Dave’s Football Blog

I know this whole mainstream media v. bloggers topic has been beaten to death in the last couple of days since Buzz Bissinger’s rant. Even Techdirt has chimed in, with Mike Masnick saying basically the same thing I did — MSM people don’t understand the Internet, nor do they want to. (And yes, Brian, he gives ol’ Bob Costas some stick, too.)

Still, this thought has been stuck in my head for the last day or two, and it’s time I got it out. It involves one of my favorite sports TV shows — ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption.

Here’s the thing: PTI co-host Michael Wilbon is afraid of sports bloggers.

“The notion of blogging scares the hell out of me… There’s no accountability….stuff isn’t edited. It just goes out there as gospel. What it is is opinion.”

Yes, that’s exactly what a worthwhile sports blog is. It’s one person or a group of people giving their opinions on the day’s sports stories. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s thought-provoking. The good blogs, though, remain consistently entertaining and/or informative.

So how is PTI any different?

Seriously, here are two guys going through the day’s sports stories and sharing their opinions on those stories with us. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s thought-provoking. Most of the time, it’s entertaining, or else it wouldn’t have remained on the air for so long.

When you really look at it, though, Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser are doing the exact same thing good bloggers do. They look at the headlines, offer their commentary on them, tell a joke or two and move on. Give Kornheiser hair, replace the Gabor sisters jokes with dead hooker jokes and swap the bear on the trampoline with skateboarder faceplant videos, and he is Matt Ufford.

So what really separates PTI from Deadspin and With Leather? Is it the fact that the hosts have experience in mainstream media? Plenty of bloggers do, too. Is it the fact that the hosts are held more accountable for what they say? The lack of accountability Wilbon thinks blogs have is a myth. Here’s your proof. Is it the fact that they touch upon different topics? PTI didn’t shy away from those Matt Leinart photos, did they?

How about the fact that PTI is backed by a large corporation that has to adhere to certain standards? I suppose that’s true for some folks, but guess what? I write for AOL, which is owned by a large corporation, and I can’t curse when I write for them. I can type “fuck” here all day long, sure, but if I did that on a FanHouse post, I’d probably get fired or, at the very least, suspended — the same way Kornheiser was put “on vacation” the day after he told Wilbon, “Wouldn’t you like to get it done under Oprah?”

Seriously, if a couple of guys did a show a like PTI in their living room and were as entertaining as Kornheiser and Wilbon, their show would be just as big a hit. Outside of sports, such a show exists — Diggnation. The whole show is just two guys sitting on a sofa and shooting the breeze about items that are popular on Digg, a social news web site that one of them created. (Digg, by the way, was the template for sites like Yardbarker and BallHype.) They drink beer and swear a little more, but that’s not the point. The point is that personalities of the hosts and the interplay between them made Diggnation as popular as it is today.

Likewise, the personalities of PTI’s hosts made that show so popular, and the personalities of certain bloggers makes them so popular. We’re all doing pretty much the same thing here. So why does Wilbon fear the bloggers, when in reality, he’s does the same thing a blogger does every weekday?

It might just be the label. People slap this “blog” label on certain sites to keep them separate from the big media. “Oh, we’re not like those people. We have standards and practices.” Ultimately, though, there’s really very little that separates PTI from the top sports blogs. It’s all just media — text, video, audio, photo, etc. We’re all just making media like they are, and we’re having fun doing it, or else we wouldn’t be spending so much time on this it in the first place. Some of us are still finding our voice, and some of us might be a little more vulgar than others, and but really, we’re all the same. We’re just here to watch the games and tell you what we think of them, and we hope it entertains you.

One day, I really hope Michael Wilbon understands that. I believe he can, too. Hell, three years ago, I was telling everyone I knew that soccer was evil, and now look at me.

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