Friday, May 25, 2007

Calling For a Ban on Steroids...Articles

Can someone please declare a moratorium on steroid-related articles. There are absolutely no fresh takes on this issue and there haven't been in a couple of years(or ever), yet seemingly everyday, almost all major newspapers in the country devote column space to this tired topic. According to various polls (of which I'm not willing to research), outside of Barry Bonds, the average fan does not care that much about players using performance enhancing drugs. If the sportswriters/talking heads were really the barometer of the fans' moral conscious then why aren't attendance/ratings/merchandise sales down across the board? Instead, in light of all of the allegations the game is absolutely thriving.

Here is my theory on why steroid stories continue to permeate newsprint. The stories write themselves. Combine 1 part Barry Bonds is cheater with one 1 part moral outrage, sprinkle in a few hack jokes, mix thoroughly, and in 20 minutes you will have your very own steroids article. Sports scribes simply churn out one of these prefabricated stories whenever they have writer's block, are on a hard deadline, or in a food related coma after hitting the buffet spread too aggressively.

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