Tuesday Night Lights

Hey, while you're waiting for the 2:15 PM non event, pretty interesting meta-moment in blogging last night on the Costas Now show Youtubed here by Awful Announcing.

I've never watched before, but apparently they use the old Geraldo format. It was a live Townhall segment featuring in one corner, Will Leitch of Deadspin fame, acting like (gasp) a normal, intelligent human being. In the other corner is Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger playing the crusty old Luddite hurling ad hominem attacks at blogs and bucket full of expletives (with the completely innoffensive Braylon Edwards in a kind of pointless third corner clearly wondering wtf he was doing there).

Costas clearly mediated with the pro-MSM point of view, but truthfully he couldn't have picked a worse matchup (unless he's an Evil Genius and he is trying to make a pro-blog point). And that all goes on the assumption one is necessarily an alternative to the other, when they can do co-exist and will likely co-exist forever. Or until they next new medium comes along and pushes everything else to the side.

The idea of this segment was apparently to use a broad brush to demonstrate the vile and voyeuristic and disrespectful nature of all things sports blog and to show how it has destroyed our discourse. I've never seen Leitch on TV before, but he comes across about as innoffensive as possible. Bissinger not so much. He calls Leitch full of s*** in his very first sentence and whips out all sorts of material from Deadspin to back up his point. As does Costas.

The amazing thing is, Leitch has written a book and about 4 jillion posts, yet everything they threw in his face and demanded some sort of response for was authored by someone else. Some were just plain offensive comments regarding Sean Salisbury. Yes they were a bit much, but they were Comments. I think a five year old can distinguish between the two.

The other material they threw at Leitch was off regular posts, but they were written by others. And Costas/Bissinger couldn't even bother to get the screen names right (someone who goes by "Big Daddy Drew, refered to there as "Big Daddy Balls") or even the author (AJ Daulerio was credited/scorched for a piece that was not his).

And the ultimate irony is attacking a whole genre for it's lack of civility, training, and writing ability by sandbagging a guy that actually has a journalistic background, and is, believe it or not, civil, and is a talented writer. Not to mention that Deadspin is not a place people actually go to to read how their team did last night. The ostensible purpose of the whole Town Hall after all is to show how we in 2008 consume our sports differently than we did in other eras. Deadspin is basically opinion and comedy. And yes, Athletes Behaving Badly and how that is splashed all over the internet. But not so sure you can blame Deadspin for that either; 99 times out of 100 when they go that route they are linking and opining on someone else's story. And that story is often just from the MSM, like this week's Daily News Clemens fest.

So my unanswerable question to the MSM is, what do you hope to accomplish with diatribes like these? Should blogs have to go through some sort of approval process? Do they really think they can bottle all this up and go to some world where only a Chosen Few can tell us what we can see, and some precious others are deemed qualified enough to opine on what they see? It's not like CNBC for example has a pristine record defining "experts" for me, as Jeff at A Dash of Insight often notes.

To me, it's ultimately a meritocracy, albeit an imperfect one. There are some great blogs that get lousy readership and some lousy ones that top the charts. But by and large, it sorts itself out to the extent that the completely unqualified and irrelevent will have a pretty minor role in the discourse that St. Costas and St. Bissinger so seek to protect.