There’s been a lot of discussion about the recent issue of long-time sports journalists slamming sports blogs as some sort of journalistic poison.  In fact, several bloggers on Bleacher Report have already given their two cents on the topic in reasoned, well-reasoned articles like this one.

It all started with the Bob Costas show Costas Now, and a round table on sports journalism, where he and several other respected writers bemoaned the existence of sports blogs.  Apparently, blogs are tearing down the fabric of journalistic integrity, or so they say.

So here’s one blogger’s two cents on the issue: these “journalists” are missing the point. 

Their anger is misplaced. 

Here’s the hard truth many sports bloggers don’t want to admit:  most of us are ignorant, untrained, crude, and impulsive.  Yep.  I admit it.  A lot of sports blogs actually make me sick.  But if sports blogs are a problem—and I’m not convinced they are—the writers of sports blogs are not to blame. 

The readers are.

Here’s a well-known fact about Web sites: if no one comes to read it, it withers and dies.  There can be no money made or popularity gained by a sports blog if it gets no traffic. End of story. 

Buzz Bissinger, who wrote Friday Night Lights (the book), apparently said that blogs are the dumbing-down of society.  Wrong.  Society was plenty dumb decades before blogs existed.  Blogs may point out society’s dumb-ness in a new light, but they are not the cause of said dumb-ness. 

You can cry about society in general all you want.  Heck, we’ve made “Britney Spears” the most-searched phrase on Google for six of the last seven years.  We eat up celebrity gossip about Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton like it’s candy.  Believe me…if your argument is that society can be lowbrow and silly…you’re preaching to the choir. 

It’s still not bloggers who are at fault. 

Here’s what sports blogs do: They bring fan opinions to the masses. 

Fans have been sitting on bar stools spouting ridiculous opinions to anyone who will listen for years and years…probably since sports began. What blogs have done—what the Internet itself has done—is make it possible to share those opinions with more than just the other drunks in earshot.  It’s a global community now. 

Your view on the issue depends on whether you think media shapes the culture, or merely reflects it.  And I guess I fall on the side of thinking that Americans have the capacity to love the lowest-common-denominator-type stories without anyone in the media having to help us along…for proof, just watch all the drivers gawk out the window at a horrific car accident as the traffic slowly crawls by. 

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