Steroids and the Media

In relation to an article written by my father, Ted Griffith, in Friday's Hamilton Spectator and Ottawa Citizen regarding Barry Bonds' chase of Hank Aaron's record of 755 career home runs, I am now posting a condensed version of an article I wrote in December 2006 regarding the media's coverage of steroid use in sport.

And for the record, it would be nice to see Bonds retire at 755, but the chances of that happening are as likely as Babe Ruth coming back from the dead to pitch a no-hitter in Yankee Stadium against the Red Sox.


The Media and Steroid in Sport

The element of steroid use in sport has been an issue for 20 years, from Ben Johnson's drug scandal at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, to recent U.S. Congressional hearings on steroid use in baseball. For a large period of that time, however, it had been the elephant in the room. Many people, both in and outside of the media, knew or suspected that many athletes were bending the rules in order to gain a competitive advantage over their opponents. That all changed on March 27, 2006.

March 27, 2006 was the day that Game of Shadows was released into bookstores, a book detailing the steroid use of baseball's greatest modern player, Barry Bonds, by two sports reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. Game of Shadows brought the issue of steroid use, particularly in baseball, to the attention of North America more than any other issue.

The book, based on articles published in the paper in 2004, was the basis for America's premier sports magazine, Sports Illustrated, using the information to label Bonds as guilty, going so far as to headline the cover of the issue with the words, "The Truth: Barry Bonds and Steroids". This story and subsequent book were released just weeks before the baseball season began, with Bonds only 48 home runs away from one of the sport's greatest records, most career home runs. Certainly the timing of the publishing was not coincidental.

Whether Barry Bonds used these substances to attain his record setting numbers is irrelevant in the world of baseball; at the time of the accused drug use, steroids were not illegal in baseball. They were outlawed after the 2002 season.

But this story, and the story of all steroid use in sport, has little to do with the rules of the game.

It is clear from the cover of the issue of SI regarding Bonds that the magazine went with a headline to draw in people and sell magazines. But this is a trend that the sports media has continued with since: convicting people before all the facts are in.

The best example of this is the case of former Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley. On Sunday, October 1, 2006, AP picked up a story from the Los Angeles Times stating that Grimsley, suspended from baseball for steroid use, named five high profile players who used steroids, including one of the best pitchers in recent history, Roger Clemens. This information was obtained through a leaked affidavit, and the story spread throughout the continent. For two days, questions arose about these players, but on the following Tuesday, it was reported that the prosecutor in the case stated that these reports contained "significant inaccuracies", effectively saying that the players named were not guilty. It is often said that a bell cannot be unrung, and if the truth had come out much later, the suspicion of the players named may have not disappeared as quickly as it did.

All this doesn't mean that all in the sports media are blind to what has been happening. Some are now ready to admit that they did not do their jobs properly.

In an article from Editor and Publisher, sports writers discuss their failure in exposing steroids in sports like baseball earlier. Bill Dwyre, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, discusses how many in the field did not translate their work from one sport to another. "We did a very good job of jumping on performance-enhancing drugs in Olympic sports, but you don't treat baseball the same as something like weightlifting in the Olympics. It didn't register on our radar like it should have."

The media's treatment of the subject of steroid use in sports has been slanted heavily towards America's pastime. In the NFL, for example, San Diego Chargers star linebacker Shawne Merriman was suspended for 4 games for steroid use, and the issue was largely ignored, and when CBS News reported that multiple members of the NFC Champion Carolina Panthers were using steroids, other media outlets did not pick up the story with any interest, especially when compared to the Jason Grimsley story of last October.

It is evident that the media has little to no interest in drug stories outside of baseball, and that is a shame. All sports are susceptible to this problem, not just baseball, and the media needs to evenly focus its attention on all of them. Too often we hear stories of "juicing" in baseball, but why is that the only sport that matters? Why are all cyclists and sprinters using performance-enhancing drugs, but hockey and basketball players go unsuspected? This problem will only get worse in the coming years, and it is the media's responsibility to fairly and accurately cover all sides of the story, and that means covering all sports equally.