Posts tagged BuzzBissinger at FanHouse

Like a whole lot of other serious bloggers, I didn't need much of an excuse to take a piece out of Buzz Bissinger in the aftermath of his infamous appearance on Costas Now with ex-Deadspin Editor Will Leitch. Since then, Bissinger has been making more positive noises about blogging.

Then again, after getting roasted the way he did online, I don't doubt that he might have come to the conclusion that bloggers could just as easily kill his next book as vault it to bestseller status. But today, I come not to bury Bissinger but to praise him. In particular, to praise him for standing up to the ninnies at the NCAA after they physically subdued Bissinger at the College World Series for -- wait for it -- trying to pass through the turnstiles while carrying a "professional grade" digital camera.

Apparently, Bissinger had been carrying said camera into Omaha's Rosenblatt Stadium all week long without incident, until he was prevented from entering the stadium with the camera in tow, presumably to prevent him from taking shots of the action and selling them.

I find it whimsically amusing that over 30 years after he began his broadcasting career (roughly around the time he used the word "blowjob" as a synonym for the word "choke" in an ABA game) he is somehow being redefined by a one-sided shouting match between a blogger and a vitriol fueled author.

However, if your motivation for watching Costas Now this evening (9 p.m., HBO, natch) is to see a Bissinger - Leitch II, then Costas would prefer you not bother changing the channel. So sayeth Bob to the WSJ.

"I'd like everyone interested in sports to tune in," he says, "but if all they're looking for is a repeat of 'Bissinger vs. Leitch' I'd just as soon they watched something else."

"The truth," says Mr. Costas, "is that this issue was a powder keg waiting to explode somewhere, and ours just happened to be the match that set it off. I think Buzz realizes he did a disservice to the journalistic standards he was claiming to uphold by jumping on Will that way. At the same time, it's easy for many of those in the blogosphere to dismiss Buzz's outburst as representative of the objections the mainstream sports media has to the excesses of the Internet."

No, the truth is that you cannot ignite a powder keg without some sort of spark, regardless of how flammable it is. Matches don't just come careening out of space, flames flying everywhere, looking for powder kegs. In other words, we all know that Costas wanted the Bissinger - Leitch eruption, which makes this kind of palms-in-the-air denial a little hypocritical and certainly tough to stomach.

On the day A.J. Daulerio was named Deadspin editor last week, I asked him about a post he wrote at the Super Bowl a year and a half ago in which he described what he read while looking over Stuart Scott's shoulder as Scott sent a text message.

Daulerio said that while he's never heard from Scott about that post, "I heard he was upset, and rightfully so."

However, Scott talked to Dan Steinberg of the D.C. Sports Bog yesterday, and while Scott said he never reads blogs, he also didn't have anything negative to say about them. Steinberg writes:

I told Scott that A.J. Daulerio, his foil from Super Bowls past, had been named Deadspin editor. Scott wasn't immediately familiar with the name. "Whatever," he said, when I explained who he was. "If that's what he wants to do with his life...."

I can't say I'm a big Scott fan, but he comes across in Steinberg's interview as though he's a reasonable guy in his approach to blogs, not a ranting lunatic. Scott's no Buzz Bissinger.

We've talked a lot about the journalist and Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger in these parts the last couple of months, and for the most part it's been to say that his anti-blog rants are stupid and unbecoming of such an accomplished writer.

But in his long Q&A with Will Leitch at Deadspin, Bissinger made one point that's worth considering. After Leitch said he doesn't think sports should be treated with seriousness, Bissinger said:

We just disagree on a lot of fundamental things. Obviously, the biggest is that sports should not be treated with seriousness. I think Friday Night Lights proves the point of just how serious sports is in our culture. I think the point you do make, that there are too many articles in the print media that are cliched melodramatic tearjearkers that we have read a million times before, is well-taken. I don't like bloggers in general, but too many sportswriters just never get up off their butts and truly delve into subjects. And what comes out is tired autopilot journalese.

Friday Night Lights is a serious exploration of the impact that sports have on one town, and it's the best exploration of high school sports I've ever read. There's a place for sites like Deadspin that don't take sports seriously, but that doesn't mean no one should take sports seriously.

Take a look, on the right, at Thomas Jefferson's wistful countenance. Can't you just picture him thinking, "If I had known what sports blogs would be like, I never would have supported the First Amendment"?

Buzz Bissinger can. The latest stop on his tour of media appearances to explain his hatred of sports blogs is an article in The Boston Phoenix.

Will Leitch has spent the last three years as the web's most influential sports blogger, and now he's joining the dreaded mainstream media.

New York Magazine is about to become his home, but before he leaves sports blogs behind, he agreed to talk to me for an interview in which we didn't discuss Buzz Bissinger (other than him assuring me that he had been talking to New York before the Bissinger blowup -- "it's not like they thought, Oh, that guy was on a TV show, let's get him'") but did discuss Deadspin's past and its future.

What will Deadspin look like post-Leitch? He told me, "I guarantee you, Deadspin is going to be considerably larger in a year than it is now." A full Q&A is below.

You would think that Buzz Bissinger and Nik Richie (theDirty.com, not pictured) ending up on the same radio program, Bill Littlefield's outstanding Only a Game on NPR, would result in the world's first airwave strangulation. Surprisingly, the short interview went pretty well.

There were only a few seconds of real tension in the interview (about 4:24) when Richie attempted to point out the Dirty's "Gossip Disclaimer" as it related to his accusations of Kobe Bryant's infidelity, and the Bissinger starts to go off and mentions "Leitch" again.

But more to the point, since America is clearly tired of talking about Buzz, what really stood out for me was a disturbing statement that Richie made relating to blogger stereotypes.

I'm not really an investigative journalist. I'm just a blogger.

That is a problematic statement. First of all, again, blogging is a medium. "Being a blogger" does not necessarily force one to be a sarcastic gossip/rumor monger. Nor does it preclude one from actually being an investigative journalist.

Richie can say "my blog doesn't deal with journalism" and I would be fine with that, but to perpetuate the stereotype that bloggers do not care about actually being journalists simply because "they blog" is a silly, outdated copout. It is also the primary reason why -- dying medium aside -- newspaper writers dislike bloggers.

I'm not asking Nik Richie to stop doing what he is doing. Blogs and journalism do not have to go hand in hand. But just don't use the "Hey man, I'm just a blogger!" line. Blogs really aren't -- as Buzz pointed out -- "as counterculture as you think", and embracing the anti-journalism stereotype certainly will not help dissipate the notion that a certain medium lacks standards or reasonable perspectives on sports and society.

Add CBS broadcaster Jim Nantz to the legions of mainstream media members who don't like blogs.

Asked in an interview with Dan Fleschner if he saw Buzz Bissinger's infamous anti-blog screed, Nantz said that he read about it, and added:

I have to admit, I'm so far out of the loop on the blogosphere, I really don't partake in that. I know that it's got a huge following. On the few occasions that I have gone or been introduced to it and checked out what's been written, maybe about my world, it's usually so vile and vicious that I shut it down after a minute or two. ...

I really appreciated Buzz Bissinger -- I read he was a little ashamed of his level of anger -- but I completely understood where he was coming from.

Nantz doesn't say which blogs he finds to be vile and vicious, but I would bet that if he read more blogs, and stopped and thought about it a little bit, he would realize that there's nothing inherently vile and vicious about blogs, and that there's plenty of vile and vicious stuff on CBS. There is good content and bad on blogs, just as there is good content and bad on network television.

This might seem surprising given all that I've written about him in the last two weeks, but I admire Buzz Bissinger. Friday Night Lights, which I read in high school, is one of the reasons I wanted to become a sports writer.

And I admire the fact that he's given some fairly introspective interviews since his anti-blog rant made him the subject of great derision. But I also read some of the things he says in those interviews and think he still doesn't get it. Take this, for instance, from Vanity Fair:

I was a little bit surprised that people were so indignant about the use of profanity on a network that basically invented the use of the word "c---" as a noun, adjective, verb, and adverb through the show Deadwood. I mean-we were on HBO, were we not? It seemed to me that, when convenient, people seize on the fact that I used profanity.

Those of us who object to Bissinger's use of profanity in addressing Deadspin editor Will Leitch aren't prudes. I use and hear profanity in daily conversation and it doesn't offend me. Many of my favorite movies and TV shows use profanity and it doesn't offend me.

What offends me is that Bissinger used profanity in place of rational argument, that he used profanity to attack someone, and that he used profanity while decrying the coarseness of blogs. Bissinger seems to understand that elsewhere in the interview, when he says, "I should not have used that invective and profanity." But when he then follows it up by saying he's surprised by the reaction to his profanity, you realize that he still doesn't quite understand why so many people reacted so negatively to his comments.

Washington Post columnist Leonard Shapiro is the latest member of the sports journalism establishment to announce that he agrees with the basic thrust -- if not the profane tone -- of Buzz Bissinger's anti-blog rant last week.

Shapiro writes in his most recent column that he agrees with Bissinger that "Some of the sports blogs, with Deadspin at the very top of the list, have gone way out of bounds on the common decency meter." And then after Shapiro gets through his first round of bashing bloggers, he includes this, which I guess is supposed to make him look fair-minded:

And none of the above is even remotely meant to suggest that blogs ought to be banned. On the contrary, bloggers are certainly entitled to their often uninformed opinions, sometimes based solely on information gathered by the working press with far more access, sources and scruples than most of them.