"Why was the Internet ... giving semi-lives to people with no lives?" thunders Mariotti, who writes for the Internet. The column goes on in this vein for 1,500 words. Let's send this through Microsoft Word's AutoSummarize function, shall we?
If you're unfamiliar, AutoSummarize is an aggressively useless tool that, with a few clicks of the keyboard, will summarize for lazy fifth-graders whatever report they just plagiarized out of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It will also reduce a fulminating columnist's prose to its purest essence.
Here is Mariotti's latest, at 10 percent:
This is the decade when sports stopped being about sports. Am I blaming sports bloggers and their commenters that a very disturbed person secretly videotaped Andrews as she was standing nude in her hotel room, then posted the five-minute video on the Internet? Unlike one of the Erin-consumed leeches — who admitted this week, "I have never met Erin Andrews,'' — I have met her as an ESPN colleague. I've seen Katie Couric wear shorter dresses. I'm a girl that loves sports. How can she return to a hotel room without wondering if someone's peeping? How can she live wondering 24/7 if someone is leering? I wouldn't blame her if she left the sports business and entered the entertainment world. A blog said I was with a "semi-hot blonde'' at an NBA party; she was a public-relations person for a player marketing a charity game. A blog recklessly ran items that weren't remotely true when I left the Chicago Sun-Times.
OK, I think I see what he's driving at. Let's take this down to 5 percent, though:
This is the decade when sports stopped being about sports. Am I blaming sports bloggers and their commenters that a very disturbed person secretly videotaped Andrews as she was standing nude in her hotel room, then posted the five-minute video on the Internet? I've seen Katie Couric wear shorter dresses. I'm a girl that loves sports. How can she return to a hotel room without wondering if someone's peeping?
Still, there's a lot of noise in there. Here's Mariotti, at 1 percent:
This is the decade when sports stopped being about sports. I'm a girl that loves sports.
Hmm. Well, that's interesting, and it certainly adds a personal dimension to Mariotti's deeply felt rage at "the sex-and-objectification culture" invented by blogs and only blogs (none of them affiliated, mind you, with his "respectable, globally regarded site"). I'd point out that this "sex-and-objectification culture" could also be attributed to Renaissance painters and probably anyone with a penis during the Pleistocene Era, but that'd be unfair of me. He's just a little girl who loves sports, not history.
Lesson of Erin Andrews: Grow Up, Boys! [Respectable, Globally Regarded Site]