In this space, we have long railed about the mainstream media mess that was the Duke Lacrosse Case. For those who have forgotten, the Duke Lacrosse Case was a tragic miscarriage of justice fueled and then perpetuated by the mainstream media — particularly the New York Times. In this sad story, an ambitious North Carolina prosecutor named Michael Nifong, railroaded a number of Duke University lacrosse players, by using his pals in the mainstream media to convict the kids long before the charges ever got to trial. He and the media, essentially destroyed their lives.
Of course, the case unravelled, the media looked like a foolish, ignorant mob and Nifong lost his job and his license to practice law.
In the middle of it all was a woman named Selena Roberts who, from her bully pulpit at the New York Times, convicted the young men long before any of the false charges ever reached a court of law. Roberts looked like a hateful, mindless idiot when the smoke cleared, but she never did apologize to the young men, whose lives she personally destroyed, or even to the public, which was duped into believing Nifong was right, the kids were monsters and the hooker at the heart of the phony charges was some saint sent to clean up the mess left by men.
There is a deep, dark, white-hot hole in hell for people like Selena Roberts, but like so many mainstream media monsters before her, she can’t quit spewing the fictional venom.
Now, she’s decided to destroy the life of baseball player Alex Rodriguez and she’s done a pretty damn good job, too. In a book entitled “A-Rod,” this entitled journalist (how does a hate-filled hack like Roberts get jobs at the New York Times and Sports Illustrated?), Roberts has used more than 115 un-named sources to make Rodriguez look like the worst human being ever to play baseball.
Like her scummy predecessors, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Wlliams, who wrote the books Game of Shadows using more than 225 un-named sources, in their very successful effort to vilify Barry Bonds, Roberts appears to make it all up.
I don’t see any other way to phrase it. When you use that many un-named sources, the only thing you can call it is fiction. Like Fainaru-Wada and Williams, who created a novel so gripping it forced the United States justice department to make up charges against Bonds — charges that have hung in the air for years and have still not resulted in a trial — you’ve done a remarkable job. It was so good, in fact, that Fainaru-Wada got a high-paying job with ESPN as a reward.
Obviously, there is a real benefit to writing fiction and the passing it off as fact. Selena Roberts is the latest mainstream media darling to go down that road and be rewarded for it. I don’t get it, when I wrote my two books, Home Run: The History of the Winnipeg Goldeyes and Canwest Global Park (2005) and the Canadian bestseller, The Winnipeg Jets: A Celebration of Professional Hockey in Winnipeg (2007), my editor wanted nothing less than every quote to be attributed along with dates, times and places, in order to source them all. I guess, when you’re a mainstream media star you can make up quotes and American editors will just blow them off as “un-named sources.”
Fortunately, the American mainstream media, embarrassed by Roberts’ incredible gall, has answered back:
Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star wrote on May 2:
Not long ago, sports writer Selena Roberts compared the Duke lacrosse players to gang members and career criminals
She claimed that the players’ unwillingness to confess to or snitch about a rape (that did not happen) was the equivalent of drug dealers and gang members promoting antisnitching campaigns.
When since-disgraced district attorney Mike Nifong whipped up a media posse to rain justice on the drunken, male college students, Roberts jumped on the fastest, most influential horse, using her New York Times column to convict the players and the culture of privilege that created them.
Proven inaccurate, Roberts never wrote a retraction for the columns that contributed to the public lynching of Reade Seligmann, Colin Finnerty and David Evans.
Instead, she moved on to Sports Illustrated, a seat on ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters” and a new target, baseball slugger Alex Rodriguez…
Roberts’ book [about A-Rod] is a long-winded blog. Why it’s being treated as an unimpeachable piece of journalism can only be explained by the cushy position she’s been handed by the New York Times, ESPN and Sports Illustrated and the unchallenged institutional bias found within the elite sports media institutions.
Then, a day or two later, Josh Alper wrote on nbcnewyork.com:
Matt Lauer of “Today” didn’t touch on Roberts’ role in that miserable moment in rushing to judgment (on the Duke lacrosse players) on Monday morning, but he did ask her about the use of anonymous sources, especially if any of them might be telling tall tales to fulfill their own motivations of seeing Rodriguez taken down a peg. Roberts’ response is curious, to say the least.
“But I think there’s not so much jealously as disillusionment because he’s so great, he’s such a great player, he didn’t need any of this,” Roberts told Lauer. ”He didn’t need to embellish anything, he’s a great story in and of himself.”
If, as Roberts’ book alleges, Rodriguez was doing steroids in high school, how is it true that he didn’t need any of this? According to Roberts, he wasn’t embellishing anything. Rather, he was maintaining the steroid use that he started well before stepping foot on a big league diamond. Unless his sixth-grade Little League season was so good that he could have been in the majors right then and there, it is Roberts’ contention that he was never a great player because he was always taking steroids.
And a great story? That’s not evident in what’s been leaked from her book. Stories about A-Rod tipping pitches for the opposition or forcing clubhouse attendants to put toothpaste on his toothbrush are meant to make judgments about Rodriguez’s character. Judgments that all flow from the fact that he used steroids, something that Craig Calcaterra, who hit on Roberts’ Duke connections before Whitlock, quite rightly calls bogus
Those stories, all anonymously sourced, are being roundly rejected by A-Rod’s teammates. Those denials are from Doug Mientkiewicz and Michael Young, which we know because they were willing to put their name behind their words.
As Roberts told Lauer, her use of anonymous sources broke the report of A-Rod’s failed drug test. Every word she writes may be true, but it certainly appears that she’s just as interested in using them to judge A-Rod as a person as she is in finding out if he broke any laws or rules of baseball.
Selena Roberts’ book on Rodriguez, just like the Bonds’ book before that, is sleazy and yellow and all too typical. Sadly — and Jason Whitlock, among others, know it’s sad — the princes and princesses of the mainstream media milk their hateful, sick fiction for all it’s worth.
