Grid Effect

So, remember when I said a couple days ago that HBO might be unsalvageable without the presence of any original scripted series? Well, umm, yeah (clears throat), we may have been wrong about that, or at least for ninety-one minutes last night When Bob Costas held a panel discussion about how professional sports are handled in the media. We probably could have recommended this yesterday instead of mocking Jeff Probst’s sensibilities. Pssh, whatever. We stand by the decision and offer no apologies.

The format was five different topics consisting of sports talk radio, blogs, television, beat reporters, and race in sports; each segment with their own panel and worthy of it’s own ninety minute discussion, since Costas manages to regularly bring in either qualified perspectives or personalities and didn’t disappoint last night. But the one that was the most contentious and messy was the “discussion” on blogs. We use quotations because it was more of a berating that an actual exchange of thoughts and ideas.

This panel consisted of Braylon Edwards, a wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns, Buzz Bissinger, best known for his novel on the Odessa Perriman football team, “Friday Night Lights”, and Will Leitch, author and editor of the website Deadspin. Deadspin is a sports blog that posts roughly fifteen times a day on varying topics and is probably our biggest distraction at work. It provides a fresh, humorous, almost lighthearted perspective on sports and athletes, gets close to 15,000,000 hits a month and for whatever reason angers those in traditional media.

Well, it’s not for whatever reason, they seem to be vast and misguided for the most part. This hostility can mainly be contributed to three factors: Many members of what’s widely referred to as the “mainstream media” since a growing irrelevance and downsizing of their medium, many think that blogs are salacious and disparaging with no motive, and many of them are just vindictive because of something they’ve read about themselves on blogs.

The host in his younger days, an amiable bloke but we disagree on the topic at hand.

And there is some credence to this, particularly the former. Anyone who watched the final season of The Wire knows how marginalized daily newspapers are becoming, and much of that fact is due to the internet and the incentive people have to update news and provide op-ed material on their own. It’s free, it’s convenient and based on that alone the demand for blogs isn’t going to relent. There is certainly some truth to the latter two, not all blogs are respectable and I’m sure have on occasion (if not regularly) said something uncalled for about a member of the media. And it certainly seems Buzz Bissinger has felt the scorn once or twice in his life, because his vitriol was off the charts.

The debate essentially consisted of Buzz screaming like a lunatic, Costas cutting him short way too late and asking for Leitch to explain himself, while Braylon Edwards mostly sat uncomfortably and waited for Costas to ask him his opinion (he did twice). But the biggest issue we take with Buzz is how misinformed and unfair he was. First of all, he did everything he could to lump all blogs together, which is just asinine. Will Leitch has no judicial control over what content is on any other blog other than his own. That would be like blaming the New York Times for something written by the Washington Post, what does one have to do with the other? I think Buzz was just struggling with the concept that when he goes from one webpage to the next with relative ease he is reading two, separate unrelated perspectives, which is what makes web-based content so appealing to so many.

And to his credit he brought in quotes and pieces from Deadspin itself to voice his discontent. But he managed to take everything out of context and seemingly did so intentionally. This just accentuated his self-righteousness. It all came to a head when he cherry-picked a quote that if read by itself is much more likely to be construed as offensive when the rest of the article wasn’t included. But when he accused Leitch for every blog on the internet not being 100% accurate, he accredited the article he was quoting from to the wrong author. The irony was rich if also infuriating and befuddling.

Costas, while doing his best to seem neutral, certainly seemed to have a predetermined opinion on the subject, asking Leitch to explain the commenters on his website (which more often than not seems to devolve into a tedious game of one-upsmanship ),, and subsequently asked him if he would hypothetically rummage through someone’s trash or used something someone else found from someone’s trash as a story. This probably more than anything else dictated the tone of the “debate”.

Edwards offered a little support for Mr. Leitch, but for the most part used a story about photos on the website of Matt Leinhart drinking at one of his I’m sure many house parties. Edwards isn’t the issue, however, just a bystander caught in the middle of a greater battle. His opinion basically stemmed from his noticeable paranoia about being caught in such a situation and was taking it personally. The issue is people are genuinely curious about professional athletes, and it’s not like these guys are hounded by paparazzi everywhere they go.

Leinhart threw a house party, invited several people into his house I’m sure he was unfamiliar with, someone snapped a photo of him getting drunk with some coeds (who turned out to be under 21, if that counts for anything), said person sent it into a website and Leitch chose to run a post about it because your average fan is curious what Matt Leinhart’s life might be like off the field. It’s that simple. Is Leitch not supposed to run it because he should be worried about offending the quarterback? Leitch’s primary concern is entertaining his readers while they trudge through another bland day at work, not protecting the reputation the quarterback on his favorite NFL team. It seems like if this is something you are tremendously offended by then it’s a pretty quick fix: don’t read it.

One would think we’d be even more incensed with HBO after the essential sandbagging they did to one of our favorite sportswriters, but we’re not. We can’t really explain why, but the contention between blogs and traditional media is most heated in the sports world and they provided a forum for a debate that is long overdue, even if it was 80% one-sided.

We could write about not only the internet segment, but the other four for hours on end, but this is a television blog and were only able to write about it on a technicality (the special was on television). But just know that if you watched the segment and found yourself agreeing with Bissinger and never read Deadspin, here is the follow-up story from Will Leitch on the experience and the article that Bissinger quoted from. You can decide for yourself if this seems like credible entertainment or just interesting content. We’d argue both, but we’re just a lowly blogger so please disregard anything we say as “unqualified”. Since apparently it requires so many credentials to state an opinion that any rationale human being could find reasonable.

Sorry for the tangent, Survivor recap tomorrow.