How do we feel about the Chron guys now?

Just as an aside - a few people have brought up protecting whistle-blowers but in this case Williams and F-W had nothing to do with whistleblowing. The case was already in front of a grand jury. What they did was the equivalent of passing on stolen goods for their own personal gain.

Remember how when this story was first "broke" people wondered how they managed a deal where the Chronicle got the material and they also got the book deal? These guys acted out of a motive for personal profit - no great ideal was being furthered (unless you consider greed a great ideal).

 

BINGO WE HAVE A WINNER!!!

 

ANOTHER HUGE WINNER!!!

Bullseye!!

 

Cranberry - TREMENDOUS posts!

Too many to quote all of them in detail but suffice it to say GREAT WORK.

Glad someone has serious EXPERIENCE in journalism and cares about ETHICS in journalism and the INTEGRITY of the justice system & laws we ALL live under.

Keep up the good work - this story is going to explode as this has MAJOR implications for many involved as dicussed. How deep was the Chron in this?

JDV

 

That would be a tough position to defend right about now.

 

Was the writing on the wall?


Was the writing on the wall within the first 72 hours of the BALCO
indictments regarding the future relationship between Troy Ellerman and Mark Fainaru-Wada ?

Below are excerpts from a Chronicle article written by Fainaru-Wada and Williams entitled "Steroid Charges Bypass Athletes." The article was published on Sunday, February 15, 2003, which is three days after the first BALCO indictments.


Troy Ellerman, a Sacramento lawyer representing Valente in the case, agreed with Collins and many others who charge that the case was hijacked for political reasons.

"It's obviously political," Ellerman said. "And when Ashcroft comes out and makes the statement that we want to preserve the integrity of sports and the athletes, well then, why didn't they indict the athletes? The athlete is the one that sends the message to the little kid on the street, who looks at it and just sees the athlete got a free pass."


In retrospect, I find these to be interesting statements by Ellerman.

Creamora

 

Interesting thought. You can also see by reading the Chronicle's Balco stuff that at some point a righteous point of view that the athletes needed to be exposed and punished took over and, well, if the prosecutors weren't going to go after them as hard as we want them to then it's our job to take them down ourselves!

After seeing this quote, I wonder if Ellerman wasn't feeding the dynamic duo this line of bullshit to obfuscate his real intentions. Once the reporters bought in, there was no turning back. I think they ignored that Ellerman was using them and convinced themselves they were doing the greater good by exposing that awful man Barry Bonds.

Too bad we have to speculate so much about this because the Chronicle still hasn't explained how it let itself get duped by Ellerman.

 

And it's not gonna explain. It doesn't have to. This will be forgotten in roughly 5 minutes, just like everything else in our ADD world.

It's an interesting one for the textbooks, that's about it.

 

At no point did it seem likely that this was a revelation of truth. These guys aren't Woodward and Bernstein. The reaction from journalists around the country just seemed out of character, to me. There are some truly great investigative journalists around and plenty of them break incredible stories that are worthy of special protection. At no time did this strike me as one of these times. I hope in the end, this will be called for what it is: these writers, with or without their editors approval, hijacked a grand jury investigation. And it seems that their motives were mostly profit.

 

No, they're going to need to explain it at some point. This isn't going away.

I think the journalists just wanted to wear the cool T-shirts and feel like they weren't in the toy deparment for a change.

 

Why not? What's going to happen, the Poynty Police are going to come arrest them?

 

Lance Williams was on with Kusellias and Golic this morning, talking about the new afterword on Game Of Shadows. He said that the new material was about why the US Attorney in SF declined to prosecute Bonds for perjury but how Williams and F-W nearly wound up in jail. He also intimated that the USA got canned because of his handling of this earth-shattering case. Needless to say, at least while I was listening, neither of the ESPN hosts brought up a) the problems involving who we now know was the source for these guys, and b) that the USA in SF was canned as part of a ongoing purge of US Attorneys that looks so nakedly partisan that the Senate Judiciary Committee's going to be grilling Gonzales about it next month.