Posts tagged Joe Posanski

In his mind, Murray Chass writes from a very comfortable leather chair, one that faces west in a sun-lit three-season porch, where he can pound away incessantly on his laptop computer as if it were an IBM Selectric typewriter. From this metaphorical perch, which is decidedly not his mother’s basement, where he decidedly does not have a blog, he is able to freely and inaccurately attack people’s character, not to mention some of the best people involved in sport.

Chass earlier this week decided to take a steaming pile of fecal matter and throw it on the Presidential Medal of Honor that was awarded to Stan Musial. Chass took a third-hand story and represented it as fact, even though the principal subject had written otherwise in a copy of his book and even though several other people made clear they disagreed with Chass’s original claim, that Musial was a racist.

Joe Posanski obliterates those claims better than I could or could hope to, so I won’t spend any time doing so. Others have attacked Chass already, so I won’t necessarily pile on, either. But sitting in bed last night, I couldn’t help but be startled by the irony of a man who refuses to be called a blogger because of a perceived lack of ethics among them, who continues to act so unethical.

Chass has made it clear that he is not a blogger, because he hates what they stand for. In his world, bloggers are people who sit in their homes — or their mother’s homes, basements, I should say — and freely make up words and generally provide nothing in the way of enlightened discourse.

Of course, many of the most and least famous of blogs and bloggers employ the same standards of the most stringent of newspaper copy desks. They cites sources, they check out stories, they call people to confirm something.

Chass, meanwhile, doesn’t.

He goes with one source — sometimes even that is on shaky ground — recklessly clomps away on his computer and hits send. He isn’t some teenager who is mad at a girl who spurned his advances, he’s a grandfather who was once the National Baseball Writer of the freaking New York Times. He has received several awards, notably one that has put him in the writer’s wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This is a man who has forgotten about more of his bylines than others ever accumulate.

Looking at Chass’s hatchet jobs, we can come to two conclusions: A- he was a hack this entire time that was shielded by the banner of his New York Times press pass or in old age or B-he has become very, very mad.

I’ll go with the latter. Why is Murray so mad? Is he mad that he no longer has a column that can be used to wrap fish, line hamster cages or potty-train young puppies? Is it a shot to his ego to say he writes a blog? A blog is just a vehicle to bring words to people; hating “all blogs” is like railing against all types of dinner plates.

But Chass is right. He’s not a blogger. He doesn’t have the standards to be considered one. At this point, he’s just an angry old man sitting by himself in a dark room.