Posts tagged BobCostas at FanHouse

I find it whimsically amusing that over 30 years after he began his broadcasting career (roughly around the time he used the word "blowjob" as a synonym for the word "choke" in an ABA game) he is somehow being redefined by a one-sided shouting match between a blogger and a vitriol fueled author.

However, if your motivation for watching Costas Now this evening (9 p.m., HBO, natch) is to see a Bissinger - Leitch II, then Costas would prefer you not bother changing the channel. So sayeth Bob to the WSJ.

"I'd like everyone interested in sports to tune in," he says, "but if all they're looking for is a repeat of 'Bissinger vs. Leitch' I'd just as soon they watched something else."

"The truth," says Mr. Costas, "is that this issue was a powder keg waiting to explode somewhere, and ours just happened to be the match that set it off. I think Buzz realizes he did a disservice to the journalistic standards he was claiming to uphold by jumping on Will that way. At the same time, it's easy for many of those in the blogosphere to dismiss Buzz's outburst as representative of the objections the mainstream sports media has to the excesses of the Internet."

No, the truth is that you cannot ignite a powder keg without some sort of spark, regardless of how flammable it is. Matches don't just come careening out of space, flames flying everywhere, looking for powder kegs. In other words, we all know that Costas wanted the Bissinger - Leitch eruption, which makes this kind of palms-in-the-air denial a little hypocritical and certainly tough to stomach.

For those of you sitting around pining for the golden age of "SportsCenter," some good news via the New York Times' Richard Sandomir: the band's getting back together ... on NBC!

Dan Patrick, who left ESPN last year to create his own syndicated radio program and write a column for Sports Illustrated, will join NBC Sports where he will be reunited with Keith Olbermann to call the N.F.L. highlights on "Football Night in America."

Olbermann left ESPN in 1997 amid some controversy, but he's now arguably more popular than ever after emerging as MSNBC's left-of-center answer to Fox News' "fair and balanced" political coverage.

Anyway, according to Sandomir, "NBC is looking to recreate the chemistry and quirky humor that Patrick and Olbermann demonstrated when they were co-anchors on ESPN's 'SportsCenter,' which they dubbed 'The Big Show.'"

Olbermann was with the "Football Night in America" crew last season serving as something of a social commentator (you may remember him from such forgettable segments as, "Michael Vick, Not Michael Victim"). Whatever, I welcome the change, if for no other reason than a) I grew up watching Patrick and Olbermann, and b) less Bob Costas for everyone!

Inside the NFL is the longest-running show on cable TV, but as it moves from its 30-year home on HBO to Showtime this season, it will be hard to recognize.

Michael Hiestand of USA Today reports that the only studio panelist from last year who will come back this year is Cris Collinsworth. Dan Marino, who had a long tenure on the show with HBO, will not be invited to migrate over to Showtime. CBS Sports head Sean McManus, who is overseeing the show's transition to Showtime, explains:

"We didn't want to just have CBS people. And we wanted a link to the HBO show. It was a tough one, in respect to Dan, to go with Cris."

Phil Simms will join Collinsworth in the analyst role. James Brown will get the job of studio host, which Bob Costas has filled in recent years. McManus undoubtedly would have loved to keep Costas around, but Costas's contract with HBO would prevent that.

Inside the NFL, cable television's long-running series, is not dead after all.

Although HBO decided early this year not to bring Inside the NFL back -- ending a 31-season run -- the NFL announced today that the show will air on Showtime starting on September 10 and running each Wednesday throughout the 2008 season.

The show will be produced by CBS Sports and NFL Films. Although no decisions have been made about the on-air talent, it will almost certainly include some of the current CBS NFL analysts, and will almost certainly not include Bob Costas, whose contracts with HBO and NBC would preclude him from working with Showtime and CBS.

Whoever the hosts are, this is good news for football fans. Inside the NFL provides a unique take on the week's NFL news, and losing it would have been a shame.

Via PFT.

Bob Costas is looking to guide the sports media with another panel/roundtable/forum/discussion group. Of course, this time around Costas -- who seems to do less and less actual media work so he can host more and more of these soirées -- will probably get less obscenity laden buzz words, but only because the panel is appearing on NBC.

A group of media members will be gathered to discuss the morality of horse racing and euthanization of the animals after their ability to race no longer serves their human overlords, amongst other very serious issues.

NBC received both praise and criticism for its conservative coverage of Eight Belles' death at the Kentucky Derby. Fresh off his sports media roundtable on blogs for HBO, Bob Costas will kick off the network's coverage of the Preakness Stakes (Saturday, 4:30-6:30 p.m. ET) with a panel discussion on the filly's catastrophic breakdown and other controversies surrounding Thoroughbred horse racing, says producer Sam Flood.

Among the guests: Churchill Downs veterinarian Larry Bramlage; Eight Belles trainer Larry Jones; NBC analyst Gary Stevens; and New York Times columnist William Rhoden, who blasted the sport of kings as 'only a couple of steps removed from animal fighting.'

But will the assembled deal with the monetary interests surrounding these animals everyone so suddenly cares about? Horse racing also makes too much money to ever get shut down, but then again, PETA generates too much money from these protests to see them end either.

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.

One of the questions some bloggers have asked in the six days since Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Buzz Bissinger launched into an anti-blog tirade on Bob Costas's HBO show is: To what extent do others in the mainstream media agree with the content of Bissinger's anti-blog screed?

I think Bissinger's opinion is shared by a large number of journalists, even if most journalists wouldn't have expressed the opinion as profanely as Bissinger did. And Bissinger seems to back that up in an interview with The Big Lead:

The initial reaction was quite positive, more than quite positive from those I immediately spoke to–fellow panelists and members of HBO with the exception of Costas (Bob was friendly but muted in his response to my performance. He is one of the most thoughtful people I know and I think he was mulling that I had gone way too far.)

Bissinger doesn't say specifically which fellow panelists agreed with him, but the other panelists on the show included many of the biggest big-shots in sports media, including Joe Buck, Mitch Albom, Dan Patrick and Mike Wilbon. It wouldn't be at all surprising if all of them feel basically the way Bissinger feels. (Wilbon and I have discussed his thoughts on blogs.)

But it is interesting that Bissinger specifically says Costas did not offer him a pat on the back, which would seem to indicate that Costas meant it when he told me he didn't like the way the Bissinger-Will Leitch argument played out, and that I was wrong in thinking Costas wanted a Jerry Springer-style confrontation.

The best news in Bissinger's interview with The Big Lead is that he gave it at all: If he's engaging with bloggers rather than yelling at them, he's made a lot of progress in the last six days.

On Thursday I wrote that I thought Bob Costas booked Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger on his HBO show alongside Deadspin blogger Will Leitch because he wanted precisely the explosive, Jerry Springer-style confrontation that their panel discussion turned out to be.

On Friday Costas called me to, in his words, "Correct your entirely incorrect assertion."

"Did I knowingly set up this kind of dynamic? Not only did I not do it but I would argue that it would not have been in my best interest to do it," Costas said. "I don't like Jerry Springer-type scenes. I prefer light over heat."

In fact, Costas said he expected Bissinger, a gifted writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, to show the same kind of thoughtful approach in his comments on the panel that he shows in his writing.

"I feel bad for Buzz," Costas said. "When you have a body of work like he has, when you have the talent and intellect that he has -- you know, even the greats can have a bad day. He's a Hall of Famer who had a bad game."

Two days after unleashing a profane tirade about blogs on Bob Costas's HBO show, Friday Night Lights author H.G. Buzz Bissinger showed some contrition on Dan LeBatard's radio show.

Bissinger (at left in the photo, with a film executive and the director of the movie Friday Night Lights) didn't exactly embrace blogs in his radio appearance, but he did acknowledge that he took things too far (via SBB):

There were some things I should not have said. I shouldn't have used profanity, I shouldn't have been as hostile in my approach to Will Leitch...

I don't take back a word of what I said. I have a tremendous amount of problems with blogs....

I embarrassed myself and I may have embarrassed other brethren in my profession.

Bissinger also said a lot of his fellow panelists on the Costas show patted him on the back afterward. And he used the ignorance defense for part of his wrong-headed sweeping generalizations of blogs: "I'm not an expert in this field," Bissinger said. "I never want to be an expert in the field of blogs. That would be way too pathetic."

For a guy who has given his share of sanctimonious lectures about the coarsening of our culture, Bob Costas sure did allow a lot of profane screaming on his HBO show on Tuesday night.

And that's fine -- Costas wanted to put on an entertaining show, and I was certainly entertained watching Pulitzer Prize winner H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger's meltdown. But please, Bob, quit playing dumb and claiming you didn't know how Bissinger was going to act on your show, as you have in an interview with Richard Sandomir of the New York Times:

Costas, a friend of Bissinger's, said he did not know that Bissinger, an author and a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Chicago Tribune, "would come on that hard."

"I knew more or less where he stood, but we did not speak beforehand," Costas said.

Bissinger is famous for his fiery temper and his hatred of blogs. Costas knew that perfectly well when he decided to sit Bissinger next to Deadspin blogger Will Leitch. Costas got exactly the Jerry Springer-style confrontation he wanted, and he shouldn't claim otherwise.