Joe McCarthy Lives

And his name is George Mitchell. I used to have a lot of respect for Senator Mitchell, but I lost it this week. The Mitchell Report might be the most shameful public document in many years. Have we not advanced as a nation since the early 1950s when Sen. Joe McCarthy performed a similar act, in which he called people Communists simply because somebody said so? Sen. Mitchell has released a report accusing many athletes of a significant crime, yet the evidence he uses in some cases is little more than the word of one guy who worked in a clubhouse.

Those of you who attended Journalism school know that we used to have a standard in the media that a reporter had to have at least two independent sources corroborating a story before you could print it. Some editors required three independent sources if the story accused a person of a crime. This requirement had good reason: the press has to be a gatekeeper that separates fact from unproven accusation and every serious accusation must be verified before it is published. The gradual erosion of that standard is part of the reason that reporters are held in such low esteem these days. They report things without verification from other sources. Thus we get a lot of accusations masquerading as facts. Remember Watergate? Remember how Ben Bradlee insisted that Woodward and Bernstein get a second and third source before they printed accusations about the President? Even Deep Throat by himself was not enough. They had to get a second and third source to corroborate Deep Throat's claims. If we still had that standard of accuracy in our society and in our media, this report would not even have been published or given credence by the media.

This report is even worse than a media story because it has been granted legitimacy by MLB. Here we have a former Senator and Judge, hired by baseball, forever besmirching the names of people based simply on the word of one person. And this poorly-sourced and managed character assasination is sanctioned by Major League Baseball.

Give me two or three independent sources saying the same thing and I'll accept it as evidence worthy of publishing. Anything less and it's simply the same kind of rumor mongering for which our media is now so famous. It's bad enough that the media does it. Now we have a US Senator and former Judge doing it. The word of one person would be very weak evidence in a court of law. And it should not hold up in the court of public opinion either when it comes to making criminal accusations about people.

Yet the meatballs in our society and the media meatballs are rushing to judgement and using the Mitchell Report as confirmation of their suspicions of guilt. Have we learned nothing in the 55 years since Joe McCarthy was de-pantsed in Congress for doing the very same thing?

Let me make sure there is no misunderstanding. Do I think that many of these baseball players did steroids or HGH? Probably. Can we know that for certain from the Mitchell report? No. Was the Mitchell Report the right thing to do? No. It was poorly conceived and even more poorly executed. Not only is it wrong to assasinate peoples' characters based on the accusations of one person, doing so disgraces the reputations of everyone involved.

We learn a lot about people in times like these. We learn a lot about the intelligence of media people who pay heed to poorly sourced stories like this. If a media person isn't smart enough to question the veracity and ethics of this report, then they aren't smart enough to hold their jobs. Sure, they have to report about the Mitchell Report, because it's news, but they fall down badly when they fail to seriously question the accuracy, ethics and process involved. Roger Cossack of ESPN is the only media person I've heard or read that has suggested that this is "McCarthy-like" . At least we have one smart person working in the media. It's probably not a coincidence that he's a lawyer by training and not a journalist. Most lawyers have a much more balanced view of exposing truth in a fair manner than do journalists. I see a lot of people in our media these days who rush to judgement based on the word of one person. That's shameful. Don't we care enough about each other in our society to be a lot more careful about truth and fairness than to give airing to every accusation? And shouldn't supposedly professional journalists know better than to ascribe meaning to such individual accusations? Some journalists (like Buster Olney of ESPN) have even gone so far as to suggest some reporters will not vote someone into the Hall of Fame if his name is on the list. I wonder if those same journalists have a problem with sending people to the electric chair based solely on the accusation of one person with no other cooroborating evidence? That has happened too. And when it has been proven that innocent people had been falsely convicted because that one person was wrong, did we learn anything? Apparently not.

We learn a lot about the intelligence of fans who use such individual accusations in such a poorly-sourced report as evidence of anything. I've heard and read enough from these meatballs in the last two days to last a lifetime. How did we as a nation get so dumb anyway?

I have hope that eventually there will be an intellectual awakening of what we have here. I predict eventually the public view of this report will change and people will see it for the witch hunt and rumor rag it was. By the time Bud Selig or George Mitchell die, this Report might be widely viewed as the despicable character assassination that it is. And those two gentlemen may go to their graves with this being the largest black mark on their otherwise distinguished lives.