Dear Mr. Bissinger,
I
am a graduate student at the University of South Dakota, majoring in
English. I hope one day to share my love of our language and passion
for meaningful communication by teaching English to speakers of other
languages. In the meantime, I teach Freshman Composition, work in our
university writing center, and take many courses on rhetoric,
linguistics and literature.
Without a doubt, there are many bloggers out there without the breadth of information or the language skills necessary to make meaningful contributions to sports journalism. This may well be true of the majority of sports bloggers. However, to make blanket statements about all bloggers and all blogs is blatantly fallacious. The baseball blogs I read all feature a priviliging of facts over opinions, whether those facts be statistics used to accurately value player contributions or insider information regarding the state of the clubs. Moreover, the blogs I read provide me with pleasure because of the quality of the writing. Naturally, this cannot be said of the majority of blogs, but anyone who appreciates both language and baseball could not be disappointed by reading Rob Neyer or Craig Calcaterra (aka "ShysterBall") any given morning. I am also a devoted fan of the authors of Fire Joe Morgan, a blog which certainly qualifies as "snarky," but which is devoted to revealing logical fallacies, misinformation, unfounded opinion, and mangled prose - the very flaws you revile in the blogosphere - where they can be found in "legitimate" sports journalism. I would be sad about how often such errors in thought occur in "journalism" if the results of FJM's fisking weren't so darned risible.
