The Hot Blog

David,
What's your take on Buzz Bissinger's (Friday Night Lights)rant on Costas Now the other night? If you haven't seen it, I believe its the second panel discussion of the media and sports themed show. Its HBO On-Demand, if you have it (almost certainly on You Tube by now, too). I know the show is about sports but I still think his rant is worthy of discussion. You'll know what I mean when you see it.

The segment from Costas Now is here.

I'm not 100% sure how I feel about it. I think there are good points scored on both sides.

The problem I have - and this is another example of it - is that there is a place for everything... but everything must find its place.

Many, many people are either unwilling or incapable of separating the ideas of news and reporting and thoughtful writing from simple, sharp-edged, cheap-shotting gossip. And they are different.

When I first started The Hot Button, Roger Ebert kindly wrote about the column in Yahoo! Life and called the column, "Gossip of the highest order."

I hated that.... because it was rarely gossip of any order. It was reported. There was opinion. There were facts. They weren't blurred. But I also had to relax and accept that the form was evolving and Roger, trying to be nice, was looking for a way to describe it.

It is when people start to pretend that opinion is fact - and this is true on-line and off - that I get crazy. If the doctor's creed is "first, do no harm," the journalist's must be, "first, try your hardest to offer truth and if you offer guesses or opinions, mark it as such."

All that crap from The Kid about not going into the press box, lest he lose his innocence is capital-c Crap. He is already a dancing monkey for his readers... and he knows that. All of us who write in public with the intend to be read by people we don't know personally deal with our dancing monkey every day, some better than others.

The web is not a meritocracy of quality, just of popularity. If I was were looking for page views this week, Eva Mendes' boobs and garters would have been a lot more merit-filled than a discussion of Blu-rays from Criterion... and I could rationalize it because she is a movie starlet who works a lot of PG and PG-13 movies.

But that would be bullshit indeed.

And let's not overly embellish the pre-web press universe of some terrible writers, mostly mediocre writers, and just a handful of great writers.

I think it is a valuable piece to watch, not because there are any answers, but it does answer many of the questions on both sides of the still-evolving issue.

Of COURSE Obama was throwing an "age" jab at McCain. Isn't he supposed to be a Great Communicator? If we want to give Obama credit for being a (by light years) better speaker than Bush, then he actually has to take responsibility for what he says.

Besides, other than the "100 years of war" nonsense, Howard Dean has done nothing but take potshots at McCain's age for the last month.

Bissinger just sounded like another Traditional Media guy who is afraid of what he doesn't understand. I mean, he and Costas couldn't even differentiate between what Will Leitch wrote and what his commenters wrote or if they did understand this, they didn't like it. Basically, they don't like the democratic process of writing a blog, they prefer journalism to be one way: I'm the journalist, I write the story and you read it and that's that. While I don't think that's a bad way for things to be, but it's just not the way it is.

Bissinger continually rants in a profane manner whilst telling Leitch that blogs promote profanity. He's a hypocrite and worse than that, he just sounds like the old man saying "get off my lawn, you damn kids with your blogs!"

Apparently, Joe Lieberman personally checked John McCain's bearings....
Eww....

I think Obama is simply bringing up a point that needs to be brought up which is...McCain couldn't tell the diff between Shiites and Sunni's so is he really qualified to pull quotes from Hamas?

In other news..
Saw STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE today and it's pretty amazing. I'm knee deep in studying various docs and the idea of what we see and SOP tied in perfectly with that. The film plays out like a horror film with a twist...or something. Good stuff.

If you are not down with Speed and the Racer clan. I got only two words for ya..........

The Wachowskis: six by six.

What the fuck are you on about your gibbering idiot?

And more on topic... what a waste of money.

your = you, obviously.

This is why you are a wretched piece of shit, Camel. I praise and defend my opinions. While cunty pieces of trash take personal shots at me. So you better watch yourself... you girlie little fuck... because you like Paris Hilton. You probably bought her album. Until you renounce that walking sperm recepticle... go fuck yourself Camel. Go fuck yourself.

Let me clarify for that wretched sloth of a man from Australia. There is an inherent difference between praising a film and defending it, and taking a personal shot. Some of you used douche containers love to respond to me DEFENDING SOMETHING with a shot. Sorry... that will not work anymore. You want to be cool. We can be cool. If you want to be a cunt. I will throw down cunty on you like Martha Stewart's daughter. As always... DO NOT PLAY.

IOIOI, how do you really think people are perceiving you right now?

"The Wachowskis: six by six."

IO, I do not understand what you mean with this. Could you please clarify?

This entry has nothing to do with Speed Racer so why were you bringing it up? That's what I was getting at.

io is a seriously disturbed person....

Let me make a most-likely-in-vain attempt to change the subject. I saw OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES this afternoon and absolutely adored it. This droll parody of 007 movies, complete with animated titles and faux John Barry music (and based on a long-running series of actual spy novels that in fact predate Bond) is a delight start to finish, with a '50s-era spy utterly clueless that his sexism and colonialism offends everyone around him. (After one such insult, the leading lady snorts, "You're very French," which he of course takes as a compliment.) And how can you not love a movie in which a holdover member of the Third Reich whines, "Why are Nazis always the bad guys? It's 1955! Don't we deserve a second chance?" It's here in L.A. at the Nuart for one week, and if the meager turnout at today's matinee is any judge, it probably won't be moving over. :-(

Oh, and IO, I didn't buy Hilton's album. I got it for free as a part of my job as a music critic. So neh!

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