Krieger: It's not our job to help cover up scandals, By: Dave Krieger

April 11, 2006

Baseball's steroid crisis has spilled over into the sports media in much the way the Iraq crisis spilled over into the news media, or at least onto Judith Miller's desk.

In its wake, there's been an uncommon amount of navel-gazing about the state of "sports journalism."

Let me do what I can to clear this up:

Sports journalism is an oxymoron.

You might already be aware of this, but the outcome of a sporting event has precious little effect on anything, assuming there's no riot. If we judged it by the usual journalistic standard - significance - we would run it in the back with the horoscope.

However, fans love sports and they want to read about their favorite teams. We satisfy this demand in the role of entertainment reporters.

We operate in a hazy neutral zone between journalism and promotion, and it's not just us. Do you notice the change in tone on 60 Minutes when the subject switches to sports?

Suddenly, Ed Bradley is fawning over Tiger Woods. Michelle Wie is charming Steve Kroft.

If this is how TV's most distinguished news program covers sports, what do you expect out of the wretches who do it every day?

Nevertheless, there's been a lot of concern about "sports journalism" lately, most of it in relation to steroids. (Not that we're on them. No one's saying that.)

This is a pretty adept PR job by Major League Baseball, which has managed to make the question, "If the press didn't know, how were we supposed to know?" Too bad Enron didn't think of that.

In fact, two reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle forced baseball to act, but critics point out these were not sportswriters but news-side guys.

As Mark Jurkowitz of The Phoenix in Boston wrote last week, sports have become a big seller for newspapers and other media, which are looking for sales drivers in a big way.

According to Jurkowitz, Buster Olney, formerly of The New York Times and now of ESPN, wrote this in The Times 10 days ago: "I had a role in baseball's institutional failure during what will be forever known as the Steroid Era."

This self-flagellation is more evidence of baseball's extraordinary influence over the people who cover it. Players, trainers and "nutritional gurus" were making the case throughout baseball's Steroid Era that you could bulk up the way Mark McGwire did, the way Sammy Sosa did, the way Barry Bonds did, by a combination of protein shakes, South American herbs and serious weightlifting.

Sportswriters, as you may have observed, do not tend to be weightlifters. By and large, we bought it. Now, Turk Wendell says no one can put on 30 pounds of muscle in a single off-season without pharmaceutical assistance. In all honesty, most of us had no idea if you could or not.

So call us naive, but that is not the same as sharing the blame with baseball for baseball's internal dysfunction. Jose Canseco wrote in his book Juiced that he taught team trainers to administer steroids. Those are club employees. That's baseball's problem.

But some media types went above and beyond the role of oblivious spectator. Some actively argued against an investigation of the Steroid Era, a probe baseball launched only after the two Chronicle reporters published their book. One prominent example was Tim Kurkjian, also of ESPN.

Kurkjian argued there was no point to an investigation. This is a television analyst and former sportswriter who does not want to know.

Nor was he alone. Any number of commentators fretted at how difficult such an investigation would be. How could it ever succeed? How broad should it be? What could possibly come of it? Better to let it drop.

The underlying rationale, of course, is it would be better for baseball to let it drop. A commentator who takes this position has crossed the line from journalist to baseball guy. A journalist always wants to know as much as possible. He certainly doesn't throw up his hands in despair before an investigation even starts.

Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that ESPN is in business with baseball to present and promote its games. It has built a stable of experts - some of them former journalists - to support this enterprise with studio shows, analysis and the like.

But "analysis" to a business partner is not the same as "analysis" to an outsider. A business partner wants to know as much as possible about tonight's starters but would rather avoid the unpleasantness of the steroid scandal. It is no coincidence that ESPN also airs Bonds' reality show, Bonds on Bonds, over which Bonds has editorial control.

It's not our job in the sports media to run baseball, and it's a good thing because the evidence suggests we wouldn't do it much better than baseball does.

It's also not our job to help baseball cover up its scandals. Even if there's just a small slice of journalism left in what we do, it should be enough to tell us that.