Stephen A. Snuffed

THE NEWS that ESPN finally put Stephen A. Smith out of his -- oh, let's be honest: our -- misery devastated me. It's not as if I ever watched his show, but whatever time Smith spent prepping for and taping the show was time he didn't have to write. And the less he wrote, the less unreadable prose there was to slog through in the Inquirer. We can only hope that the network's pledge to have Smith "expand his presence across numerous ESPN entities as part of a new role" comes to pass. As a reporter and columnist, he's painfully out of his league, filing incoherent pieces that defy logic and contain more exclamation points than a 14-year-old girl's diary. Smith is all about Smith, about shouting and yelling, about being "shocking" and "edgy," about trying to outcool cool. He is, in other words, perfect for ESPN, a once substantive network that has succumbed to the disaster of personality-driven media at the expensive of the interesting stories it once told.

Comments

[Tom Goodman]

TD: You have my proxy on this one.