FanHouse

Washington Post columnist Leonard Shapiro is the latest member of the sports journalism establishment to announce that he agrees with the basic thrust -- if not the profane tone -- of Buzz Bissinger's anti-blog rant last week.

Shapiro writes in his most recent column that he agrees with Bissinger that "Some of the sports blogs, with Deadspin at the very top of the list, have gone way out of bounds on the common decency meter." And then after Shapiro gets through his first round of bashing bloggers, he includes this, which I guess is supposed to make him look fair-minded:

And none of the above is even remotely meant to suggest that blogs ought to be banned. On the contrary, bloggers are certainly entitled to their often uninformed opinions, sometimes based solely on information gathered by the working press with far more access, sources and scruples than most of them.

Of course, Shapiro knows a thing or two about uninformed opinions -- and bloggers know about Shapiro's uninformed opinions, too. When Shapiro wrote a wrongheaded column after the death of Sean Taylor, bloggers rightly called him on it. When Shapiro wrote a wholly uninformed critique of the sport of mixed martial arts, bloggers rightly called him on it.

Shapiro has a solid body of work as a sports journalist, and I take no glee in pointing out his shortcomings. But he does have a track record of uninformed opinions of his own -- and I think he's expressing an uninformed opinion in this column when he refers to Bob Costas as "another blog-basher." Having spoken to Costas about Bissinger's rant on Costas Now, I don't believe Costas is a blog-basher -- his view of blogs is much more nuanced than Shapiro's or Bissinger's. In this "blog vs. traditional media" dust-up, nuance is something that's been sadly lacking.