Bissinger's beef appears to be less with Leitch than with the changing media landscape. Sports blogs have brought younger, more diverse and more creative voices into the discussion of sports. While much mainstream sportswriting obsesses about personalities, scandal and statistics, the blogosphere offers other options. Pining for the past makes Bissinger sound like some 1950s preacher railing against rock 'n' roll. In some ways, Internet sports coverage is like rock--there's bad and there's good--but overall, it has expanded the confines of the form and content of sports journalism.

Costas fueled the controversy, likening blog commentary to what "a cabdriver" thinks about sports. In the past, he has called bloggers "pathetic, get-a-life losers." It's an attitude that's shared by many A-list columnists and sports personalities, some of whom seethe over the fact that "some guy in his basement" gets to have equal voice--or, in Leitch's case, even exceed the popularity of those whose once dominated the coverage.

There are sports blogs in every style, for every team, and they have entirely changed the game. Of course, some are repellent, but to swear off all blogs would be like refusing to read the New York Times because you don't like the National Enquirer.

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If anything, legacy sportswriters deserve far more scrutiny than the upstarts on the web. Washington Post and ESPN scribe Tony Kornheiser has said that this not a golden age of sportswriting, but it is a golden age for sportswriters. There is more money and fame for those willing to "play ball."

Consider what Big Daddy Drew wrote on Deadspin about ESPN's Rick Reilly. "Reilly is what I like to call a privileged sportswriter. I'm not saying he's rich, or snooty, or anything like that. What I mean is that, in his position, Reilly has access to privileges that you or I, as normal sports fans, don't have. He gets to go to the Masters, VIP-style. He gets to go golfing with Bill Clinton. He gets to ride in an Indy 500 race car. He gets to walk up to Sammy Sosa's locker and dare him to pee in a cup for him. He gets to do all that. And that's why he sucks.... If you're a privileged sportswriter, you're experiencing sports in a completely different way from normal, everyday fans. It's no coincidence the bulk of ESPN's programming now involves sportswriters talking to one another. They're the only people they can identify with. You certainly aren't part of the conversation."

What infuriates old-school sportswriters is that people on the web are calling them on their privilege, isolation and celebrity. In sharp contrast, bloggers, with their messy passion and sharp interaction with readers, sometimes sound far more authentic.

Read it all here.

"It's a New Orleans tradition that you can take any music and mess with it,” said Bruce Boyd Raeburn, the curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. The key lyric is “They’re tryin’ to wash us away,” he said, because it is applicable to most periods of New Orleans history. “It captures that feeling that you’re trying to cling on to your culture, to your life, in the face of this wave of indifference, of racism, of malevolence and of water itself.”

The results of the exit poll, conducted at 40 precincts across Pennsylvania by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and The Associated Press, also found stark evidence that Mr. Obama’s race could be a problem in the general election. Sixteen percent of white voters said race mattered in deciding who they voted for, and just 54 percent of those voters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election; 27 percent of them said they would vote for Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama was the Democratic nominee, and 16 percent said they would not vote at all.