closing-night treatment of him and five other official festival bloggers, but I’m not especially surprised.

It’s tempting for emerging reviewers to embrace the knives as a way of getting their names out there; after all, critics including Dorothy Parker, AA Gill and Charlie Brooker are celebrated for their witty cruelty. But while not every hatchet job might attract a libel suit, it’s still lazy reviewing. Only by putting a dollar value on professional critics who engage frankly but fairly with a text can we combat the bland insularity of a reviewing culture that just smiles and hugs tighter.