I thought folks might enjoy this snippet of an e-mail conversation between myself and Bryan Anderson. The conversation started with fantasy football, of course, but eventually led to a statement of a sad but concise truth about our current media culture:
Bryan Anderson wrote:
So, do you think footballguys or CBS (gives worse fantasy football advice?) I'm thinking CBS.
John Magee wrote:
On the fantasy baseball site I subscribe to we have an ongoing thread mocking CBS's fantasy advice.
The real problem is that they obviously have an editorial mandate to add fantasy analysis to every news item, no matter how inconsequential. It's a thousand-monkeys-at-a-thousand-typewriters approach to fantasy analysis.
This means that one day one of them may advise that "Shakespeare is an adequate wordsmith in a good theatre company, but his lack of upside and polish limits him to strictly a role as a Playwright 2 or perhaps a Flex Poet."
Bryan Anderson wrote:
That made me laugh. You are right, but does the editorial mandate extend to saying dumb things?
John Magee wrote:
Saying dumb things is a natural consequence of having a huge space to fill, be it inches of space or hours of airtime, and not having enough smart things to fill that space.
Career success in the modern media seems to have little to do with saying smart and informative things, and is instead predicated upon simply having no sense of shame over the ridiculous things you say to fill three hours of time.
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Since I obviously have no sense of shame over the ridiculous things I post to fill this blog space, I expect to become a huge media superstar any day now.
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