Posted by Steve Klein 1:00:32 PM
Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis loves bloggers, but is willing to criticize them too.No one has been more supportive of bloggers and more critical of mainstream media than Ted Leonsis, the former AOL executive who owns the NHL Washington Capitals. (OK, well maybe Mark Cuban is close.) Leonsis has paid to send independent bloggers to cover Caps prospects in Russia, and when long-time Washington Times hockey writer Dave Fay died late last year, no one was kinder.
But to read the owner’s very active blog, Ted’s Take, it doesn’t appear he sees a great deal of either. “Don’t listen to mainstream media, they know nothing. Make your own decisions. Listen to your heart and to your own set of experiences,” Leonsis wrote after the New Hampshire primary.
And Leonsis couldn’t help but point out how wrong Washington Post columnist Tom Boswell was about the Washington Redskins retaining coach Joe Gibbs the day before he resigned.
Leonsis also has a right to expect that Capitals fans put their fannies where their blog posts have been in demanding that he sign the superstar Russian to a long-term contract. (The team ranks 29th out of 30 in the league.) Canadian writers have been sniping in the north-of-the-border press that the Washington market is undeserving of Ovechkin’s massive talent — all documented on “Ted’s Take” for anyone to see. What the MSM and even the bloggers don’t provide, Leonsis does, in what is often a fascinating exercise in what transparency really means.
From these examples, I would make these distinctions between MSM and bloggers — something Colorado journalists seem anxious to do these days concerning state government coverage:
Journalists take deadlines seriously, as Rovnak points out, and generally report better. (Aren’t they supposed to by definition?)
However, Leonsis would argue with that: “I am constantly amazed at how silly this cycle is: someone reports badly; someone comments on the bad reporting; there are now two sources out there; it must be true; so now it is fact.”