It’s been a week since best-selling author (and Philly Mag contributing writer) Buzz Bissinger assured himself internet immortality by tearing into Deadspin editor and sports blog ambassador Will Leitch during a live segment on HBO’s Costas Now. The blogosphere’s reaction — and his wife’s — was instantaneous and scorching, and Bissinger has been apologizing for his meltdown ever since. Philly Grill gingerly requested an interview this morning to see whether he’s had a real change of heart. — Brian James Kirk
I want to start by asking why you were so angry. You basically began by telling Will Leitch that he’s “full of shit.”
Well, I’m not going to take back what I said — although I’ve [now] had the opportunity to see sports blogs that are information-based. But nobody should have profanity directed at them. All I did was subsume the valid points that I wanted to make. Go ask your editor — sometimes I go too deep and too far, and this is what happened. I felt that some of Leitch’s answers didn’t strike me as particularly honest.
We revel in humiliation, we love it. We revel in gossip and trash and dumbing down and mockery of people more than ever. Not all blogs are representative of that. In the glow of the moment, many of the fellow panelists were congratulating me. We grew up in the same era. I looked at e-mails that said “You’re a dickhead,” “You’re a douchebag,” “You need psychiatric help.” What turned me were e-mails from fans that were cogent and calm and well-written. They were expressed with a tone of sadness. Also, my wife said I was way over the top and undignified.
You attacked Leitch over whether he’s read the famous sportswriter W.C. Heinz. Do you think its fair to compare W.C. Heinz and a blog post?
Heinz was a gorgeous writer. It’s been suggested to me that if he was growing up today he’d be a blogger. I don’t know if that’s true, plus I don’t care — it’s a silly hypothetical. I rarely see that type of gorgeous writing. He had the ability to go to events and report, observe and craft them into beautiful writing on deadline. I don’t see that on Deadspin or a lot of sports blogs. I do see a lot of blogs that have good information. But blogs want reaction. I personally think that many bloggers want to see the end of newspapers. I’ve gotten e-mails saying “We are the future, we’re the new kids on the block, fuck newspapers.”
To set the tone of the segment, Costas read out some comments from Deadspin posts. Do you think forum-style comments change a reader’s perception of a blog?
It’s not separate, because a post is written to generate comments, and frankly, sometimes the comments are more interesting than the post, based on whoever can make the most clever reference to “cock” or “dick.” You want comments because you want traffic. One of the best ways to make traffic is to mock and be cruel.
But, as a writer, isn’t the intention to create a dialogue? This is just a more transparent way of doing it.
It’s wonderful to have dialogue if the dialogue is cogent and makes some sense. Take a look at the New York Times article about it. [Richard Sandomir] said that I came off as a lunatic prosecutor. But he called me for comment, he called Will Leitch — it wasn’t just some goal to humiliate me and my family as much as possible. Look at how Deadspin played the death of Eight Belles — talking about how she’s in heaven with Barbaro and that they’re not playing with Christopher Reeve. Go look at it.
But none of this excuses the way I treated Will Leitch. I’m truly embarrassed. That’s not fit for spin, that’s not to make him feel better. I got way too heated up.
There was a lot of talk about access and what it means to sports coverage. But as a new medium, blogging often doesn’t have the same type of access that you have.
Reporting is what makes stories great. Any one of the bloggers could go down to Odessa, Texas, and could do what I did to write Friday Night Lights. There’s no mystery to how that book was done: I got up off my ass and quit my newspaper job to do it. Many do it at a far greater risk — they go to hotspots, to Iraq or Afghanistan. Blogging is based on opinion, but at a certain point of time, because it’s the present. There has to be a greater sense of reporting.
At one point, Costas brought up the new media vs. old media argument. You said on the show that you’re not the future. Do you really think that?
Of course I’m not the future. Is the written word the future? It doesn’t seem so to me. I grew up as a newspaper reporter — that’s where my sensibility comes from. Newspapers are dead because they’re trying to do blogs, but they can’t generate traffic because they’re set to a higher standard.
But isn’t it your duty, then, to explain to bloggers how to do it right and with integrity?
That’s not my duty. My duty is to my craft, my duty is to my children. I said that in a very un-artful way on Tuesday, but I was basically told to go fuck myself. They’re not going to listen to me anyway. They’re thinking “He’s just tired, he’s just an old windbag.”
Yes, but you attacked Leitch — what reaction did you expect?
He took the high road. I’ve since talked to a few of the guys at Deadspin. Leitch seems like a good and reasonable guy who conducted himself well and was enormously gracious. The yelling and screaming didn’t help me make the point.
Have you changed your mind at all about blogs?
I really want to emphasize that regardless of what I feel, the manner in which Will Leitch was treated was totally unprofessional and embarrassing to him and more embarrassing to myself. I also want to reiterate that as a result of this, I’ve looked at more blogs, and there are some good sports blogs out there. Having said that, I still think the majority of sports blogs are just not very good, and are dedicated to a kind of maliciousness and invective in the hopes of generating comments. I have not done a wide-ranging analysis, and one of the problems with what I did on Tuesday was make sweeping generalizations, which is always a bad idea for anybody to do.
Originally published on Philly Mag’s Daily Examiner on May 6, 2008.
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