And well presented.

I think this whole thing stinks of the last great battleground between MSM and “bloggers”—the subjective, “character assassination,” flowery prose of MSM vs. the objective, fact-based rat-tat-tat of the bloggosphere.  Which is ironic, because it is the MSM that accuses blogs of being incorrect, factually deficient, and out to “assassinate character.”  But I think that CC is dead right—the subjective tone given to this story is actually what shapes the story. 

The irony (well, not irony, but something) is that this is the one year anniversary (give or take, according to Deadspin) of the Leitch v. Bissinger show down.  That’s why this story seems to be part of those final, rear-guard skirmishes of the war.  To me, the appearance is of a snarky, trying-to-make-it-in-a-male-athlete-world female reporter slanting a story to give her a niche, and MSM like the Daily News is peppering our airwaves/newspapers with bits and pieces of a story that (1) not many care about, and (2) everyone knows about (or assumes) already.  And the presentation has a personal, subjective edge to it to spice it up. 

Could A-Rod, in all his glory, actually help bring down the last bastions of the MSM?

Craig I think that’s easily the best thing you’ve written that I have read. No one is willing to challenge the validity of what she has been writing and her moral presumptions about those she writes about also go unchallenged. I have not seen similar commentary on her like this anywhere else and again, it was a phenomenal piece.

Well done.

We are in the minority. Just like those of us who put on the brakes during the early days of the Duke case were in the minority.

Roberts isn’t a harbinger of the end of the MSM. She’s the only thing keeping it alive. For every person disgusted by writers like Roberts, there are five readers who eat it up. And the former group wasn’t buying newspapers, anyway.

Apparently, fewer and fewer of the latter buying newspapers, too.

Ben—except as demonstrated above, even after the facts were set straight in the Duke case—after Nifong was being prosecuted for prosecutorial misconduct and the players in question had been exonerated, Roberts was still stirring the pot, still casting aspersions on the Duke lacrosse team and it’s culture, and coming to the conclusion that a false prosecution may have been for the best anyway.  Sorry, that’s more than reporting facts, as you say.  That’s ignoring facts that are inconvenient to her premise (i.e. that the rich White students at Duke are evil and are due their comeuppance) and blasting forward with the premise anyway.

I haven’t read her book on A-Rod yet. No one has. But given her track record, we should be skeptical of the same thing in this case.

Bob: Of course you can. What if the book says he was a cheating baseball player and a bad husband, ergo he is a horrible father?  What if it says that he is a cheating baseball player and a bad husband, ergo he hates the poor?  What if the book says he was a cheating baseball player and a bad husband and that made him a wretched and miserable human being?  I’d say all of those things, absent more, are unsupported leaps.  Even if A-Rod has some pretty crappy character in many respects doesn’t make him an abomination.

If, on the other hand, she documents and reports facts and draws reasonable, supportable conclusions from them, great. Lovely. I hope she wins a Pulitzer Prize.  My point is that given Roberts’ track record, I don’t think she should be given an advanced benefit of the doubt about that before anyone has had a chance to read her book.

And explain to me how I’m kissing A-Rod’s butt.

Craig, you said the following:  “Indeed, as I’ve said three times today, I don’t even think that I care if the facts are true or not, because the facts don’t interest me as much as the way in which they are presented, the context, and the conclusions they cause Roberts to draw.”

Now, in response to my comment, you say that we should be “skeptical” of the factual assertions in Roberts’ book because, in other situations, she hasn’t backed off factual assertions once proven wrong.

So which is it?  Do the facts not matter at all, as you said three times earlier?  Or do the facts actually matter, but we should doubt whether not her allegations are actually true?

I can accept the latter.  These are serious allegations and, when it comes to initial reactions, the messenger matters.  But I can’t accept the former AS A CRITISISM OF ROBERTS.  If you don’t care about the facts - about whether ARod cheated, about whether he deliberately hurt his own team’s chances of winning in favor of helping his friends - then the identity of the messenger doesn’t matter. 

You can say you don’t care about the facts because, well, you don’t care.  Fine.  No one says you have to care.  But if you don’t care about the facts, that’s not a critisism of Roberts.

Several thoughts…

1. Well done, Craig. Very good piece.

2. Interesting that Craig writes this the same day that the Baltimore Sun cuts a third of its remaining, already bare-bones newsroom. This includes virtually every sportswriter not named Peter Schmuck that they’ve got left.

3. Ben, I think you’re being a little too obtuse here. What Craig is saying, I think (he can of course defend himself, and almost certainly will) is merely that in this case specifically and in her career overall, Selena Roberts has proven that she is unreliable, especially by the standards of the journalistic profession that she claims to belong to. Part of that unreliability includes her demonstrated ability to hold to a position in contravention of facts as well as the changing situation. She jumps to conclusions and then is unable to admit to being wrong.

From this, we should not jump to conclusions on Rodriguez based on what Roberts has written. Craig doesn’t care about the veracity of any one thing that Roberts has written. Ultimately, all that stuff will shake out. Rather, he doesn’t want all this odious stuff that’s coming out about one aspect of Rodriguez’s life: his (possibly, or more likely probably, fraudulent) job performance. Rodriguez’s scuzzy behavior at work should not be taken as a signifier of his general character, which most of us do not, can not, and will not know.

Sitting here, a thought occurs to me…

There might be some parallels here with many finance executives. A bunch of people engage in unethical behavior that is almost certainly illegal in terms of the federal government as well as in contravention to the standards applied by one’s employer. This risky behavior is common for many reasons, perhaps not the least of with is the lack of policing from official and unofficial sources (SEC/MLB and the media in both cases). Once the situation can’t be contained any more the media rediscovers its purpose and goes digging for scapegoats. The people who have lost/spent a bunch of money on a lie are understandably peeved, and overreact. Now, death threats against AIG execs are much more serious than character assassination of a rather tone-deaf baseball player. And the financial crisis is of course more serious than baseball. But this is the situation of the media in late-capitalist America: that of simulacra. A-Rod the man is replaced by A-Rod the monster. The AIG executive who has two kids and a wife and volunteers at his church on weekends (or whatever) is replaced by the greedy capitalist.

Just thinking aloud, but ultimately we should all sit back and realize these are complex people with a lot going on. Selena Roberts does not help with this.