Steroids in Baseball and Beyond

low-cost, low-quality, high-availability food and entertainment that have become the sole concern of the People, to the exclusion of matters that some consider more important: e.g. the Arts, public works projects, human rights, or democracy itself.

Is that what professional sports has become for the American public? It’s tempting to judge this whole steroids saga as a unique merger of greed and sports but I think it is indicative of a larger, more inclusive Winning is Everything philosophy that I will deal with later in this series.

Other media distractions

Is it merely coincidence that other stories sharing the theme of steroid abuse fail to catch the eye of the corporate media? I would be more inclined to attribute this to poor timing if I were not already well aware of many ignored or underreported stories deserving public attention that did not receive it. When I first started giving public presentations on our election mess several years ago, Ariana Huffington’s piece “Just Say Noruba” made a great opener. In it, Huffington examines the news coverage three stories got on the six major news networks over seven weeks in early summer, 2005. The stories: the court case and ultimate acquittal of Michael Jackson, the disappearance of blonde co-ed Natalee Holloway while vacationing in Aruba, and the release of the Downing Street Memos, minutes of a meeting which discussed the Bush administration’s commitment to the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent manipulation of intelligence to justify going to war. This last was, by any measure, a major story, deserving our attention.

Huffington’s research yielded the following: Downing Street memos: 56 segments (with two networks having no segments at all and three more having ten or less), Natalee Holloway: 646 segments, and Michael Jackson: 1490 segments. While the Holloway story got more than 11 times the coverage of the Downing Street Memos, the Jackson story easily prevailed with so many more lurid features: a high-profile celebrity, race, pedophilia, homosexuality. Who could ask for anything more?

I have long complained that the media focuses on all the wrong things. This is but one example of that tendency. We have critical elections just around the corner. States have tripped over one another to grab the earliest possible dates for their primaries. Now we have an even longer, drawn-out campaign season. We’re spending even more precious time focused on the superficial. Who’s willing to talk about the terrible state our elections are in? In effect, the elections are distracting us from the way our elections are run. Which is what counts in the long run. The secret vote counting – done on computerized voting machines using proprietary software – that has taken over our nation is the 800-pound gorilla in the living room everyone avoids mentioning. It means that We the People have been shut out of our elections by private vendors. This is maddening. To quote Nancy Tobi, stalwart New Hampshire defender of election integrity,

Democratic elections are the protective shield defending the new American Republic. Public control and citizen oversight of government is nowhere more important than in elections. Publicly run, observable voting systems with checks and balances, secure the free, fair, and open counting of votes.

If you still believe we should just trust the vendors and our election officials to protect our constitutional and sacred right to vote and know that the vote has been counted properly, you have not been paying attention to the endless recitation of failed elections and lost votes. Please. Let’s get serious here and focus on the issues that really matter.

There may be "no crying in baseball," but when there's far more hue-and-cry about steroid-using sports stars on athletic fields then there is about juiced up cops and private mercenaries roaming real life battlefields in which the lives of spectators are more at risk than the participants, it's a sad day.

I couldn’t agree more.

 1  |  2