Gawker Media sets the standard for crude irresponsibility, and Will Leitch is all too happy to hold up their standards.

MITCHELL BLATT

Will Leitch once was a journalist. Now he posts pictures of athletes like Matt Leinart over there. The entire post accompanying that photo included a total of six sentences then a link to the site that actually reported the story.

You can’t blame him though; when you post needless trivia and gossip 20 times a day, you won’t be able to write a good long post very often. It’s the Gawker business model. The model that spawns false gossip about celebrities and athletes and others who are “protected by piles of money,” as former Gawker.com editor Emily Gould said infamously on Larry King Live on April 8, 2007.

Appropriately, it was just over a year later, April 29, 2008, that Will Leitch folded to Buzz Bissinger on Costas Now. Deadspin certainly doesn’t have the level of filth as Gawker.com, but, being owned by the same company, they basically do the same thing. The only difference, really, is people don’t care as much about athlete-gossip as they do about celebrity gossip, so there isn’t as much fallout when people see that Matt Leinart is “taking his offseason work quite seriously,” as Leitch said.

Emily Gould has since quit as editor of Gawker and now attends therapy, she wrote in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this past Sunday, a fitting ending for someone who said, “No one has the reasonable expectation to be able to walk down the street and not be noticed.”

Gould and Leitch are both members of a disturbing new niche in the media that provides no value and no defense for their actions.

They reacted similarly in their respective media appearances, neither being able to justify their low-bar journalism, or their sometimes questionably ethical post topics. Leitch shuns his journalistic roots and seems to have no gripes with his cut-and-paste potshots. Gould actually referred to Gawker.com as “citizen journalism” before clarifying that, “Everybody reads it knowing it isn’t checked.”

Journalism indeed.

Gould certainly made the biggest fool of herself:

Emily Gould, Larry King Live, featuring Jimmy Kimmel

Notice her facial expression as she is asked serious questions about the repercussions of Gawker listing where celebrities are at any given time of day or just making up complete lies about them. She seems to think the questions were jokes (as she acknowledged in the Times Magazine). Go to 1:30, and an agent/publicist is saying his clients have been stalked because of the Gawker Stalker map that lists where celebrities are, and he says, “I’ve had my clients say, ‘These assholes,’” and Gould just makes childish facial expressions then laughs.

She shrugs off all the questions and saying, “This is citizen journalism. People don’t read it with the expectation that everything is the gospel. … It’s not checked.” That’s at 3 minutes. She didn’t attend journalism school, but still…

Leitch acted similarly, saying that it didn’t matter what he wrote, and besides, everyone already knows athletes get drunk. He says that athletes don’t care if they have their drunk pictures posted. Shawn Phillips says he wouldn’t want that shown of him (Video), and so did Braylon Edwards on Costas Now (Video).

The entire video of the Leitch’s confrontation isn’t available on YouTube, but you can watch it here.

At one point, Leitch was looking for sympathy from Edwards, so he says, “We get the pictures from Facebook … You don’t ever have any paparazzi?” to which Edwards replies, “We can’t go anywhere without watching ourselves.”

Gould and Leitch both gave the same answer as well when defending the purpose of their blogs, Gould being the more idiotic of the two once again.

Kimmel was talking about how Gawker lied about him being drunk and how they lie about lots of other celebrity gossip, then Gould says:

“I think it’s great that we’re not putting people up on a pedestal and worshipping them anymore.”

Kimmel: “But you’re throwing rocks at them.”

Then, one of the most idiotic quotes you’re ever going to read:

“Aren’t they sort of protected by piles of money?”

Leitch said no one is going to change their perception of an athlete based on a picture of them drunk. “He’s 24 years old. Of course that’s what he’s doing.”

Bissinger mocked him: “Oh, so you’re doing it to make them look human?”

Edwards voiced his agreement with Bissinger.

If Leitch is going to defend himself by saying that athletes don’t care, why doesn’t he stop posting pictures of athletes who do care? The fact is he doesn’t ask athletes before he posts pictures. Most of them want to be fun guys, so they play along, but he can’t keep pretending he actually cares what they think. Admit what you’re doing: profiting by making fun of athletes, who, in your own words, are just doing what you’d expect them to do.

I’m not going to say anything should be done about Deadspin like Stephen A. Smith would. It’s popular because people today have no attention span, so they like reading one paragraph blog entries on useless trivia. It’s all about the market. It’s just that Deadspin and Gawker suck, that’s all.

If you’re a journalist today, like Leitch was, and you start blogging like that, you’ve got no pride.

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