Letters to the Editor
The Brad
Published Letters: 155 Editor's Choice: 17
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I'm in the Deadspin wheelhouse...
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]as I'm a 20-something white (& white-collar) male. I've logged something close to daily time on Deadspin since '06, but my ardor has been gradually cooling, mostly because Leitch can't keep his mouth shut. He's a nice guy, reasonably reasonable and all that, but as an employee of Gawker he is absolutely unqualified to lead the blog charge.
Deadspin makes its bones not on astute analysis (indeed, most of Deadspin's playoff previews and team-by-team breakdown duties are farmed out to other bloggers or sympathetic sportswriters) but coy character games. A photo of Matt Leinart with two co-eds and a beer bong is funny, sure, but Leitch insults everyone's intelligence by claiming the photos go up because it makes Matt "human". Read the comments; no one's gobsmacked by Matty's humanity. Everyone's there to, well, gawk. The Brady Quinn=gay meme, the Tom Brady=gay meme, the pandering shots of Allison Stokke and Erin Andrews... this is not the brave new world of sports fandom, this is the same old base-level amusement, enshrined on a server. I understand that you don't judge a blog solely on its comments; but when 10% of your posts are about balls, expect that to trickle down. Leitch is a fine writer: not in the sense that he can craft a pleasing phrase or provide penetrating insight, but in the sense that he writes with a minimum of grammatical mistakes and maintains a consistent gee-whiz-I'm-just-a-nice-fan-with-a-dream tone. Every so often, when an athlete dies or Deadspin is attacked in the mainstream media, he mounts a pleasant response that blows his commenters - largely smart guys and girls with a good BS meter, made lazy- away.
Fire Joe Morgan, the site cited in HBO's taped segment, could have offered a cogent argument for the blogosphere-as-Fifth Estate. For their day jobs, these guys are writers in the MSM, for God's sake, and Costas chooses to grill the head of a Gawker Media blog that gets a crap-ton of hits. Clearly, Costas wanted to take the internet to task, and as the editor of a site that once broadcast an ESPN anchor's voice messages to a girl in a bar, Leitch (bless his heart) is a fine recipient.
With one mouth Leitch, AJ Daulerio, and the KSK crew protest their validity as sportswriters; with the other, they provide or enable a stream of content revolving around horse cocks, bangability, and creepy MSM gossip. I'm not going to lie here; I'll leer at Deadspin's post of Naked Santonio Holmes, or thrill to the Chris Berman YouTube clips, or chortle at Sean Salisbury gossip. It's a fleeting fix, though; it's non-caloric and barely tangentially related to sports. And it's a Deadspin standby. I get that Stuart Scott, Berman, and the like need to be taken down a couple pegs in our collective estimation, but that's not sportswriting. That's not the vanguard of the 'revolution'. That's cheap meat for bored eaters. And Costas could've had a much better meal to chew on if he'd chosen another blogger.
I'm not trying to suck up here, but King's a good example of internet sports writing that's worth a damn. He's got a sense of history, is judicious with the coarser talk, and provides analysis, rather than analysis generously leavened with photos of drunk athletes. For schadenfreude and good ol' unrestrained snark, Deadspin's my destination. For writing... not so much. Ever.
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I much prefer
[Read the article: Watch "The Love Guru": Go to hell]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Make this movie: go to hell."
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Sarcasm
[Read the article: Barbara Walters interviews Barbara Walters]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]is rarely becoming from writers defending their work. You were right, David was wrong; leave it simply as that.
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from Wikipedia
[Read the article: Networks call Indiana for Clinton]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]WorldNetDaily, also known as WND, is a conservative [1][2] web site and online news site, founded in 1997. It is currently in the top 90 news sites as listed at Alexa.[3] It has been described by some writers as 'far right' in its political leanings.[2]
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from Wikipedia
[Read the article: Networks call Indiana for Clinton]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]WorldNetDaily published an editorial[39] in December 2006 written by Jim Rutz of "Megashift Ministries" where he claimed that eating soy at a young age increases the chance that a child will be gay, and that soy's estrogen content will feminize a young boy. Rutz is not a doctor or nutritionist, but has founded his own church.
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Someone should tell Mike's kids
[Read the article: "Crank That (Mike Gravel)"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That their dad got out of the home again.
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Meanwhile...
[Read the article: Clinton makes another electability argument]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ron Paul mails RNC Chairman Mike Duncan three coupons for $6.99 haircuts at Great Clips.
Moving on...