 He was right: the media doesn't like him. In a forthcoming offering from Gotham Books (a subsidiary of Penguin), excerpted in yesterday’s Sports Illustrated (a subsidiary of Time Warner), two reporters for the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle provide smoking-gun-esque detail of Barry Bonds’ steroid use. That's right, in an inspirational, hands-across-America moment of cross-corporate-cooperation, we all take timeout to proclaim in unified voice: “Barry Bonds: Asshole.”
Our practice at Sports Media Watch is not to comment on athletes or sports themselves. Plenty has been written already, with the story less than twenty-four hours old, decrying Bonds’ character and casting his future and legacy into the fires of Mount Doom. That’s not what we’re about. Instead, the story behind the story. Today, that means giving credit where credit is due, and having just finished the SI excerpt, we have to admit: a lot of credit is due.
Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams are the San Francisco Chronicle reporters who have been the Woodward and Bernstein of this story since its inception, including being behind the Chronicle’s report on Giambi’s grand jury testimony in November 2004 (you’ll remember it well: the story broke a matter of hours after Boston had closed out the World Series). While they have documented a history of homerism in the Bay Area with respect to Bonds and the Giants, especially by documenting the Giants’ persistent unwillingness to ask questions about Bonds’ drug habits, no one could accuse Fainaru-Wada, Williams, or The Chronicle of anything but intrepid and unyielding investigation. Kudos.
To put that in perspective, compare The Chronicle’s work here, and its relationship to the Giants, to the relationship between the Boston Globe and the Red Sox, as widely detailed in last November’s Theogate. Not exactly cozy and cuddly – but, then, that’s the point: this is the kind of fruitful conversation and genuine journalism that happens when everybody is not sleeping with each other’s bank accounts.
Instead, at some point, the two reporters decided to combine and expand their reporting into a single volume. Penguin picked up the book contract through its subsidiary, Gotham, and in preparation for the late-March publication date Penguin shopped around the idea for an excerpt or pre-release coverage of some sort.
According to an audio interview available on The Chronicle’s website, Gotham approached SI for the excerpt remembering especially Caminiti’s interview with Tom Verducci in which he came clean on his own steroid use. SI picked up the piece presumably because they are not stupid, and recognize that the buzz around this report and the details inside it will sell a phenomenal number of magazines, especially given its timing.
So here are the questions we’d like to see answered, not because anything smells fishy, but just because this seems like a particularly salient example of how sports media gets packaged and sold. These aren’t questions we’re likely to get answers to; it’s a wishlist:
What are the terms of the deal between Sports Illustrated and Gotham which allowed for the publication of the excerpt? Given that both Gotham and TimeWarner stand to make piles of money from this story, who’s paying whom? How many issues of this week’s SI fly off of the shelf? Does the Chronicle get any sort of compensation for the use of material learned during investigations on its dime? In short, given the number of media conglomerates that had to come together in order for this story to go off, how does it happen?
Gotham and TimeWarner will cash some very large checks. As far as The Chronice is concerned, Fainaru-Wada appeared on SportsCenter last night to answer questions about the story; he appeared in front of a San Francisco Chronicle marquis, continuing to threaten to elevate the paper into the upper ranks of American daily newspapers. It’s still not quite the peer of the Los Angeles Times or Washington Post, but the Chronicle’s stock is definitely on the rise, even if they’re not necessarily seeing a specific financial windfall (unknown).
As for Fainaru-Wada and Williams, it’s hard to know whether they’re going to ride this fifteen minutes of fame back into the pressroom, or whether this is their audition for the Bristol brand of beat sports journalism. Our immediate impression: these guys are hard-wired for the real stuff. But Bristol’s punch must taste good; these guys may go for a drink. Remember: Sal Palantonio used to be a real journalist. Now he stands in front of T.O.’s house, in case of press conference.
Whether or not ESPN ends up with Fainaru-Wada and Williams, Bristol has to feel burned. Gotham went to SI because, at the end of the day, the magazine still has more journalistic credibility than the Worldwide Leader, and this story has gotten more traction in twenty-four hours than ESPN: The Magazine’s report on steroids received in its entire run. And even if ESPN’s journalistic brand weren’t feeling a bit hurt already, Bristol’s got to feel REAL bad about that whole Barry-Bonds-Reality-Show thing. 10 points to TimeWarner for getting the scoop, timing the story, and taking out a chunk of their rival’s programming, all in one swoop.
As for Barry, you were right about one thing: yes, the media is out to get you. We admit it. Which doesn’t make us wrong.
In Non-Barry-Bonds-Used-Steroids-News
The weekend saw two big events for Bristol: one, the ongoing party in Central Florida known as ESPN: The Weekend; two, the debut of ESPN Full Circle, a fancy phrase meaning “For the next two hours, all of our employees are working on the exact same thing.”
ESPN: The Weekend didn’t mean a lot to anybody who wasn’t in the Orlando area; for us watching at home, it just meant that anytime anybody spoke with Peter Gammons he was standing in the Magic Kingdom instead of at Fenway. It reminded us oddly of College Gameday: an ESPN studio set put into a parking lot with a mass of tv-crazed fans behind, clamoring for a close-up.
To be fair, we don’t fully understand this behavior. Yes, if you’re tailgating for a college football or basketball game, and ESPN shows up in the parking lot, sure – hang out, make a sign, insult Skip Bayless. These things are fine and natural.
But if you’re inside Disney World – meaning, you’ve spent an inordinate amount of money, including (likely) airfare, exorbitant hotel costs, and the actual cost of ticket entry, to get into the “Happiest Place on Earth,” isn’t there a ride or a show or an outdated glimpse of mankind’s future that you’re supposed to be waiting in line for?
Actually, reports suggest that Disney World was in fact crawling with ESPN personalities and activities. This just a week after Bristol invaded Central Florida for the Bassmaster Classic, and just before ESPN begins filming the Battle of the Gridiron Stars at … where else? … Walt Disney World.
Nonetheless, we’re still waiting for a more in-depth report from anyone who was there. If you’ve got one you’d like to submit, send it here.
Instead, like everybody else, we were watching Duke/UNC Saturday night. And by everybody else, we mean everybody else: thanks to ESPN Full Circle, the entirety of ESPN’s sports empire was tuned in to one game. And yes, Dick Vitale was on every channel.
Not having the benefit of ESPNU and its camera that was apparently roaming through the crowds at Cameron – you can get a sense of some of the angles in the footage recap here – we did manage to see the game partially on ESPN 360, the broadband video feed, which stayed at a consistent twenty-second lag despite providing fairly clear and watchable video quality. We also occasionally switched to ESPN2 to watch the game from the backboard-mounted cameras, though, to be honest: it freaked us out.
In addition to this, ESPN will tell you that they devoted considerable other resources to the game, including features in ESPN: The Magazine and targeted content on ESPN Mobile, in case anybody has one. To be fair, Bristol syncs in their coverage and programming so often anyway that it’s hard to take special notice of this one event – it was really the multi-channel simulcasting that struck us as new or noteworthy. And in the end, it only meant one thing: there wasn’t anything else on.
I’m a Brown-noser, Baby!
If you’ve ever been watching college hoops on ESPN and wondered, possibly out loud in a socially-inappropriate situation, “how does that crazy bastard Dick Vitale keep his job?,” we have an answer for you: excessive brown-nosing. Apparently CBS has been trying to borrow Vitale for use during their NCAA tournament broadcasts; ESPN said “no deal” and is keeping him safely locked away. In response, Dickie V. noted that, while it would be fun to broadcast for the big dance, “I've had an absolute love affair with ESPN and will do whatever my bosses want me to do."
Dick: truthfully, we find you a bit annoying. But we draw the line at rooting for any eternal damnation to come your way – so be careful. You’re playing with fire. |
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