Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Beil’s Spiel: Button-pusher
More spiel, this time with comments from readers of Tuesday’s column. What he gets right this time, though he doesn’t say it, is the press’s complicity in the whole thing. If these ballplayers have been doing illegal and anticompetitive things for 15 years, as Jose Canseco contends, and such behavior is judged such an outrage, where were these writers?
Apart from quoting the dubious Canseco and the even more dubious Caminiti when they spouted, the press did little or nothing to advance the story. But let some accusations fall into their laps and the rabid anti-steroid watchdogs get ballistic, trashing MLB and the Union and the players but somehow overlooking their own role. There’s plenty of attitude around, all that’s lacking is hard evidence.
In contrast, today’s story about Arnold Schwarznegger and his own steroid use seems pretty rational.
I think that hidden deep, deep, deep within all of this is a larger issue and a dialog that has yet to take place, but really ought to.
And that is what really is the role of the press in general?
The steroid issue is illustrative, why the silence then (if it was so widespread) and why the hysteria now? And more importantly, what should the press be writing, or asking? Everything? Should every intimate detail of everyone’s lives be held up to the scrutiny of the third estate? Only public figures? Only public figures in relation to their work?
I don’t have an answer, but I imagine an intrepid reporter could find out that 99% of poliiticians, movie stars, athletes and journalists at one point tied one on and called their ex-girl- boy- friend late at night. Would that be news?
We like to say that we don’t want to censor the press, but what happens when the press becomes a censurious voice? Forcing people not just lie about large matters, but smaller matter or weaknesses. Not cardinal sins, not venial ones..just everyday human weakness.
Is it healthy that we have a press that can corner a president into saying “I didn’t inhale” – leaving aside the same press’ credulity for the current president’s unremitting lies about Iraq?
In most countries, there is no pretense about an impartial press. Here we pretend that it is so. Fox’ ‘fair and balanced’ is no more credible than Clinton’s tale of non-inhalation.
So what should the press do? It’s clear that the Olney’s Lupica’s, Heyman’s and so on shouldn’t be writing about steroids, first they nothing about them, each column is filled with unfettered conjectures about the effects of steroids most of which are absurd and unfounded. Second they continually misrepresent what is being said. There was a time when reporters would NOT write what they privately knew unless they could double source it and get someone to speak, even if anonymously. And anonymous sources as sole backup would lead to a story being pulled every time.
But even outside of this kind of slipshod amateurism, there is this bigger issue. When does something become “news” and are there things that really aren’t?