More The Big Lead-related nonsense

June 23rd, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

Most of the few hundred people reading this right now don’t give a fuck, but whatever, it still irks me, and it’s (50 percent) my site, so I’m going forward. TBL, in his response to Leitch’s scathingly accurate criticism of his comments in the L.A. Times this weekend, linked back to this post a couple of months ago. Back then, I wrote:

A larger point here, at the risk of looking like a dumbass in six months, is that as blogs further professionalize and gain legitimacy, bloggers should expect parallel increases in criticism and credibility. If you’re going to take the game to Yahoo!, AOL, ESPN, and everywhere else — if you want to be at the Super Bowl — you have to play by the rules. To do anything less risks losing everything before really gaining anything. (Which is not to say that blogs have to break news, just that if you fancy yourself a newsman and not just a commentator, you’ve got to get it right, and you’ve got to be transparent.)

Despite McIntyre’s either/or posturing after his link, I stand by that. What I meant to get across at the time was that if TBL was going to present himself as more than an outlet for opinion, if he was going to make himself seem like this tip-collecting omnipotent news-breaker, he had to get things right. All of us do, should we choose that route. That’s the only obligation. I think most reasonable bloggers would have agreed with that far before Buzz Bissinger acted like a jackass on subscription television.

Will’s point is that your blog can be whatever you and your readers want it to be, and that you shouldn’t change for Buzz Bissinger’s sake. My point is that if you want yourself to be a newsbreaker, you have to be right. These are not mutually exclusive distinctions. The rest of us didn’t need BuzzBiss to tell us to “clean up our acts.” We were doing just fine well before that.