The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception isn't a book, it's a chapter.

I'll take their definition of The Culture Industry over yours, seeing as they came up with the concept, not you.

Those in the Franklin Circle critiqued everything ad nauseam.

It's Frankfurt, not Franklin... and no, they didn't just aimlessly critique everything. That's a bland right wing argument aimed at feeding ignorance and avoiding curiosity. As the Taoists say; Ignorance speaks as if it knows.

In actual fact The Frankfurt School critiqued specific areas of culture and politics which they believed could become fascist or repressive. They were anti-fascists (having seen the rise of Hitler in Germany first hand).

Even Critical Theory which also gets that hand waving complaint that it "just critiqued everything" is actually interested in highlighting the unexamined and less visible manifestations ideology has in daily life... and it does so with a view towards liberating individuals from ideological traps and knee jerk reactions.

Even their legitimate examinations were formulated with a necrotizing wordiness that made most of their discourse absolutely unpalatable to me.

In my opinion you're using far more wordy and obfuscating language than The Frankfurt School (which seems hypocritical given you're admonishing them for it, then doing the same thing yourself).

The more they spake the more I mourned the fact that there was no more Alexander to demonstrate to contentious men such as these that one could untie the perplexing knot they ruminated over simply by pulling the linchpins from their yokes and exposing both sides at the same time.

You're obviously trying to be wordy for some reason. Personally I find your critique of The Frankfurt School only slightly more substantive than the first line of William S. Lind here:

"Political Correctness is intellectual AIDS." -William S. Lind 2004

"Philosophers like Adorno and Horkheimer are the result of a syphilis which gives lip service to achievement while criticizing all that is." -You, 2018.

Judging from your complaint that "They critiqued too much" (rather than you know - investigating whether their critiques were valid) - I'd say you've been somewhat informed by negative and right wing ideas... it's like going to the left and asking whether the right are reasonable or having anything positive to contribute - they're going to say no out of the same knee jerk ideologically driven assumptions and lack of thought that The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory were trying to dissolve.

Sorry they weren't to your tastes.

Anyways, I'll let you get back to whatever it is reptoids do on earth. Night.

Cultural Marxism was The Frankfurt School's critique of The Culture Industry. It was an early critique of mainstream media and neo-liberalism. Adorno had things like this to say:

"The Culture Industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them."

"this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of “fully exploiting” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger."

"The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape" -Theodor W. Adorno, Enlightenment as mass-deception

Meanwhile Marcuse warned everyone that "progressive politics" could also become repressive and regressive in it's own ways:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al3aOuqpVbs

...and The Birmingham School warned that culture was drifting away from local culture. Due to the Massification of culture in the form of the globalization of media + tabloid journalism.

This was a pre-internet critique of mainstream media and neo-liberalism, and ended around the time media became more democratized in the 80s, when the internet began to be foreshadowed with Zines, DIY culture, and public radio/TV. That's when the tail end of the Birmingham School declared the need to critique mass media to be kind of over because everyone could talk to everyone.

....of course, the right wing conspiracy theorists will say it's SJWs and a jewish plot that runs the media... but it was actually critiquing the media.