I love it when columnists or other pundits tell me what I think. Here’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. Michael Wilbon and Mike Wise are two sports columnists at the Washington Post (and darn good ones, too – the Washington Post has many flaws, but it also boasts an extraordinary array of fine sportswriters). In a recent column about baseball’s steroid scandal, Wilbon wrote that:
” . . . what intrigues me now is the lack of public outrage regarding all of this. . . . I’m looking at e-mail after e-mail expressing emotions that overwhelmingly range more from sadness to indifference. . . . People in and around Washington were much more exercised on the issue of benching Mark Brunell a couple of weeks ago than they are over the news or the implication that Giambi, Bonds and Jones have all cheated their sports and lied about it, which leads me to wonder how big a scandal this is . . .”
And Wise was even more concerned about “our” indifference to the revelations of steroid use:
“The steroid issue is not something friends call breathlessly to talk about. For months it has been a media-driven story, fueled by dogged journalists committed to facts rather than opinions. They were not on a witch hunt; they felt the public needed to know. The terrible thing about their pursuit of the truth is that the public barely wants to know. They don’t care how Barry Bonds hits baseballs into McCovey Cove; they care that he does it. . . . That’s what the BALCO investigation and the grand jury testimony leaked in the San Francisco Chronicle this past week is ultimately about. . . . We thought we knew, but we didn’t. And when our beliefs were challenged by irrefutable evidence — at least embarrassing, if not damning, in Bryant’s case — we turned the channel. We reached for the box scores. We believed what we wanted to believe.”
Is that so? Now, I’m actually interested in hearing what Wilbon or Wise thinks about all of this steroid stuff – that’s why I read their columns. But I’m really not interested in hearing what they think I think (or, by extension, what “the public” thinks), mostly because I cannot imagine how they could have the faintest idea what I (let alone “the public”) think.
Maybe I’m making too much of this – but I think this is one of those things that, when you start looking for it, pops up all over the place, in all sorts of contexts – stories or columns or opinion pieces that are not about “Something that Happened” but about “Our Reactions to the Thing that Happened.” And it annoys the hell out of me, every time I see it.
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