A friend sent me this New York Times article, which summarizes a heated confrontation that took place on the HBO sports media show Costas Now. I’m not usually interested in professional sports-related topics, but this discussion got my attention.
On the show, Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights and other books let rip on Will Leitch, the founder of the sports blog Deadspin. Shortly after the show started Bissinger interjected himself into the conversation.
“I really think you’re full of shit,” he said to Leitch. Bissinger then launched into a full critique of blogging.
“I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed,” Bissinger said. “Here’s insight in blogging, because it really pisses the shit out of me,” he said before reading some offensive comments he pulled from the blog.
Later in the show Leitch acknowledged that some blogs are abusive and not responsible, adding that those are not the ones that become very popular. “The nice thing about the Web is it’s a meritocracy. Sure anyone can start a blog, but to get a readership you have to be serious, you have to be consistent, it’s hard goddamn work…”
The Real Disagreement
This debate isn’t new, but here’s what this particular discussion made me think about.
You get the people in Bissinger’s camp who don’t like what bloggers are doing. Like Bissinger, they say blogs are dumbing things down. Blogs are vicious, uncensored and bloggers don’t have the same accountability as journalists, which negatively affects the quality of the content, they say.
Then you get the people who think like Leitch. Perhaps bloggers aren’t accountable to editors and news organizations in the traditional sense, but they’re accountable to their readers, they say. In response to criticisms about the tone in the blogosphere, they say that the large variety of blogs cater to many different tastes, some are snarky, others aren’t, it’s a question of taste.
Leitch points out that the Internet is a meritocracy. I don’t think you can argue with that — you don’t have to read, listen or view anything online that you don’t want to. Popular blogs are widely read because people like what they’re reading. They keep coming back and sending the stuff they read to friends because they’re gaining something from the content.
The real disagreement between these two camps is over how much faith they have in readers.
Bissinger and others who espouse pro-establishment views obviously don’t trust the average person’s intelligence. If you buy what they’re saying, then almost anything that’s online — no matter how dumb, profane or poorly written — could become popular and mainstream. I mean that’s the fear, right? They’re concerned that everything that’s bad about blogging could become the modus operandi.
On the other hand, Leitch, who is a young Gen Xer, and the rest of the pro-bloggers have absolute faith in the intelligence of readers. They’re counting on the fact that people aren’t going to keep coming back to Web sites that continually get the facts wrong or defame people to the point of disgust. They acknowledge that there will always be garbage online, but their faith in people makes them believe that the Huffington Post will always hold more authority then Perez Hilton.
As a blogger, I predictably tend to side with Leitch. Bissinger’s arguments really didn’t speak to me. During the show, they both touched on the idea that this could be a generational issue. So maybe that’s it.
Bissinger is a baby boomer and his argument about blogging dumbing us down, sounds a lot like Susan Jacoby, another boomer, who makes the same point. It could be generational, but the person who sent this to me is a millennial who strongly agrees with Bissinger and many people have pointed out that most Gen Ys don’t read blogs.
But I do have to give Bissinger credit for one thing. Towards the end of the show, the host asked him whether his distaste for blogs arises from feeling like bloggers are threatening his job. There aren’t many journalists who deal with this honestly, but Bissinger acknowledged that bloggers make him nervous. “This guy [Leitch], whether we like it or not, is the future,” he said.
Check out the clip from the show here.
Read this author's blog.
Because print journalists like those that work at the New York Times have so much more credibility…
Haha, I guess it depends who you’re asking
Print journalists are especially afraid of blogs because print articles are printed at a time and can’t be changed or updated as the news happens until the next day or next edition. If they were a little less technologically ignorant and small minded they might have the vision to realize that instead of focusing on the print editions they could just update the online editions of their papers as the events evolve.
Plus, many of the boomers and people in the media can’t seem to differentiate between blogs that are just meant to sort of expound on the author’s opinions of something (which don’t compete with traditional media) and the blogs that actually try to gather and report news themselves or draw relevant connections between news events (which may somewhat compete with traditional media). However, in my experience there a thousand opinion blogs for every fact based or academic blog.
I didn’t see the interview you referenced and I don’t routinely check deadspin but I do know that it has a reputation for focusing on particularly outrageous and extreme sports stories, such as the michael vick case, rather than sports reporting or positive stories.
Popularity isn’t the same as merit unless you believe that the best judgement of merit is the public at large.
However, we don’t quite work that way. If we did, great works of art would never be unpopular and brilliant books would never go unread. This happens because the merit of an individual work can sometimes only be understood by a few people who have researched the field.
So while it’s popular to call the Internet a meritocracy, let’s recognize that it’s really more based on popularity and marketing technique, with merit as an afterthought.
Kristen O,
Interesting perspective. I think the general public’s collective taste is pretty sophisticated.
As you point out, some things might not receive the recognition they deserve. But in general, I think that people aren’t just going to be interested in something because it’s well marketed.
One of my first blog posts addresses the above issue. In many ways I see blogs as an important addition to democracy. I noticed its importance during hurricane katrina when someone on my blogroll posted photos of her house after it was destroyed. Reading the experiences of people who actually lived through the disaster as opposed to being filtered out by a journalist was absolutely mind blowing.
At the end of the day that’s where the fear lies: people actually speaking for themselves going around the establishment.
I think maybe the framing of the discussion is a little too black-and-white. As far as I can tell from the NY Times article, Bissinger’s problem isn’t necessarily blogging itself, but how some people pursue blogging. And, yes, I think that blogging does have an inherent problem that you always have to consider the source - but then, I assume most people would know to do that. As Tim points out, the NY Times (or other “establishment”) hasn’t been perfect itself in the credibility department - but doesn’t that just underscore the problem of journalistic credibility, particularly in even looser forms such as blogging?
As for calling the Internet a “meritocracy,” I would have to ask, who is deciding what is meritorious? I’m not sure how you can say that the “general public’s collective taste is pretty sophisticated” considering the popularity of MTV, that most Americans seem to get their news from The Daily Show, and that romance books sell more than academic works or even more literary fiction. Don’t get me wrong - I love The Daily Show myself - but I can honestly accept the fact that most Americans enjoy snarkiness and that many bloggers will naturally play to this to earn greater readers. There’s nothing inherently wrong in this, it’s just the way the world works. And I can understand that some people would feel offended by it.