“And when you look at the internet business, what’s dangerous about it is that people who are clearly unqualified get to disseminate their piece to the masses.”-Steven A. Smith 2007
Quite frankly, I hope you’ll Pardon the Interruption.
Get over Steven A. Smith, an untrained actor, appearing on General Hospital as a reporter at the scene of a hostage taking. That was acting, not writing. Besides a journalist appearing on TV playing the role of a journalist is not acting, as anyone who saw Smith can attest.
Smith was not talking about himself, he was talking about you: the ragged men and women standing at the off ramps of the internet super highway begging for attention. Making rude pronouncements. Distracting decent folk who were on their way to read the respectable work of serious journalists.
Like Steven A. Smith.
Now, I don’t agree with Smith. I have a hard time imagining a federal prosecutor reading an internet blog and deciding to go after Michael Vick. There is no asterisk beside the notoriety Barry Bonds brought on himself. True, I called for the Yankees to let Joe Torre go and the boys in Tampa forced him out within a few hours. But what the hey he’s gone on to a better place. Los Angeles, that is. Swimming pools. Movie stars. But I also have to consider that I could be wrong and Smith could be right. If he is, how should we deal with this menace?
We could begin by denying bloggers their rights of free speech and a speedy trial. Some forms of torture, such as water boarding, have fallen into disfavor. That leaves more extreme measures, such as making bloggers watch a tape loop of 1st and 10?.
It is far too easy to get a blog. As Smith points out, any yahoo who can get a blog. Real Sports Bloggers, for example, conducts no background checks before we issue blogs. You can join our sports blogging community and post slanderous insinuations about Bill Belicheat in under thirty minutes. We don’t restrict anyone’s Constitutional rights. Heck, we rarely bother to spell check or verify our sources.
It is a well documented fact that ISP’s in New York City (altogether now, NEW YORK CITY!) can evade Gotham City’s strict blogging laws and go right down I-95 into Virginia and North Carolina where cheap blogs are plentiful and nobody asks any questions. These illicit blogs find their way back to New York where they frequently turn up at the scene of declining ratings for ESPiN’s 2pm to 4pm programming.
Would it be too much to ask for a 24 hour waiting period for blogs while a records check could determine if your blog poses a threat to respectable journalists? We could put Bill Conlin in charge and give him a bunch of guys in brown shirts to process the applications. That would be, well, Wunderbar! Sending all these bloggers back where they came from isn’t practical. Colleges have enough sixth years seniors as it is, and the bars are pretty crowded this time of year. Issuing them drivers licenses and hoping they go to their home countries won’t work. Most of us have no knowledge of geography and only purchased On-Star so at least one woman would have to talk to us.
There are other options. Giving us all a 1975 “Pong” home console with no controller would keep us distracted indefinitely. We could serve probation as hall monitors at Gate D in Giant stadium. Deportation to Europe would generate a whole new generation of soccer hooligans.At the end of the day there is one question we must ask. Is a blogging ban fair? Fair is a relative term. If by fair you mean Steven A. Smith having a reality TV show about untrained people off the streets becoming broadcast journalists with no experience, and then condemning bloggers for not having graduated from journalism school, probably not.But let us not talk falsely now. The hour is getting late. (Did I mention that bloggers are habitual plagerers?[sp!]) Rather than let my unschooled ramblings influence you, I think we should give Mr. Smith one last chance to bring his full journalistic powers of persuasion to bear:
“More important are the level of ethics and integrity that comes along with the quote-unqoute profession hasn’t been firmly established and entrenched in the minds of those who’ve been given that license.”
We are all humbled.