First, major league baseball isn't the only legal monopoly; there's still the other pro sports, almost everyone's cable service, and the emerging media megaliths. And the last two are far more pernicious than the sports monopolies. That said, I want my kids to play sports someday because I think they teach important lessons--but I've had to think hard about whether I want to encourage my kids' participation in activities where they might feel they have to use drugs to get by, fit in, level the playing field, whatever. Especially ones as powerful as steroids. So while I don't think the congressional hearings on the issue were all that great, they were appropriate: steriods is far from an athletes-only issue and as Congress has specifically exempted MLB from antitrust statutes, it has an interest in monitoring how it conducts business. Of course, per Crystal, it is an easy sell; if there's one thing the last decade of news has shown us, it's that covering millionaires is far more rewarding (in a fiduciary sense) than covering those below the poverty line.
Second, the only reason ANWR should matter to Joe and Jane Sixpack is that the pressure of public opinion is the only thing with a ghost of a chance at swaying our representatives from their ideological idiocy, and if we had public servants who took stewardship seriously we likely wouldn't have this problem. (Oh, well, shit in one hand and wish in the other and see which one fills first.) But Joe and Jane have the Congress and Administration madly waving Social Security "reform" while they dismantle bankruptcy protection, cap tort awards and practice piss-poor medicine on a woman whose situation has been throguht the courts more times than a law clerk with diarrhea. I want ANWR preserved as much as the next person who's not strapping themself to a grizzly bear as a form of protest, but it's way down on my priority list. (And we all know that list is infallable.) So the inattention, on the public and news media's part, is somewhat understandable.
Finally, some words on "objectivity" and a news media gone horribly wrong. First, as I agree mostly with NYU's Jay Rosen that journalism is very similar to a religion (though I might expand it to include most of the "reason-based community"--and if you don't read Rosen's blog, PressThink, you really should), I am hopeful that we will look back in a hundred years and see this he-said-she-said bullshit masquerading as objectivity--or as our true goal, fairness--as the indulgences of our time. Sadly, Kevin's expectation that the audience will be able to tell a crackpot from an expert in the age of the soundbite is naive and mistaken. Much like juries accept anyone who sounds reasonable when he says the Earth is flat, viewers, listeners, and increasingly even readers think that because someone's quoted that they know what they're talking about and if there is an equal number of quotes, the issue is a tie and we can all go home now. If I could open up a bullshit-detector repair shop (and convince people they need such a service), I could do one hell of a lot of business, but until that happy day perhaps we journalists should stop taking the easy way out and start remembering that we're not in this to shmooze with bigwigs or to sleep late or whatever, we're in this to tell stories, inform the public, improve lives and watch over government and business and all the other things in the world that, unlike the majority of our audience, can damned well afford to protect themselves. Of course, I think the first thing the news media need to do is learn that they are not just another business, so one might question my sanity.
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