Hm, if a journalist is going to describe something as a "much lauded performance," I'd expect her sources to be people lauding the performance, not her own judgment of the performance itself. It is weird if she hasn't seen it herself (so she can judge whether the lauds are sensible enough to pay attention to, to avoid manufactured lauding as you suggest) but it isn't that weird if her primary evidence for the claim that a thing is popular is media sources.