steroids

Thomas Boswell’s Outrageous Ethical Breach

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

In the first installment of Ken Burns’ latest addendum to his epic documentary “Baseball”, there is a considerable discussion of baseball’s steroid problem, and its effect on the game, its image, and integrity.  Washington Post sportswriter Thomas Boswell is one of those interviewed, and caused quite a few PBS watchers, including me, to drop their jaws when he volunteered this:

“There was another player now in the Hall of Fame who literally stood with me and mixed something and I said ‘What’s that?’ and he said ‘it’s a Jose Canseco milkshake.’ [ Note: Star outfielder Jose Canseco was widely believed to be a steroid user from early in his career, and he finally admitted it after retiring.] And that year that Hall of Famer hit more home runs than ever hit any other year. So it wasn’t just Canseco, and so one of the reasons that I thought that it was an important subject was that it was spreading. It was already spreading by 1988.”

Boswell, who knew exactly what the player meant by “Jose Canseco milkshake,” never reported the apparent use of steroids—illegal in 1988, as it is now— to the team, Major League Baseball, or the public. Continue reading →

The Reggie Bush Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The Reggie Bush affair, in which the NFL star was stripped of his 2005 Heisman Trophy as the year’s outstanding college football player (to be more accurate, he was about to be stripped of it and chose to relinquish the award voluntarily), is one of those periodic incidents that exposes the media’s rudimentary and flawed ethical instincts, as well as the public’s. Baseball’s steroid scandal is another example. At its core, the Bush situation is infuriatingly simple: he was not eligible for the Heisman in 2005, because he had accepted gifts from alumni and other benefits and amenities forbidden by NCAA rules. It doesn’t change the correctness of  the decision to rescind Bush’s award to note that the NCAA is corrupt, that college athletes are exploited by the system, that anyone would be tempted by all the people trying to throw money, cars and other trinkets at them, that the mess of big time college football isn’t cured by punishing Reggie Bush, or any of the other dozen excuses, rationalizations and irrelevant arguments bleated into cyberspace by various sports pundits who lack the skills to decipher a basic ethics problem. Continue reading →

“The Ethicist” and His Definition of “Unethical”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Eureka! Bingo! At last!

While explaining in this week’s column why he hesitates to label a manifestly unethical practice unethical, The New York Times Magazine’s ethicist, Randy Cohen, clarified a couple of questions that have been bothering me for quite a while. Why do so many people react so violently to my conclusion that they have done something unethical? And why does Randy Cohen, a.k.a. “The Ethicist” so frequently endorse unethical conduct, especially dishonesty, when he believes it is motivated by virtuous motives? Continue reading →

The Trouble With Auto-Tune

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The British show that launched “American Idol,” X-Factor, admitted that it had used Auto-Tune, an audio processor that corrects a singer’s pitch and tone. An 18-year-old contestant named Gamu Nhengu sang just a little too well in the show’s seventh season premiere, and fans and critics started hinting at conspiracy on the web, especially via the show’s Facebook page. Finally, a spokesman for “X-Factor” confessed that Auto-Tune was used to fix disruptions caused by the many microphones used on stage during the telecast, but that the judge’s decisions were definitely based on the actual, non-Auto-Tuned performances of contestants. The show’s producers, he assured the public, only used the processor to “deliver the most entertaining experience possible for viewers.”

I’m sure that is true. This is exactly the reason TV executives rigged the quiz shows in the 1950’s. It is the reason why TV reality shows are scripted, and why NBA stars get away with game fouls that referees call against lesser players. Any competition’s entertainment value is enhanced by better competitors and more suspenseful action. The problem is that once spectators know or suspect that they are being manipulated, they stop watching at all. The fact that Simon Cowell’s UK hit would use the device immediately roused “American Idol” conspiracy theorists, and  Cowell to immediately announced an Auto-Tune ban. Continue reading →

Summer Rerun: “Ending the Bi-Partisan Effort to Destroy Trust in America”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

[TV is full of reruns these days, and sometimes I am grateful for them, for it gives me a chance to see episodes of favorite shows I had missed for some reason or another. Back in early March, I posted the following essay about the origins of America’s current crisis of trust in our government, and how it might be cured by our elected leaders. Since then, the crisis has deepened, and as I was doing some routine site maintenance, I reread the post. It is still very timely (unfortunately), and since far fewer people were visiting Ethics Alarms in March, I decided to re-post it today, with just a few minor edits. I promise not to make this a habit. Still, trust is the reason why ethics is so important in America: if there is a single post of the more than 700 I have written here since October 2009  that I would like people to read, this is it.] Continue reading →

Gift or Bribe? Barry Bonds’ Generosity to the NABJ

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Barry Bonds, the retired baseball slugger who used banned or illegal performance enhancing drugs to fuel a late-carer transformation that allowed him to grow from merely great into Superman, breaking every home run record in sight as a result, has adamantly maintained his innocence despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence, positive drug tests, and the verdict of common sense. He has also played the race card when it seemed convenient to his cause. Bonds’ cheating ways have made him rich beyond belief, and his only real problems now are 1) the likelihood of a Federal perjury trial next year in connection with his Grand Jury testimony that he never knowingly took steroids, and 2) the fact that few of the sportswriters who vote for the Hall of Fame seem inclined to enshrine steroid cheats, based on their rejection, so far, of Mark McGwire, whose steroid-assisted single season home run record Bonds broke while he was especially pumped-up.

Both of these problems could conceivably be helped by some positive press opinion, something that Bonds has never cultivated, being inclined to treat all journalists as if they were something he had to wipe off the bottom of his shoe. Thus it raised eyebrows when  it was announced that the charitable foundation created and controlled by Barry Bonds has donated $20,000 to The National Association of Black Journalists. NABJ president Kathy Times told the Associated Press that the money will be used to fund an annual award promoting entrepreneurial spirit. Continue reading →

Charlie Rangel’s Defense and Buster Olney’s Fallacy

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Charlie Rangel’s defense against the ethics charges against him is, in part this: I’m not the only one, so it’s unfair to punish me.” From the Washington Post:

“He was not the only lawmaker to solicit donations in this manner, his lawyers argue, saying that peers who did the same thing were not punished. With a trial of Rangel by the House ethics committee possible by mid-September, his legal team reached across the Capitol to point a finger at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who helped raise money for a center named for him at the University of Louisville. Rangel’s team cited similarities with the recently deceased Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and with former Republican senators Trent Lott (Miss.) and Jesse Helms (N.C.).”

OK, a question: what’s the matter with that argument? Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“You gotta understand, there were only 28 people who had my job in the whole world. And thousands of people wanted those jobs, and every year, there were guys trying to take my job. So I needed to do anything I could to protect my job, take care of my family. Do you have any idea how much money was at stake? Do you?”

—Former Mets and Phillies star Lenny Dykstra, explaining why he used banned and illegal anabolic steroids throughout his career Continue reading →

The Ethics of Booing Manny Ramirez

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

As it so often does, the world of sport is presenting us with a clear ethical conflict tomorrow night—one of those times when we have to prioritize ethical values, and decide which is more important in our culture, because if we meet one, we violate another.

Manny Ramirez will be returning to Boston’s Fenway Park in a Dodger uniform, as Boston hosts Los Angeles in an inter-league contest. Continue reading →

Armstrong, Bonds, Steroids, and Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Barry Bonds was forcibly retired from baseball despite general agreement that he could still hit a ball better than most active players. No team would hire him, because he had become the symbol of baseball’s steroid and performance-enhancing drugs scandal that casts a permanent shadow over the game’s image, statistics, integrity, and current stars. Bonds never has admitted to using P.E.D.’s, but the evidence that his remarkable late-career success was illicitly aided by banned substances is overwhelming, and indeed was overwhelming while he was playing. [I have written about the fairness of judging Bonds a cheater and the tortured rationalizations employed by his defenders here, here, and here.] At the same time, another individual who dominates his sport, cyclist Lance Armstrong, has managed to convince most of the media and his adoring public that accusations that he used steroids are false, even though the circumstantial evidence against him rivals what has condemned Bonds. This has always had the stench of a double standard; now, in the wake of new allegations by a former team mate, the only excuses for not giving Armstrong the Bonds treatment are unethical ones. Continue reading →