Remember awhile back when Chronicle lead sports columnist Richard Justice defamed Stephanie Stradley, a very good local blogger on the Texans and the NFL who now blogs at the Chronicle?
Well, ol' Richard is at it again.
This time the subject of Justice's venom is Alan Burge, who pens a very good blog on the Texans for the Houston Examiner.
Burge recently made a comment on one of Justice's blog posts regarding Texans GM Rick Smith, who Justice has been belittling for months because Smith fired Justice's friend, former Texans strength coach, Dan Riley.
At any rate, after Burge commented (he goes by "AJ" in the comments) on Justice's blog post, Justice responded by belittling Burge's comment. Burge responded by again challenging Justice's statements regarding NFL contract provisions. Justice responded by continuing to belittle Burge and concluded by accusing Burge of stealing "from others and calling it research."
Inasmuch as Justice has previously removed some of his defamatory statements from his blog site after publishing them, I copied four of Burge's comments and Justice's replies to them before Justice could remove or edit them (he has, in fact, done so now). Burge's comments and Justice's replies are set forth in the document below. Also included in the document is a comment from another commenter who was appalled by Justice's comments toward Burge and Justice's reply to that comment.
Go read Tom's entire post. He has the comments printed out and asks a pointed question: Is there any hope for the Chronicle?
From a Sports coverage perspective, Yes. But only if the Chron is willing to jettison, or demote, their top-tier writing talent and re-build from the bottom. Given Cohen's track record with columnists, I don't see that happening.
The end-result of this is hackneyed analysis, PR-like reporting and the above-referenced unbalanced rants. What all of this obscures is some very good reporting going on in the 'free' blog Sports section. Yes, there is some homerism but what do you expect from a 'fan' blog? There's also better analysis to be found here than in the blogs of the supposed top-flight writers.
This is twice now that Justice has irrationally gone after a sports blogger, denigrating them personally instead of addressing the weak points of an argument in which he is clearly wrong. Of course, its also wrong for Justice to characterize what he does as "reporting". He's a columnist, he walks in the realm of opinion. He's not out there working the beat or breaking news he's commenting on what's already happened. Quite often he's taking Mark Berman's scoops and commenting on them. Which, when you think about it, is really what he's accusing Alan Burge of doing.
