since i dont care if players used steroids theres pretty much nothing shocking here.  the tipping off of batters would REALLY piss me off if i was one of the pitchers he was screwing over, but as a fan its not a big deal.  as neyer pointed out in one of his posts, stuff like that goes on and no one cares. when farve and the packers o-line conspired to give strahan the single season sack record (and man was that ever blatant), it wasnt a scandal.

people need to get off a-rod’s sack.  yes hes a spaz and a weirdo and did stuff i wouldnt, but who cares, im paying to watch him play baseball, not to be a good person.  i could give half a dingleberry what hes like in person.

Great article, Craig.  Very well put…and much more eloquent than any response I’ve given to writers with obvious agendas (Mike Freeman over on CBS and his article ‘Deal with the Devil’ comes to mind—an article about A-Rod working with that steroids charity).  As you say, facts are facts, but reporting has reached a level of irresponsibility that actually angers me.  They’re in real trouble, in my opinion, as their competitors on blogs like this don’t charge anything.  The Duke case hit home a little bit and I was appalled at its handling as most were.  As someone who played baseball in college, I felt a real general disdain toward college athletes that was completely unwarranted.  Keep up the good, sensible, rational, work.

Ralph—there’s no requirment that someone’s opinion be a good one, but I do believe that someone’s opinion—at least someone who’s going to publish stuff for the world to see and comment on—should be a fair one.  There’s a difference.  If someone is the biggest sonofabitch the world has ever seen, it’s not being fair to act like they’re nice.  That’s simply not being accurate.  At the same time, if you’re going to call someone the biggest sonofabitch the world has ever seen, you had better have the goods to back it up, lest your opinion be seen as a transparent, evidence-free attack piece.

Roberts’ Duke work is a good example. I have no problem with the social commentary and the tangents into white sports culture at a rich college in a poor town.  Very interesting subject, actually. The problem was that Roberts ignored the facts on the ground to make those points, never once—even after the prosecution unraveled—acknowledging that, whatever her opinions on that dynamic, the Duke lacrosse case was not particularly illuminating and, in fact, somewhat cut against—or at the very least complicated—the tired privilege vs. poor narative she tried so hard to cultivate.

As for the political books, I feel they should be held to the same standard.  I’m no supporter of George Bush, but lefty screeds against him which deal more in carircature and agenda-setting as opposed to dealing with the facts on the ground and making reasonable conclusions therefrom are utterly useless.  Same goes for the stuff the Ann Coulters of the world write about Democrats.  No matter the partisan tilt, simplistic armchair psychology, especially when fueled by prexisting biases, leads to pure crap writing whenever the subject has a modicum of complexity to it.

I plan on reading Roberts’ book and will judge it on its own merits. But as the title of this post says, I am skeptical that she’s doing anything much different than the stuff I described in the previous paragraph.

Craig-
Your legal background is showing…and I mean that in a good way.  This is the most intelligent and well presented review of this story that I’ve seen. If you continue to write objective and well thought out pieces like this…well, you will never be welcomed in the mainstream media.

Selena Roberts gives all appearances of somebody who has an agenda, and will twist or play up information to suit that agenda. She may, at times, fall into something that is more or less correct, but that does not make her any more accurate as an author, a reporter, or even an opinion columnist. There’s a big difference between:

A) Gathering information
B) Verifying it as best you can
C) Drawing logical conclusions based upon that information

This is what good journalists do. Frankly, they do not do it enough, instead falling back on the he-said-she-said “objectivity” sheen, or, even worse, this:

A) I have an agenda (Democrats are evil; Republicans are evil; all professional athletes, and A-Rod in particular, are misogynist jerks)
B) I am going to find pieces of information that fit my agenda. Accuracy is a secondary concern, at best.
C) Any information that does not fit my agenda will be ignored, played down, brushed aside or twisted.

This is the Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh route. It is also the Selena Roberts route. Roberts may have the NYT’s imprimatur, but they’re all shameless hacks.

Great work.

I read another superb deconstruction of Selena Roberts’ hatchet jobs yesterday at the site below.

He excerpts all her pieces on A-Rod, which evidently stretch back two years before the article Shysterball exposed as little more than cheap yellow journalism. 

http://theyankeesrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/04/selena-roberts.html

I think this guy is a lawyer as well.

“In case I was unclear, my last comment was not that we should be skeptical of her facts. It’s that we should be skeptical of the conclusions and judgments she draws from them.”

Case in point: the “suspicious” 25 pounds he apparently put on between his sophmore and junior years of high school.  Well, I played high school baseball and I gained at least that much muscle weight during those years.  So did just about every other athelete I knew.  It’s called puberty.  You sprout a couple inches, your body naturally fills out, and, for most kids, it’s when weight lifting really starts to pay off. 

But, anyway - excellent article, Craig.  Also a fellow attorney and fan, so add my tip of the hat to Seattle Zen’s.

Marc—I actually agree with most of that, and you will rarely if ever see me making blanket statements about “the MSM”—at least not serious ones—even if I do go after specific reporters, writers and some newspaper conventions. I appreciate, based on experience, that blogging is an inherently reactive medium.  No “MSM”? No blogging. It’s that simple. Indeed, I spend a great part of each day going through the websites of the newspapers that cover Major League teams looking for stories on which to opine. If they weren’t there, I’d be toast.

I don’t think that the mainstream press provides anything over what I can do when it comes to opinion writing, and if I could figure out a way to not work in a law office for a living, I think I’d have a puncher’s chance at in-depth investigative work too.

But the day-in-day-out reporting, game coverage, etc.?  I think the MSM is crticial to that, even if there’s a lot of bloat in the system right now that needs to be shaken out (i.e. paper; redundancies, a couple layers of editors, etc.).

Dabullet—thanks.

Anonymous sources are an interesting thing. Someone with a journalism background may have greater insight into this than I do, but I certainly think they have their place. I think that place is limited, such as when the information is truly sensitive or the person providing it could truly be compromised if their identify was known.  I gather that there has been something of a tightening of anonymous source standards at big newspapers in recent years, but you still see it a lot more than may be necessary.

In a newspaper setting, a reporter has to (at least in an ideal world) get an editors or sometimes two editors’ approval to use an anonymous source, and the information being passed by them has to be checked out to a pretty serious degree. 

My question here is (1) was Roberts truly required to grant the sources anonimity here, and if so, why did she do so; and (2) did anyone at her publisher make an effort to demand that they the information check out the way a newspaper editor would.

Knowing what I know about the book publishing world, I’m guessing the answer to (2) is no, though we certainly will see soon.  As for (1), I’m having trouble coming up with a reason, other than fear of personal embarassment or identification as someone with a previous vendetta, that the sources should be anonymous. If so, Roberts should have looked elsewhere for corroboration or demanded that the source be named. If anything, their outing a system of cheating is not something that should be embarassing. Indeed, it would be a service to the game.

I don’t want to inject politics into this or offend those who are on the political left, but can anything display the follies of modern society better than the deadpan line “she was raped, robbed, strangled and was the victim of a hate crime?” It makes it sound as if (had this crime been real) the bias of the perpetrators was somehow a separate (and possibly worse) than the horrific actions that constituted the real crime.