25. Pat Buchanan – 53 On-Air Mentions

And we start off our list with none other than Mr. Pat Buchanan. Buchanan made a number of appearances last week on MSNBC where he’s a commentator. One fun appearance was on Hardball where the he and Ron Reagan Jr. discussed Michele Bachmann. The talk was derailed briefly when Buchanan and Chris Matthews spent a while trying to figure out what on earth a “cyberattack” was. It made us think that MSNBC should add a technology show starring Chris and Pat. Each week would end with one of their grandchildren calling in to make sure they checked that the computer was plugged in first.

24. Jean Chatzky – 53 On-Air Mentions

Next up is Chatzky, who was part of a panel on the Today Show that offered financial advice to regular people over Skype. Isn’t it great, now that everyone has wonderful HD TVs, that we can use them to look at blurry computer images? We can’t wait till those new 3D TVs come out and Today can air YouTube videos. That cat with the piano is gonna blow your mind in 3D.

23. Charles Osgood – 65 On-Air Mentions

Osgood offered up a special Easter edition of CBS Sunday Morning by wearing a glorious pastel bow-tie and ending his show with a few minutes of soothing footage of bunnies frolicking in the field. It was so hypnotizing that we were unable to continue writing this list for like ten minutes. We’re talking about the bow-tie, not the bunnies.

22. Andy Rooney – 71 On-Air Mentions

60 Minutes is a powerful show. How powerful? Well, Rooney only appears on TV once a week, doing his famous rant on that week’s episode but, since there are so many affiliates carrying the show, he ends up at #22 on our list. In the April 4th rant, Rooney read some mail. It turns out he makes two piles with the letters he gets: the “good” mail and the “bad” mail. He read from the “bad” mail. Why not? It makes for better television. And makes him the 22 most oft-referenced TV pundit.

21. Harvey Levin – 76 On-Air Mentions

We now move to the well-respected area of hard-journalism that is celebrity news. Levin, who is also the executive producer and host of TMZ, appeared on a Fox affiliate to discuss the trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor for all the eight people who still care about the trial of the Michael Jackson’s doctor. He also appeared on The People’s Court where he acts as legal analyst where he asked people on the street if animals can die of being heartsick. Why that required a law degree, we are not sure.

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The memory will never leave me, because Ryan looked like he was not amused. I’m paraphrasing here from a foggy memory, but his answer was: “I’m a journalist. He doesn’t speak for all of us who have made a career out of reporting sports for decades.”

I respect Ryan – especially as someone who grew up reading him in the Globe. But that was a moment I realized that becoming the traditional, in-the-trenches sports reporter was long gone. For years, I pictured the massive divide between the press box and the bleachers, but Simmons was the first to successfully demonstrate that there didn’t have to be. He was on to something a lot sooner than the rest of us, he was writing in a blog style long before there were blogs, and ESPN recognized his talent and style quick enough to make a smart move and bring him aboard.

As someone who is one of the many influenced by Simmons, an everyman fan who has been a writer at ESPN.com for more than a decade, I will be among the first to admit he isn’t the pure commoner he once embodied. However, he still is putting himself out there from a very non-traditional place in the sports media world. He has such a distinct spot in the last decade of the Worldwide Leader, and not just on dot-com, but also because of his New York Times bestsellers, the 30 for 30 sports documentary series he produces and his star-studded podcast, The BS Report. He has a self-carved empire somewhere in the middle of “Booyah” and the screaming heads of Pardon The Interruption and Around The Horn.

The normal preaching about Simmons’s career appears in a column in April’s Atlantic Monthly by Isaac Chotiner. While a heavy emphasis on Simmons recent bestselling The Book of Basketball, Chotiner still gives plenty of ink to the following that the sportswriter has earned through his personality and style:

In public, Simmons fans love to yell out “Hey, Sports Guy!”—which (again) recalls voters who, when interviewed on camera about their candidate of choice, say that he is “one of us.” To Simmons’s credit, however, the unassuming nickname actually fits him comfortably. In certain respects, the public figure that Simmons most clearly resembles is the early David Letterman, although Letterman has never tried to seem like an average guy. Still, they have one thing in common: the way they personalize their work.

Chotiner sets up an even more interesting dichotomy in the column when he begins by referencing Bill James, whose stat-crunching encyclopedia of baseball is also very present as an influence to the works of Michael Lewis. Whether the obvious ties in Moneyball or the more shrouded stat-mind in the sports part of The Blind Side (i.e., the book, not the movie), Lewis is clearly a bookish disciple of James. The thing is that Simmons is kind of the opposite side of the same coin of Lewis; Chotiner places his tome of Basketball at the opposite end of the bookcase from James’s equally voluminous archive of statistics, yet certainly deserving of the same shelf.

This imagery is important for this era of journalism: Simmons is comprehensive in his coverage of sports, but not even close to the same way as James and Lewis. He grew up among fans in the decade of citizen journalism and online publishing, and he hasn’t let that change how he writes – he is proud to know Matt Saracen’s stats in the same way he does Matt Cassel’s. That has to irritate the crap out of the guys who’ve filed hurried game summaries from press boxes of low market teams to work their way up.

Yet, as Simmons has grown in popularity, the same problem has alienated him slightly from the fan base that once adores him. There’s a running joke about the time ESPN opened up comments for Simmons’ regular written columns – and how quickly the vitriol (actual comments in this 2007 Deadspin post) forced them to shut down that section for his posts still to this day.

In an exclusive interview with Mediaite last fall, Bill mentioned to Colby Hall:

You can’t work for ESPN and NOT be part of the establishment. For most people, we are the Starbucks of sports. When I started writing for them, it was like a switch went off — suddenly I was getting these “you sold out” emails and I’m like, “I sold out? Where’s the money?

The question I have, though, involves whether or not the establishment accepts him. It’s one thing to be a part of it, it’s quite another to be invited to the reporters’ buffet. As much as that ESPN tag makes him one of “The Man,” Simmons still has to fight the battle of being alongside the Rick Reillys, Gene Wojciechowskis and Bob Ryans of the world, with whom he still doesn’t line up perfectly. He’s as much outside the circle as inside of it in that regard.

Chotiner partly discussed Simmons in the same breath as David Letterman’s comedy stylings in the Atlantic feature. Letterman didn’t care who thought throwing watermelons off roofs wasn’t funny, he did it anyway; Simmons likewise doesn’t mind if you aren’t a fan of the television critics, fiction authors and former college roommates he parades through his podcasts. Changing the style to appease fans or join the reporter’s gallery isn’t in him – and even if he stands alone in this middle ground, he still will forever change the notion that there is no cheering in the press box. Because of him, the cheap seats are just as likely of a home for the next game changer in the future of sports journalism.

Most people are dreaming about brackets this week and the least-productive Thursday and Friday in the American work calendar. But there’s another spring event in the CBS Sports catalog that is going to be a spectacle: this April’s Masters. Forget about all the normal stories about Augusta and what its history means to the sport. This year’s event has the tease of Tiger Woods return as its big draw.

Tiger Woods, 1997 Masters Champion. Photo from CNN SI.

Late last week the AP reported that this April’s Masters at Augusta National could be the place for Tiger’s first tournament since the incidents of the last few months. It’s perfect for the imagery, as I’d argue that its one of two venues in the sport  with which Tiger is probably most associated (to me, the other is Pebble Beach, which coincidentally happens to host June’s U.S. Open). The downside? We’re about to get a landslide of ridiculous, hyperbolic narratives as to what it means to the sport of Golf, sports media, the world at large, etc.

It started earlier this month when Bill Simmons talked about the return of Woods and put it in terms of Muhammad Ali’s return to boxing from Vietnam War-era exile. That didn’t sit too well with most, ranging from the normal snark minds at Deadspin all the way to former ESPN anchor Keith Olbermann. The latter’s comments started a short-lived firefight between the two personalities, but, as seen in a  response to Mediaite’s Steve Krakauer, the ESPN brass seemingly tried to wash their hands of the back-and-forth.

Dan Levy gave a great wrap up on the whole situation, and maybe the Tiger-Woods-as-Muhammed-Ali column was  Simmons just trying to not back down from a comment he made during one of his weekly chats. The Olbermann interjection was entertaining, but he’s as explosive a personality as Simmons and has as many (more?) haters as fans. All of that was blown bigger than usual because of who it was, and it was basically just one author taking a shot at the first “Tiger’s Return” column when you strip it down.

It’s about to get worse, folks. “Tiger’s Return is going to be the biggest media event since X” is about to be the story that fills in the gaps between early round play of the NCAA tournament.The statement just got released: Tiger’s return at the Masters is confirmed. Also breaking: Rick Reilly’s head just exploded as he figures out how to depict this as the most cinematic blockbuster sporting event since the Chariot scene in Ben Hur.

Don’t believe me? The tipping point is about to close, and in the newest addition to the genre of Tiger’s return, the comparison comes from CBS Sports president, Sean McManus, as documented by Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch:

“I think the first tournament Tiger Woods plays again, wherever it is, will be the biggest media event other than the Obama inauguration in the past 10 or 15 years,” McManus said.

The reporter — taken aback by that claim — asked if he had heard correctly.

“It is hard to overestimate how much interest there will be,” McManus continued. “Tiger Woods is the most famous, most recognized, most accomplished athlete in the world, and his celebrity and prominence is even larger than it was. When you look at the fact that he gave a very simple press statement with no questions and every broadcast and cable news network in America carried it with great interest, I think that is an indication that whatever he does has enormous interest. And whatever he does on the golf course for the first time since Thanksgiving will be of interest to almost every man and women in this country.”

This is my one appeal: let’s try and keep the excitement in check. I’m asking a lot, I know, of the sports media to not overplay a story. Don’t bill this as the return of the Prodigal Son – let’s not forget for a minute *why* Tiger has been missing from Golf since November and it wasn’t an excuse to avoid the 16th Hole at the Phoenix Open. We’ll watch – Tiger or No Tiger – mostly because it’s a major tournament that is one of the first signs that Spring is actually coming and golf season is upon us. I know most believe that Golf media lives and dies by the Swooshed-One, but let’s try and behave with some dignity.

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But Reilly’s connection with the average sports fan is as strong as a dial-up modem (attempt at Reilly prose) – and it was never more clear than in his odd, over-reaching advice for Tiger Woods this week (and even some at ESPN agree publicly).

He was on Sportscenter Tuesday to tease a column about the same issue. Here’s some of Reilly’s advice:

I think he’s got to fire his caddy, I think he’s got to fire his agent, his PR guy anybody that his wife no longer trusts, rightly or wrongly, has to go if he wants to stay with his wife.

What exactly did his caddy do? And “rightly or wrongly,” Woods has to get rid of anyone who his wife wants? This logic seems completely unjustified. But wait, there’s more:

Most importantly I think he just needs to forget golf for awhile. Just practice, he lives right next to the range in Orlando, and prove to the world that his marriage is way more important than majors. He can shut it down, clear through to the U.S Open, maybe to the British Open, and be really serious about this.

Sportscenter anchor Jay Harris gently followed up, saying it “goes contrary to what a lot of folks think. Many experts think he needs to get back on the course and start winning and this will all go away.”

“When your house is on fire, you don’t go play the Buick Open, you don’t go play the Masters,” said Reilly.

Not suprisingly, 62% of Sportsnation (also on ESPN) disagreed with Reilly’s PR plan for Woods (actually that number sounds low), and it has been largely disputed across the web.

But then there was the reaction from his ESPN colleagues. On Pardon the Interruption yesterday, during the “Role Play” segment, Tony Kornheiser played the role of Woods’ caddy, Steve Williams. Reilly’s comments came up, and co-host Michael Wilbon didn’t hold back:

Wilbon: Tiger Woods always turns to you for advice. What you got for him now?

Kornheiser (as Williams): First of all, I don’t even know if I’m working for Tiger because Rick Reilly went on TV, said I should be fired, Tiger’s agent should be fired, everybody in the Tiger camp should be fired.

Wilbon: How stupid was that, Stevie? How dumb was that?

If there was someone who would publicly say what others are thinking within ESPN, it made sense to happen on PTI.

Here’s Reilly’s Tiger screed:

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» Follow Steve Krakauer on Twitter

But it might be just that, the tangential style that intertwines endless pop culture references with hilarious personal stories and occasionally well-researched topics, that has made him one of the most popular writers in the country today.

In his latest book, The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy, you essentially get a 700 page Simmons column, complete with lists of the 96 greatest players of all time, the ten best teams in history and of course, around 1,500 words on how Kobe Bryant compares to Teen Wolf.

After reading the book in its entirety, I’m convinced of one thing: Nobody knows more about the history of basketball than Bill Simmons. At times, it reads as though he’s trying to prove that to you, particularly when he writes about the sport prior to 1975. He was born in ’69, so in those parts, he relies heavily on the hundreds of books he read to fill in what he didn’t witness firsthand.

From there, it’s vintage Simmons. For a guy who calls the year he stopped writing and smoked way too much weed the best decision he ever made, the man has a remarkable memory. He tells the laugh out loud story of how his developing love for basketball made him wish he was black (haven’t we all?). And he comes off as guy who recognizes how privileged he was to grow up in a time where he and his father could afford season tickets to some of the greatest Boston Celtics teams in history. It’s actually quite endearing.

For those who read him regularly, the book meets all expectations. He even addresses some of his longstanding beefs with certain players or coaches. Early on, he describes how Isiah Thomas, a man he crucified over the years in his column, taught him the secret of basketball. The secret is a theme throughout the book; players and teams who understood the secret were rewarded. Those who couldn’t were guys like Vince Carter, who Simmons is harder on than just about anyone who ever played, with the exception of Kareem Abdul Jabar.

While some sports writers use lists as a lazy way of mailing in a column or giving length to a book, Simmons’ top 96 players list is the central premise and unquestionably, the best part of The Book of Basketball. Spanning 338 pages, from Tom Chambers at 96 to Michael Jordan at 1, he recreates the basketball Hall of Fame the way it should be, devising a pyramid that separates the players by level of greatness.

All of it, of course, is his opinion. But he backs so much up with statistics, knowledge and his passion to persuade everyone to think exactly the way he thinks, that you have to question yourself before you start calling Simmons a homer who let all that pot get to his head. Full disclosure: The minute I received the book, I skipped to see where he listed my favorite player of all time, Allen Iverson. He has him about 30 spots higher than I expected.

From there I was sold.

And chances are, you will be too. The book isn’t without its flaws. It occasionally reads like a 700 page book might and the pop culture references will surely be out-of-date by the time Simmons’ children are old enough to read it. But he also delivers the most entertaining history of an entire sport you’ll ever read. Baseball is a sport too stuffy, too set in its ways, to have a book written like this. Football is too much team, not enough individuals.

Basketball is just right. And Simmons was the perfect author to capture it all.

This post originally appeared at Dan’s Take.

Just in case our mandate of covering the media is not recursive enough for you, we gather here today to watch the watchmen watch the watchmen. In other words: How did ESPN’s new ombudsman Don Ohlmeyer do in his first column for the World Wide Leader in Sports?

The answer: pretty good… if you could make it far enough into the nearly 4,000-word column to get to the point. Or as the kids might say: TL;DR.

Unlike his predecessors Le Anne Schreiber and George Solomon, both of whom came from newsroom backgrounds, Ohlmeyer is more of a Jack-Donaghy-of-all-trades: His resumé includes line items like producer and network honcho. This is crucial. Assessing a behemoth like ESPN that karaoke-steps the line between entertainment and information (“Let’s invent a 24-hour sports network that buys rights from leagues and teams and then does news coverage half the day that covers those leagues and teams critically,” deadpanned ESPN’s John Walsh on Bill Simmons’ podcast, but like, that’s exactly it) requires a multi-media perspective.

What it probably doesn’t require is a lengthy intro peppered with name-drops, confusing disclosures, and conventional wisdom. I’m hardly one to call someone out for excessive verbiage — I’ve never met a complicated sentence structure I didn’t love — but I think it’s fair to say that one really shouldn’t have to slog through this:

I think the Internet is the most transformative technological advancement since the printing press. Gutenberg’s press freed information from the control of the church and the aristocracy. It led to literacy and the freedom to think based on knowledge. The Internet has revolutionized access to unfiltered information, putting it at everyone’s fingertips. The blessing is that, at the touch of a finger, we can Google almost anything and find a wealth of information. The curse, of course, is you can’t be sure what you find is fair or accurate.

…in order to finally arrive at this:

It appears that in an attempt to tamp down media criticism, ESPN issued a statement to inquiring news organizations that had questioned its lack of acknowledgment of this story. That doesn’t cut it. In a situation like this you need to be proactive, not reactive. If ESPN felt it needed to explain its rationale to The New York Times or The Washington Post, then there is no excuse for not giving the same explanation DIRECTLY to its audience.

That point, coming as it does nearly 3,600 words into the column, is exactly right. A few weeks ago, I dubbed ESPN’s weirdly circuitous way of issuing one statement to explain its lack of another “a sort of journalistic fingers-in-ears ‘I can’t hear you!’” maneuver. It was paternalistic: not just in its condescension — we’ll engage with readers of the Times, sure, but not with our own viewers — but also in its daddish fogeyness, its clear misunderstanding of the way information is disseminated and digested online.

(Speaking of old farts who don’t get it, an aside: In a bit of corporate synergy, ESPN employs Rick Reilly, hater of blogs and one of the worst perpetrators of what Can’t Stop The Bleeding terms “terrible sub-Dave Barry-style jokery — the sort of Dad-grade randomness in which words like “weasel” and “donut” become punchlines of their own.” Or dental metaphors: Their odd prevelance in Reilly’s writing was first uncovered by Slate’s Josh Levin and most recently scrubbed from Wikipedia by a kindly PR rep. Then there was the Twitter hammer brought down by Bristol. No wonder Bill Simmons seems evermore crazed!)

Anyway, reaction to Ohlmeyer’s early effort has been mixed. Examiner.com’s Paula Duffy was unimpressed with the ombudsman’s interview with ESPN VP Vince Doria as well as his suggestion that the network should have briefly acknowledged the story, explained that it was opting not to elaborate further, and directed viewers to its website for an explanation of its policies. I agree about the Doria interview — he already spouted the same useless party lines when Dan Patrick interviewed him — but I like Ohlmeyer’s protocol for handling issues like these. (I proposed a simple line item linking to the AP report, but his method is even more transparent.)

Over on Deadspin, Dashiell Bennett ruled that Ohlmeyer, once he got to his point, “pretty much nailed it” but not before comparing the column, which used the old crutch of defining the word ombudsman in the lede, to “a bad graduation speech”. (A commenter likened it more to a bad college essay, noting that “I was always partial to ‘Since the dawn of time…’”) Amusingly, Bennett took more comfort from Ohlmeyer’s overall rambling tone than he did from his voluminous conflict-of-interest disclosures:

At this point, you have no need to worry about Ohlmeyer’s independence from the ESPN corporate structure since it’s obvious that no editor touched this thing. (Although it was published at 5:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night, just before the Brett Favre news conference. Not exactly primetime placement.)

NBC’s Pro Football Talk, one of the most outspoken blogs during the initial Roethlisberger flareup, also agreed with Ohlmeyer’s conclusions, although writer Mike Florio did lament the lack of hard-hitting and/or follow-up questions in the ombudsman’s exchange with Doria. He also served up a juicy parenthetical aside:

(There’s also a possibility that ESPN was protecting its relationship with Harrah’s, the employer of the plaintiff and all of the defendants not named Roethlisberger. Coincidentally, SportsBusiness Daily reported today that ESPN and Harrah’s Interactive Entertainment have announced a seven-year deal for ESPN to continue to broadcast the World Series of Poker. A month ago, a report regarding the suit against Harrah’s employees could have complicated the negotiations.)

Innnnteresting. Perhaps Ohlmeyer can get some boilerplate denials from Doria about that one in his next column. Let’s just hope that he skips the part where he waxes nostalgic about the origin of the slot machine or looks up “junket” in the dictionary.

Katie Baker has contributed to Gawker, the Yale Daily News, Young Manhattanite, and US College Hockey Online. Her blog can be found here. She also has a day job.