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The seemingly endless debate between mainstream sports media and the blogosphere, generally as cordial as that of the mongoose and cobra, took another turn Wednesday night on the HBO show Costas Now, when Deadspin editor Will Leitch was thrown like a sacrificial lamb to a nearly salivating Buzz Bissinger. Click here to watch the segment in its entirety. The talented longtime sportswriter and author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August may be many things, but a lover of new media is not one. He attacks Leitch, Deadspin, and blogging generally, cherrypicking individual posts from the site (about as legitimate as condemning the entire newspaper industry based on one column from Jay Mariotti), after stating:

I feel very strongly about this. I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed.

Good to know he entered the discussion with an open mind.

As someone who works with a foot in both worlds, I’d say the speed thing is probably true (not like mainstream journalism, of course, where writers are encouraged to take their time, deadlines be damned). The other two? Maybe I missed that page when thumbing through my Great Blogger Handbook, but I didn’t see them listed. Bissinger reluctantly and more than halfheartedly conceded that his generalizations about the blogging world were just that, but still launched into seemingly any form of sportswriting not produced by seasoned pros such as himself with invective normally reserved for Nazis and Enron.

Despite Leitch’s attempts to seem like a decent, likeable guy (which, in my limited dealings with him and by reputation, he seems to be), there’s no question his website periodically crosses the line between satire and mean-spiritedness. That doesn’t mean it isn’t funny- I love Deadspin- but I get why it ticks some people off, and overall I think he soft shoed the idea that even when they’re being funny, DS can get pretty rough with those subjected to their treatment. At the same time, I felt bad for him. First, he was set up by everything from the video introduction to the roundtable to Costas’ personal welcome as the bad guy, the irresponsible face of new sports media with neither the class nor the skill of his ink-stained predecessors. That’s not fair. Earlier in the day, Leitch correctly forecasted he’d be on the show as “The Spokesperson for The Internet,” which isn’t fair, either.

Moreover, Bissinger especially and other mainstream media types (like Costas) also miss the point of Deadspin and other sites across the blog universe. Whether it’s Deadspin, Fire Joe Morgan, Awful Announcing, or many of the other widely read sites upon which MSMers tend to focus, the reason they are so successful, beyond often insightful observations about sports, is because more often than not they tap into what most fans are thinking and what many mainstream journalists would say or write… if they could. They, especially FJM, tend to focus on subjects who draw attention to themselves, whether it’s through bad or obnoxious behavior, or (perhaps more egregiously) a tendency to take themselves far too seriously.

They, to use an expression I came to love during my year in Australia, take the piss out of the high and mighty. In that, they fit right in with a long history of editorial tendencies in print.  They just have MySpace pages and cell phone cameras at their disposal.

Look, I take what I do seriously, whether it’s at SHLA or ESPN The Magazine, or the LA Times.com. I work hard to deliver information and opinion in a way that’s entertaining to my audience. I understand that I have neither the background, nor quite frankly the talent of a Buzz Bissinger, but if I do a good enough job I’m confident people will read what I have to say. And, where possible, I supplement my opinion with access to athletes, coaches, executives and the like. Hopefully that makes for a better read, too.

At no point, though, do I take myself overly seriously, or pretend that because when I go to a Laker game with an LA Times credential it makes me somehow more qualified than someone watching at home to judge whether or not the purple and gold defended the pick and roll with verve and vigor. At the same time, the access of sportswriters does provide insight and perspective that can’t be gleaned at home. Someone has to talk to these people. The best bloggers and enthusiasts of them understand that, just as the best mainstream writers understand the value of what the web can offer.

During the, um, discussion, Leitch quite rightly points out that the Internet, despite providing a platform to any shrieking head with a phone or cable line, is actually a giant meritocracy, much more than newspapers. The process of accountability is faster and easier to judge. Either you get hits, or you don’t. There are drawbacks to that- some sites will go to increasingly off-putting lengths to get eyeballs on the page, but in the end, if the product isn’t good, if people don’t like it, it’ll go away. I can tell you, just as Leitch did Tuesday night, that maintaining a high quality site day in and day out is extremely difficult work.

The Matt Leinart beer bong photos were brought up as an example of how tawdry Deadspin, and by extension this site, since we wrote about it, too, can be. How dare they publish pictures designed simply to embarrass a young guy like Leinart in his off time. What news value could it have? Well, both Bissinger and Costas ignored that the story was picked up by the mainstream media for the same reason it was given attention by everyone else, namely that Leinart is the starting quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals, and has a well-earned and increasingly tiresome reputation for not taking that job particularly seriously. Hot tubbing with underage girls doesn’t really take the edge off that image.

Hey, don’t all 20-somethings do that sort of thing? Well, no. I gave up the beer bong once I got my college diploma. Probably before. But either way, most 20-somethings aren’t NFL quarterbacks, in a position to receive special and preferential treatment in any number of areas. Certainly that comes with some responsibility. Leinart didn’t screw up once, it’s part of a pattern. That’s why it was news.

There are great sports blogs, and there are bad ones, just as there are great columnists and bad ones. Great reporters and bad ones. There are plenty of things about blogging and the Internet and the unending 24 hour news cycle that I don’t like, but having lived in both worlds for a while, I can tell you the best and worst attributes exist in both.

Reading about l’affaire Bissinger today on the web — not surprisingly, the general consensus out in the ether is that he came off as a total jackass — the best summary came from one of the best writers I know in any medium, Jon Weisman at Dodger Thoughts. In his post from Tuesday night, Weisman eloquently sums up why Bissinger was so wrong, and why people like him who equate Internet sports journalism with the end of decency and humanity miss the mark:

“…tonight’s debate revealed the limitations of mainstream media in examining its own value. Their sanctity is taken as a given, their merits unquestioned. Sure, they say, there are some good blogs - a minority, of course - to go with the overwhelmingly noxious. But would they dare point out that there are some poisonous sportswriters - a minority, if you like - to go with the truly angelic? Not tonight. There are mainstream writers that understand this, but I guess they mostly keep to themselves…

The fact is, even as the consumption of information migrates online, even as the economics of the business are forever altered, a quorum of readers and writers are still interested in truth. Journalism is not dying. It may be evolving, but it’s not dying. It’s living and breathing - breathing fire at times, just like it always has. (Or was Charles Foster Kane modeled on a blogger?) What decay there is isn’t the bloggers’ fault, it’s the business model’s, as well as that of some of the leadership.”

Without a doubt, there’s vitriol out there on the Internet. But that’s not the medium; that’s some of the messengers (especially if you’re going to count, as Bissinger did, the most acid commenters as bloggers). You can find hate speech and irresponsibility around every corner of the universe, and it’s telling that by far the most hate-filled person in the debate tonight was the man who has spent 40 years “perfecting his craft.” What an advertisement for convention he was. Cloaking his venom in the concept of protecting integrity, when he brought so little integrity to the debate himself, was embarrassing if you weren’t too snowed to realize it.

How do you spend decades reading and writing and not grasp that every medium, from theater to film, from television to print, from cave drawings to the Internet, has its strong and weak? You do that when you are the very thing you so deride in others: biased, and more in love with the sound of your own voice than the possibility of hearing truth in others.

Amen to that.

Brian Kamenetzky hosts the Lakers Blog and Blue Notes: A Dodgers Blog for the LA Times.com. He’s a contributing writer to ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, and can be heard regularly on the Steve Mason Show, on 710 ESPN radio in LA. Write him at bk@sportshubla.com.

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