Turns out I wasn’t the only person who found Will Leitch’s takedown of Darren Rovell to be excessively nasty.
Clay Travis felt the same way. Writing for Outkickthecoverage.com, he made many of the same points I did about Leitch.
Travis writes:
It wasn’t funny or witty or demythologizing of sports, instead, it was just mean and bullying. I’m not going to pretend I’ve never been mean in what I’ve written, but I’ve at least always tried to be funny. (I’ll excuse pretty much anything if it’s funny). But there was no attempt at humor or satire here, this was a serious attack on Rovell’s online persona.
Travis then expanded his critique. He said Leitch’s column is an example of a Mean Girls mentality among sports bloggers.
The more I thought about it the more I realized Will’s column was the culmination of something I’ve noticed over the past couple of years, the sports blogosphere’s descent into “Mean Girls.” You remember “Mean Girls,” right, the movie that suggested Lindsay Lohan was going to be a superstar, the script that vaulted Tina Fey into the limelight. (If you don’t remember “Mean Girls,” you’re clearly much cooler than me, which may be a given). At its heart the movie was about a group of cliquish girls who didn’t think for themselves and bullied everyone else around them. That’s when it hit me, increasingly the sports blogosphere in a Twitter age has come to resemble the clique of mean girls at the center of that movie, a cabal of bloggers who all share the same opinions and band together to bully the same targets.
The targets will vary, but they’re typically employed by ESPN. From Bill Simmons to Craig James to Joe Schad to Darren Rovell to Stephen A. Smith to Colin Cowherd to Stuart Scott, all of them have provoked the ire of the sports blogosphere at some point or another. It’s a roving band of ridicule, a bunch of ants trying to take down a rhino.
It’s jealousy personified. A group of people without a very substantial audience who go after a target with a substantial audience in hopes of punching up and making a name for themselves. Only the sports blogosphere fights aren’t one on one, they attack as a cohesive whole. Everyone, miraculously, has the exact same opinion of every target. And to what end? Are you really telling me that these ESPN targets are so much worse at their jobs than everyone else in the sports media? Of course they aren’t, that’s not the point, it’s that the mean girl clique has nothing better to do than band together and go after new targets over and over and over again. What they lack in audience they make up for in dedication, woe unto you if you have the temerity to question the herd of ants.
I’m sure they rose to their feet in Bristol when they read that passage.
I don’t know about the “Mean Girls” parallel, but as I wrote yesterday, I do believe the discourse has become excessively mean. Leitch simply took it to another level. And there’s no question that high-profile targets like ESPN, Rovell, and Rick Reilly are under attack in the name of page views.
That isn’t to say some of those targets don’t deserve the criticism. Just because fans embrace the celebrity of Chris Berman when they see him in public doesn’t mean he is universally beloved when he launches into his schtick on ESPN. And it is essential to pile on Craig James.
Travis makes some points worthy of discussion. Judging by the Twitter reaction, his critique has hit a nerve or two among the bloggers/critics.