If you're a football fan, you are no doubt fully aware of ProFootballTalk and it's primary writer, Mike Florio.
Let me start out by saying I have nothing against Mike Florio. He has been able to parlay a site that traffics in rumors, innuendo, blog length observations and the occasional breaking story into a successful media enterprise, and for that I applaud him. In general, if you can provide a unique spin to some form of media and make money at it, particularly as an independent business person, I'm all for it, even if I disagree with your point of view. Heck, I hit the site every day.
That transcends sport and into politics. I have never agreed with a single thing Rush Limbaugh has had to say but, like Father Charles Coughlin before him, I acknowledge he is a great entertainer who has hit upon a formula to generate a massive amount of revenue for himself, his bosses and the affiliated stations, so more power to him for making the best of a free enterprise opportunity.
But back to Florio. One of the most prominent features of ProFootballTalk was, and is, the arrest meter. The prominence of this feature, and it's central role in the early rise of his site to prominence, encouraged the development of a robust online commentariat that took delight in reinforcing stereotypes of primarily African American athletes as criminals and thugs.
Because these types of stories attracted page hits, and those page hits attracted comments which, in turn, attracted more page hits, these stories flourished. When these stories flourish, the comments flourish. And, once you attract that type of commentariat, and use it to rise to prominence and generate revenue, they become entrenched and don't go away.
So I was surprised to wake up last Sunday morning to the following Tweet from the @Profootballtalk account:
Nothing shakes my faith in humanity more than reading (and deleting) some of the reader comments in response to a Rooney Rule article.
Now, the type of commentariat with this type of opinion is not unique to ProFootballTalk. Hit the website of your local newspaper and you'll find it filled with bigots and idiots of all stripes. Tying in Facebook IDs to comments has helped curb this somewhat, but plenty of people who are bigots, racists, religions nuts and climate deniers are more than willing to put their name to their opinions, and sleep well at night being bigots, racists, religious nuts and climate deniers, some of my family members among them.
All of which is their right, and I don't really have a problem with that, any more than I have a problem with calling those people out for it.
What I have little patience for are what I call Captain Renault acts. In this case, a person whose stock and trade involved easily exploitative stories involving minority athletes, whether they be centered around arrests, rumors of teammate conflict or finger wagging on athlete behavior, a person whose site rose to prominence at least partially due to distributing this type of information, wakes up one morning shocked, shocked! to find that his website's commentariat is racially insensitive (in addition to being anti-union, but that's another story entirely). That these people didn't just disappear once NBC bought the site from him and he turned into a television personality.
And I'm sure Florio would make the case that he never actually actively encouraged any of that discussion. But tacitly he and his site benefited from it financially. And while there's plausible deniability about site content, there is no plausible deniability from the conscience that sent that tweet.
Part and parcel of being a webmaster that distributes content is addressing the user community that views your content to begin with. You can turn comments off completely which, it's theorized, will severely limit traffic (though that never seemed to hinder Fire Joe Morgan). You can have a robust comment monitoring community that filters out and bans the idiots.
But if you profit off their backs, you forfeit the right to profit off of their existence and then express your distaste over their behavior. It's time Mike Florio did the same.
