Bud Selig's buddies
Even good writers are doing bad stories on the issues behind the looming baseball strike. Why is the media peddling the owners' line?

I've been covering sports business -- which by definition means mostly baseball business -- for 22 years now. There have been times when I've been amused, surprised, peeved and angered by the coverage of labor problems in the sports press, but 2002 is the first time I've ever felt disgusted. A collective insanity seems to have spread into nearly every corner of sports media, and in some of those corners -- I'm thinking of talk radio as typified by the hosts on WFAN -- it's a form of hysteria.

As I write this, it looks very much as if Major League Baseball is going to have another strike. In point of fact, it has been looking this way for more than two years, or ever since commissioner Bud Selig came up with the idea for a "Blue Ribbon Panel" to evaluate baseball's economic situation. That was the first sign that Selig was planning a war, and the panel actually had some limited success in winning over the press and public. Even the New York Times supported its conclusions in an editorial. Amazingly, no one in the press seemed to notice that the panel contained not a single representative of the Players Association or even of the Society for American Baseball Research, SABR, the organization that baseball trusts with its Hall of Fame research.
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