Michael A. Walsh (born October 23, 1949) is an American music critic, author, screenwriter, and media critic.
After graduating from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, United States, in 1971, he became a reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in February 1972, where he shared the New York State Publishers Association first prize for reporting with two colleagues for a series of articles about heroin in Rochester. In May, 1973, at the age of 23, he became the paper's classical music critic.
Walsh was named chief classical music critic of the San Francisco Examiner in November 1977, where in 1980 he won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for music criticism. He became music critic of Time magazine in the spring of 1981, where his cover story subjects included James Levine, Vladimir Horowitz and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
From 1997-2002 he was a visiting fellow of the University Professors, Professor of Journalism and Professor of Film & Television at Boston University. For several years he served as Vice President of the board of the Wende Museum, devoted to East German and Soviet art, artefacts and scholarship, in Culver City, California, and is currently a member of the advisory board. He has lectured widely, both in the U.S. and abroad, including presentations in Tokyo, Japan; Munich, Germany; and Budapest, Hungary, where he appeared in January 2015, under the auspices of the Danube Institute.
Since February, 2007, Walsh has written for National Review both under his own name and using a fictional persona named David Kahane, the name of which "...is borrowed from a screenwriter character in (the movie) The Player." This persona has evolved into one of "...a Hollywood liberal who has a habit of sharing way too much about the rules by which they live to a conservative audience."
In January, 2010, in collaboration with Andrew Breitbart, he launched BigJournalism.com, devoted to media commentary and criticism. From December 3, 2010, to the summer of 2013 he contributed a weekly opinion column for the New York Post, and in late June 2012 became a featured columnist at PJ Media, where his political and social commentary appears almost daily.