Tom Shales, a Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post who brought incisive and barbed wit to coverage of the small screen and chronicled the medium as an increasingly powerful cultural force, for better and worse, died Jan. 13 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. He was 79.
The cause was complications from covid and renal failure, said his caretaker, Victor Herfurth.
TV critics in New York and Los Angeles traditionally had greater show business clout than one in the entertainment backwater of Washington, but Mr. Shales proved a formidable exception for more than three decades.
