I can't watch it. My BP is bad enough.

Please comment on this thread...

http://www.armchairgm.com/Lockerroom:I_Urge_You_To_Watch_Costas_Now#end

Wow.

I'm reminded of the last presidential debate - the answers didn't come under fire, the handling of the proceedings by ABC news did. Bob Costas pulled a Stephanopoulis here - what a trainwreck.

And I still have yet to see WHY Buzz is so angry - it's obvious he IS, and at WHAT he is, but WHY?

is it a lack of decency in a couple of posts? Well, then why attack it with profanity and insults?

I'm scratching my head.

what an absolute joke...the buzz guy is a complete asshole

just another idiot in the growing line of old media dinosaurs that are all circling the drain together.

people dont read book or newspapers as much anymore because of attitudes like that asshole

i read deadspin and the big lead and AA because info is presented with a slice of humor from unbiased (mainly) writers and they give me an opportunity to take the articles further and we can all discuss them

keep it up AA i read your site daily but post seldomly. thanks for uploading this video

Bissinger looks like roid-raging Steve Lattimer in that bit. Cool.

sorry that comment by ryan was really me, signed in under a friend account accidentally

keep up the good work fuck that buzz guy

This is amazing.
Buzz needs his own show on ESPN.
He's crazier than Skip Bayless.

Oddly, I found Braylon Edwards to be the most refreshing and insightful of the three. Granted, there wasn't much Will could add, trying to reason with a couple of people unwilling to be reasoned with.

The Matty L. point makes no sense. Wasn't that reported on SportsCenter and PTI, along with being in the newspaper?

I am confused.

Braylon did confuse PTI with Around the Horn but both still yell alot.

Buzz needs a dentist.



NEGATIVE POST

How can we get a hold of Mr. Bissinger and let him know about how we disagree with his opinion? Also, BDB you are absolutely correct with regards to Edwards

Dammit....my fault again....the end gets cut off because it's longer than 10 minutes. Fixing and sorry.

Angry? Incoherent? Full of invective and profanity? Get that man a blog!

Dang.. I forgot lack of fact checking/reasearch.

The more I think about this, the more I hope it was just very badly done satire on his part. I don't think it was, but the optimist in me hopes for it.

If you want to get in touch with Buzz, his email is

buzz.bissinger@gmail.com

Got that from the contact page of his website- www.buzzbissinger.com

Fetus-faced windbag? Come on. That's a pretty good slam of an incredibly inaccurate sports analyst.


15 hours later and I still can't understand why Braylon Edwards was there. He doesn't blog, know anyone who blogs, or reads blogs for the most part.

Here is the e-mail I just sent to Costas at all of the contacts I could find for him:


Dear Mr. Costas,

I lost a mentor today. I watched in horror as you, who I have always admired and looked up to, allowed Buzz Bissinger to ambush Will Leitch on your show last night. I am ashamed of that tactic. I suppose it ranks up there with the best Mike Wallace showing-up-at-the-corrupt-politician's-office piece I've seen.

I spent 13 years in journalism. Most of it as a copy editor and designer in sports in Southern California and at the Sacramento Bee. I have covered sports, including the Lakers, Angels, Dodgers and UCLA. I'm not a guy on the couch or in the basement. I have to tell you that you're missing the point about blogs, and by your tactics last night, all you did was add fuel to the fire instead of fostering the discourse you so earnestly said you sought.

Will Leitch is not a journalist, nor does he say he is. He is a writer, though, and should be respected. To cover him and the guys who DO sit on their couch and rant about girls and boobs and the bad call the ump made is a gross injustice. It is not unlike me roping your work in with the "Boom goes the Dynamite" kid (look it up) or most of the screaming heads on ESPN.

This is a new medium. Instead of trying to fit it into your view of the world, why not try to help shape it? Write a blog. give us analysis. Joe Posnanski of the Kansas City Star writes an excellent blog.

The fact is, 95 percent of the content on the Web is garbage. But so is 95 percent of content on radio and TV. The 5 percent will rise. By coming off as holier-then-thou, you don't get your point across. You simply fuel the garbage.

I would have thought you were above this. I mean, you gave Vince McMahon a fighting chance to answer questions. But Bissinger lost it, and he had no intention of engaging in discourse. So now, the discourse is back online, where people are taking pot shots and cursing up a storm.

So whatever your desired result, what you did was make things worse. Nice work.

Ian Cahir

I generally agree with what everyone's saying. However, Costas and Bissinger do have a point in that the tone propagated on many blogs, including Deadspin, borders on being mean spirited and uncivil. Yes, the commenters are responsible for most of the drek (although sometimes it's the articles), but I think Costas is right that the blog publishers set the tone and, ultimately, are responsible for what gets put on their site.

@ stuart, and him cursing on TV is okay?

I understand Bissinger's point but he was so bitter and angry that it never fully came across. Nice Letter Ian.

No. I wasn't excusing the terrible round table (why the ambush...talk about unprofessional), just saying that one of their points, no matter how terribly made, was valid.

Well done AA.

Although it may be spirited and uncivil (and there are lines to cross), that's what make blogging so great.

You have the right to say what you have to without the newspaper being worried about censorship.

@ssreporters
I understand your point, and I agree that freedom is an advantage to blogs. However, freedom doesn't mean that you're immune to criticism. Complaining about the uncivil nature of certain blogs is perfectly valid, and "bite my nuts, go find another site" is a perfectly valid response to said criticism.

That being said, I'm stunned by the way that Bissinger acted. I had no idea how thoughtless he is, especially after writing such a rich, nuanced book as Friday Night Lights. Genuinely disappointed; and a chance for a decent debate was totally destroyed by his lousy attitude.

They should have just let Ken Tremendous and Braylon Edwards debate.

Good response Stuart.

That's the other problem, there are millions of blogs and Bissinger makes a quick generalization using Deadspin.

I think the best way to get your point across is to talk as loudly as possible while asking questions to someone and not allowing them to answer. Good work Buzz.

I find it amusing that the horrible, mean-spirited blogger is able to speak so eloquently and without offensive language, all the while being given less than equitable time to respond to these comments from Bissinger. Meanwhile, the respectable journalist can't seem to complete a sentence without inserting choice descriptives for his feelings.

By seeing this, it seems that they're more upset that the internet can provide information faster than their respective media. But un-qualified bloggers seem to be a good enough scapegoat.

The whole argument that bloggers are reporting too many rumors without fact-checks is horribly weak. How many times have we seen news reports (not only in sports but everywhere..) later being retracted and/or corrected because a "source" was wrong?

Will handled himself extremely well for being put in such a horribly hostile situation. Thanks for putting this up!

if it makes you feel any better, I still listen to NOFX too.

this all strikes me as the post office bitching about people using e-mail instead of sending letters. fighting it won't make anyone stop doing it because it just makes too much sense, and now you're just making us resent having to deal w/ you the times we still need you even more because you're morons.

um...that analogy doesn't work that well. I just really hate the post office.

Another voice has been added to the bash-a-thon; Michelle Tafoya. I know, I know; how will we ever survive? She visited Deadspin, I think for the first time, and said she could see how it appealed to "a certain segment" of the population, and was completely disgusted. Gee, there's a shock. Get over yourself, you self-righteous bimbo(oh, I'm sorry Michelle; that's should be self-righteous "soccer mom". My apologies). And of course, Vanilla Ice Tirico agreed with her.

It took me a minute to remember who Bissinger is. He wrote "Three Days in August," which was mostly a good book, but made me furious in the introduction when he said that people who are into stats don't really love baseball.

Yeah, I've been to 27 major league ballparks and hold a partial season ticket plan purely because I enjoy being a pedantic asshole.

Change is rough, eh Buzz?

What I find the most insulting is when these experts in the media think that fans are so influenced by what we read on blogs that we can't think for ourselves. I can tell a rumor from a fact. I can do research about a topic myself. I can draw my own opinion about what I read.

I take the same approach, whether I'm reading an article in the newspaper or a blog on deadspin. If I see Ronaldo was caught with 3 trannies, I think to myself, hmmmm... maybe it could have been only 2 trannies, or maybe just one.

But in all seriousness, I wouldn't read a Bissinger piece and take it as the bible, why would I do that with a blog.

The crazy thing about this is other elements of the MSM have turned to blogging as in integral part of their reporting. Sites like Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. actually help drive coverage of political campaigns. Because of this, all major newspapers and TV networks now have some of their political reporters writing blogs. There have been many instances where actual newspaper reporters left to work for a blog/web site (Politico). Why are the sports departments of the MSM so resistent to this change?

F' Buzz Pissinger! I'm a blogger and I'm "mean spirited" or whatever adjective Buzz wants to throw at us, but he sucks! Seriously, he made an ass of himself.

No, Buzz, it's not that they want to give the perception that all athletes screw up and fuck around. Just the ones that screw up and fuck around.

I took History of the Circus in college, doesn't mean I'm a lion tamer

Why aren't Costas and Buzz more outraged at the fact that ESPN has message boards on the vast majority of their articles? Are the conversations on those less vitriolic because they replace curse words with "####"? Read a Jemele Hill article and enjoy the virtuous discourse that takes place afterwords.

All these comments prove Buzz's point. The posters sound like sheep, declaring Buzz 100% bad and Will 100% good. Seriously, how about some good intelligent discourse? It's knee jerk reactions like these (when the blogoshere look like sheep) that makes people dismiss bloggers as infantile. Surely, people don't like everything Will has done.

Thanks, the big read. I too am tired of commenters taking a sheep approach to blog vs. MSM debates. There is a lot of glib drive-by judgment on blogs, and that needs to decrease. Not all of what Buzz said was wrong, although I wish it had come from someone who does NOT foam at the mouth.

NOFX > CostasNow

Jay, Will handled himself with class during the whole mob mentality interrogation by both Bissinger and Costas. Pot meet kettle to both of them. As RT said, if anything the sports MSM is severely behind everyone else. I have yet to see a case of a blogger taking somebody's job at a MAJOR newspaper. If anything, its the newspapers that are buying out people left and right despite people like Jackie MacMullen and Sam Smith being top-notch writers. I don't see them blaming bloggers. Some of the writers are now paranoid though and cannot think that it could be that people don't want to spend money of stuff they can read for free online for mostly the same stuff and then some. Bissinger and Costas need to chill. I guarantee you in 5 years tops, Costas will have a blog among his other sports media monopoloy.

Anon - Agree very much that Will handled himself very well amidst what amounted to Costas holding him down and Buzz kicking him. Costas and Buzz both have an extremely antiquated view of blogs, which would probably change if they read AA, Deadspin or Shysterball everyday. Its not all hatred, vulgarity and rumors. And by responding to blogs with angst, cursing and misinformation they just end up looking like hippocritcal sports wri-tards.

What lispy Will Leitch SHOULD have said as a response:

WL: Hey Buzz... Buzz... hey, old man, shut the fuck up for a second. Take your heart medication and chill the fuck out. Let me respond to your asinine comments about a medium you haven't spent a lick of time trying to understand. First off, you choose one entry from Deadspin to criticize? Is that journalistic due-diligence? Secondly, though I'm sure you walked uphill both ways to school through 3 feet of snow as a child, man invented a better mode of transportation. And you, Bob Costas, is this what you had in mind you tiny fucker? You sit there with your little suit beaming at this exchange. Yea, I talked to some of your staffers. You're a bigger douche than this nasty fucker Buzz over here. You know what, I'm not going to denegrate the medium of blogging by letting you dipshits gain viewership... forget this... I'm out...

Buzz seems to have some anger issues.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0430081tmz1.html

The above is a link to the Smoking Gun website reporting that TMZ (a BLOG) has a story of the 14 year old son of celebrity who is a possible victim of statutory rape. TMZ released the kids name, parents name AND PICTURE of the kid when he is 10 years old.

Oh yeah, TMZ - owned by Time Warner. Also owned by HBO. The post on TMZ is still up despite comments by dozens of readers to take it down. Again - TMZ - owned by Time Warner.

Why does MSM hate blogs? Because they can't CONTROL THEM!

jay, I apologize. I scrolled down too quickly to realize what I thought you wrote the big read.

1) I also love NOFX. Maybe that's our problem?

2) Who the hell is this Buzz guy? I feel bad that he's the only person on that stage I have never heard of. I'm 32, fairly intellignet, raised a sports fan by a sports fan and have followe dsports actively since I was 8. Yet I have not heard of this guy. Maybe it's a fluke, but seriously pulitzer's are nice but they are the journalistic equivalent of the Grammy's: It's an honor just not as much as anyone who has one thinks it is. Milli Vanilli won a Grammy.

Like Rock-n-Roll the internet is here to stay.

3) Running a blog is hard work. My friend runs a celeb gossip blog and she busts her hump. She told me her google reader has 1000+ new items a day. Going through that knowing 95% of it will be useless to you sounds like work to me.

wow - what an ass. Good work on putting the video together.

Lovely debate... Leitch could have won this one without saying anything.

In one sitting Buzz managed to destroy much of the credibility he gained in "his forty years perfecting the craft". His behavior was nothing short of despicable and I can no longer take anything he says or writes seriously.

What boggles the mind is that Costas used commenter posts as examples of the low level of discourse on blogs.

Mister Costas, have you read reader comments on the political primary stories that appear daily at The Washington Post and the New York Times? There is more vicious invective hurled in a single comment section on one of those sites than appeared all last month at Deadspin.

Let's be real: civilized discourse is disappearing in society. Period.

One need only listen to Buzz Bissinger for proof of that.

While you're at it, watch the network and cable evening news. Ten years ago, only the National Enquirer would have covered what have now routinely become the lead stories. Gratuitous pot shots? Mean-spirited abuse? Are you going to tell me with a straight face that a MSM obsession with flag pins and angry preacher sound bites is any less gratuitous or journalistically dishonest than a sports blog?

Please.

As for you, Buzz, singling out Deadpsin and its ilk as exemplar of the dumbing down of our society is either cynically disingenuous or shockingly naive.

I think all you people have to stop slobbing on Will Leitch's Lispy Knob. Doesn't anyone realized that the blogger's merely are writing opionion in response to what someone else has already written? I would say 90% of stories on Deadspin have a link to some story from some newspaper somewhere, and then the bloggers put their own little twist on it. It's nearly plagurism (sp?) if you ask me. Also, who is Furher Leitch accountable to? Who's his boss? Who keeps him in check, Gawker Media? I think that's the underlying issue here. He can write all day long and if something is utter bullshit, what does he do, just make a sorry little "Edit" or "Update"? HOwever, if someone from "MSM" writes something bad, the bloggers call him/her out and they lose their job for it...

Anyone else find it ironic that Buzz criticizes the language used in blogs but starts with "I think you're full of shit"?

were you planning on uploading the rest of the show? I thought you said you were, and I keep clicking back on the site every 5 minutes.

I found it interesting that Mr. Costas used comments from DeadSpin to point out cruelty when there is some self-righteous filth on newspapers' comment sections. It's a problem that many editors are looking at today. You can't argue that the newspapers' article influence the tone. Sorry, there are just some sick folks out there.

New Word--


Fred: What's up, you are all Buzz Bissinger?

Tom: Sorry, had a rough day at work. My Bad


Danny
TheSportHump.com

@anon:

"Doesn't anyone realized that the blogger's merely are writing opionion in response to what someone else has already written? I would say 90% of stories on Deadspin have a link to some story from some newspaper somewhere, and then the bloggers put their own little twist on it. It's nearly plagurism (sp?) if you ask me."

Ummm, that's the point of blogging...you search the internet and find things that will be of interest to your reader, and collect them for the reader, while adding some of your own opinion. That's what a blog is. It's not plagiarism, it's essentially just citing sources.

Looks like Youtube took the videos down...

Also, who is Furher Leitch accountable to? Who's his boss? Who keeps him in check, Gawker Media?

His readers, that's who. Never mind that Leitch is not, and does not claim to be, a journalist, so the idea of comparing him to a traditional reporter is off base. Deadspin is a product, and if the quality slides people will stop reading. Thats the beauty of the internet, if I don't like one site I can leave it and find another.

Yes, bloggers could go off and spout bullshit 24/7. Many do. There are millions of pages of BS on the web, covering a range of topics from sports to politics to religion to gossip. I bet somewhere on the web there's a site which a "doctor" advocates a bacon and whisky diet for robust health. Pure BS (sadly), and the reason pages like that don't get 10 million hits a month is because readers are smart enough to sort through the crap and find the stuff which is entertaining, informative or otherwise interesting.

Like, um, Will, like, um did a, um great, like, um job representing blogges, um.

Will sounded even dumber on NPR when he tried to defend his obsession as a white guy telling black guys they're not black enough.

"it's um, like, well, um, the readers get it. Like, um, it's supposed to be funny."

Buzz was pissed but at least he didn't laugh out loud at
"Good luck working at Denny's douche bag."

Funny stuff and cutting edge. Man them old folks don't know what they're, um, like, um, missing.

Some people just don't get it. They don't like freedom of speech if they aren't allowed to regulate who can have it. Typical MSM. Costas' slanted questions were horrible.

http://sportslocker.blogspot.com/

I dont even understand what that argument is. Are people like Costas and Bissinger saying the only people who can report or even talk about sports are "Journalists" or people who work at newspapers. Talk about elitism. Costas will fit right in with the Chinese Government at the Olympics.

come on AA, u gotta post the radio segment with mad dog. I will be eternally grateful if you do!

Bissinger doesn't strike me as the kind of person who can form a rational unbiased opinion, which is exactly what is WRONG with 99% of the "journalism" in this country. He's a corporate shill just like the rest of his ilk. What a bone head (and a potty mouth).