Bissinger's Blog Bashing: Over the Top, But On Target

"That guy is a curmudgeonly [expletive]."

"He ended up the total buffoon he was trying to make [Leitch] look like."

"Buzz Bussinger has rendered himself the old man in the neighborhood telling the kids to get off the lawn. He was the biggest jackass."

Bissinger, to his credit, has said he erred in his confrontational approach that night, and he said he knows there are some responsible bloggers out there. But he's not backing down from his main points -- and he shouldn't.

"Their tone is very cruel, and very mean-spirited," Bissinger said on a recent interview with National Public Radio. "They want traffic hits, and when you get traffic hits, you get more advertising and you want to make money. ¿ It's mostly that edgy, off-the-top-of-your-head opinion, and you dumb down the culture."

As for his performance on the HBO show, he admitted, "I was simply too angry. It wasn't a put-on. ¿ It's the kind of person I am. ¿ I do consider blogging not only a threat to journalists, but to society because it's constant dumbling down. I cast too wide a net. ¿But unfortunately, cruelty sells in our society."

It's hard for this slightly less grumpy older man to disagree.

Obviously, a little more civility in his comments that night obviously would have gone a long way toward driving home what many long-time sports journalists believe are absolutely valid points, and he should have been applauded for stating them, instead of being vilified for his over-the-top approach.

Some of the sports blogs, with Deadspin at the very top of the list, have gone way out of bounds on the common decency meter. And the comments that often accompany some of those posts -- virtually all of them written by anonymous cowards who don't have the guts to put their names on their despicable swill -- truly don't deserve to see the light of day.

We're not talking about a First Amendment issue here; it's really just a matter of common decency.

And none of the above is even remotely meant to suggest that blogs ought to be banned. On the contrary, bloggers are certainly entitled to their often uninformed opinions, sometimes based solely on information gathered by the working press with far more access, sources and scruples than most of them. But it's a free country, and blogs -- responsible or not -- surely are not going away any time soon.

Still, Bissinger's concerns should be all of our concerns. Do we want our sports-infatuated kids to grow up reading Deadspin and Kissing Suzy Kolber (don't ask), or would we prefer them to peruse the internet or their local library to read the wonderful work of Red Smith, Shirley Povich, Jim Murray, Dan Jenkins and yes, most definitely Buzz Bissinger?