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03/29 2011

DL544: Is Murray Chass the Westboro Baptist Church of Sports Bloggers?

Posted by Dan Levy.

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Murray Chass wrote something last week that got a lot of baseball writers and other bloggers in a tizzy. We paid attention to it, as a whole, because those baseball writers and other bloggers wrote and blogged about it. Look at this guy! Why do we still pay attention to him?!

Wait…why do we still pay attention to him? If there’s a crazy man ranting on my street corner, do I bring TV cameras over and yell at the cameras that we should ignore the crazy man I just introduced to the world? Or do we calmly ignore the crazy person and go about our day?

What’s the internet equivalent of walking across the street with your head down?

As Nick mentioned on the show, if the news media could find the common sense to ignore the “protesters” of the Westboro Baptist Church, no matter what they did to try and get attention, would they eventually go away? Doesn’t the attention, in some way, justify the method? And, no, we aren’t calling Chass crazy, but the analogy is nearly perfect, isn’t it?

This came up again late last week when Doug Farrar recapped the comments of Fran Tarkenton, who was quoted as saying that the labor situation in the NFL could be fixed if the players and owners just sat down together without lawyers.

Farrar adroitly skewered the old Vikings signal caller, before ending with this:

Tarkenton has been known to spout off on a number of current NFL issues — his takeoffs on Brett Favre and other quarterbacks are generally funny (if a little overblown), but he is so far out of his depth here, it’s hard to know where to begin. Before he starts popping off with overly easy answers that anyone could have come up with (unsuccessfully, to be sure), he should study up a bit on the actual issues affecting both sides so that he can come up with a series of reasoned options that actually work.

And then, maybe his words will be worth our time.

It’s an old blogger device, yes. “Why is this even worth our time?” Well, it was worth the time to write it and it was worth the time to read it, wasn’t it? If not, you just wasted an hour of your life and at least 5-10 minutes of mine to come up with the conclusion that it wasn’t worth anyone’s time. In this case, with Tarkenton who is an NFL legend with a widely-reported quote on a huge issue in the sport, it actually was worth our time to hear it, simple-minded as it may be. Farrar’s only mistake was undervaluing his time (and ours) to make a point.

The issue with everyone writing the same about Chass, however, is that Murray Chass doesn’t have a following anymore. Chass doesn’t write for the New York Times anymore. How much traffic can his blog really be generating on its own? He’s getting his readers from the rest of us talking about it, so why not just ignore it, spending that time on other things rather than writing about how his opinion isn’t worth our time? It’s a waste of time!

Now, I’m not sure if Chass still has a Hall of Fame vote but I do know that as of two years ago he was still getting a seat in the World Series press box. So publicly outing his ramblings could serve a greater public good in that sense. But why not send that to the MLB PR office or to those in at the BBWAA if you were really concerned about his influence? Why make more of a spectacle to something that we never would have seen otherwise?

Nick brought up Bleacher Report (and other blogs that do get traffic and with posts that should actually be ignored) but the difference there is that those sites are already getting a ton of traffic on their own. Ripping an erroneous B/R story or TBL rumor or fill-in-the-blank-huge-blog-you-don’t-respect-here post is, in a way, doing the readers a service. We’re alerting people to the fact that what they’re reading, simply put, sucks. We’re not telling people to read something they otherwise wouldn’t know existed, just to show them how bad it is.

There’s a small difference, perhaps, but it’s there.

If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say..

Nick and I spin that conversation into one about Chad Ochocinco trying to be an MLS soccer player. Is this a real, good, feel-good story or should we be ignoring this obvious three-pronged publicity stunt (Ochocinco, MLS and ESPN)? Does the fact that he’s not very good say more or less about soccer to the average NFL fan?

Plus, Manchester United is the most hated company in England. Not sports team…company. How many of those voters are fans of the team but hate the Glazer family? Last, now that it’s cancelled and only has two episodes left, Nick implores you to catch up on Lights Out.

Thanks for listening.

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Posted on March 29, 2011 at 10:06AM

 

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