Where there’s smoke…someone might be smoking.  And something doesn’t quite smell right here.

The Miami New Times, a weekly free “alternative” newspaper, reported on Tuesday that Alex Rodriguez had used prohibited substances on a regular basis over the past several years.  Immediately the media, including the New York Times, latched onto the story, which swiftly went viral on the internet.  And not one person, not one publication — no one — seems to entertain the notion that the “dope” on Rodriguez could be a bunch of crap.

This wouldn’t be the first time the New Times has run a story that turned out to be hogwash.  Several years ago, they got caught with something very similar that turned out to be nothing more than a blackmail attempt disguised as a tell-all expose, and there are some eerie parallels here.

Here are the actual facts:

The A-Rod story runs at some length describing the people and activities, clients and histories of Biogenesis, a clinic in Miami that ostensibly provides anti-aging treatment.  In reality, the story very convincingly asserts, it is a front for dealing banned steroid and similar drugs to ordinary people and a range of well-known professional athletes, including Melky Cabrera, Manny Ramirez and other disgraced baseball players caught using banned substances.

But the evidence that actually fingers A-Rod comprises a series of “personal notebooks” and other records that purportedly belonged to Anthony Bosch, Biogenesis’s owner and a shadowy figure from the sports doping underworld.  These records were “found” by Juan Garcia, an” investor” in and salesman for Biogenesis.   According to Tim Elfrink, the MNT reporter who broke the story:

The names are all included in an extraordinary batch of records from Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic tucked into a two-story office building just a hard line drive’s distance from the UM campus. They were given to New Times by an employee who worked at Biogenesis before it closed last month and its owner abruptly disappeared. The records are clear in describing the firm’s real business: selling performance-enhancing drugs, from human growth hormone (HGH) to testosterone to anabolic steroids.

Elfrink also spoke to several people connected to the operation:

Interviews with six customers and two former employees corroborate the tale told by the patient files, the payment records, and the handwritten notebooks kept by the clinic’s chief, 49-year-old Anthony Bosch.

“Corroborate” what tale?  Most of what is in the article seems plausible, and is likely true.  The article is lengthy and well-researched.  But almost none of it concerns A-Rod.   And without A-Rod it’s just another drug den story, of no interest to anyone.   Other than some notebooks — which even the reporter acknowledges may or may not actually have been written by Bosch — found by a disgruntled investor in the seamy business, who seems to be the primary source for the article, and turned over to Elfrink, the only other connection to Rodriguez is this:

“He [Bosch] was always talking about A-Rod,” says one former employee who asked not to be named. “We never saw any athletes in the office, so we didn’t know if he was just talking bullshit or not. But he would brag about how tight they were.”

Bosch hardly seems like a credible witness, and wouldn’t be the first fast-talker to promote himself by expropriating someone else’s fame.  Further, Elfrink mentions another figure, A-Rod’s cousin, who has a lengthy history of dealing in banned substances:

 On a 2009 client list, near A-Rod’s name, is that of Yuri Sucart, who paid Bosch $500 for a weeklong supply of HGH. Sucart is famous to anyone who has followed baseball’s steroid scandal. Soon after A-Rod’s admission, the slugger admitted that Sucart — his cousin and close friend — was the mule who provided the superstar his drugs.

Was Sucart in fact Bosch’s customer?  Did Sucart enhance his leverage with Bosch with intimations or assertions that he was acting for A-Rod?  Who knows?  This much we do know, according to the the New York Daily News:

Tenants of the building that once housed Biogenesis — located in a beige, non-descript office building near the University of Miami — say they never saw A-Rod.

It all seems a little to neat for us.  Garcia, an angry partner, stiffed by Bosch, goes to — the Miami Herald?  ESPN?  – no , to the Miami New Times — with a boxful of notebooks that “appear” to be Bosch’s, with a dozen or so ledger entries containing references to A-Rod, and says “here’s proof that Alex Rodriguez used banned substances as recently as 2012.”

As we said, it could be true, but the closer we look, the funnier it smells.  Something here just doesn’t make sense — and as a wise old sage once pointed out, if something doesn’t make sense, then there’s something you don’t know.

First, why did this story come out at all?  Who benefits?  Not Garcia, the shortchanged investor.  Is he out for revenge?  On whom?  Bosch vanished well before the story came out two days ago; he only responded to calls yesterday, saying only that he had no comment.  Clearly his business was already in flames.  Was Garcia motivated by a sense of civic duty?  Does that seem even remotely possible?

Second — did Rodriguez really deal with someone like Bosch — already deeply implicated in doping through the Manny Ramirez scandal and other high-profile doping investigations?  People do insanely stupid things, but this seems pretty unlikely.

We do not in any way doubt that Elfrink, the reporter, believes his story is accurate, and that they present a strong case against Rodriguez.  But — as we mentioned — we also know well that this wouldn’t be the first time a New Times publication has been taken in by a lurid story told by someone with an axe to grind.

Back in 2007 , the Miami New Times’ reprinted  two articles  from its sister publication up the road, the Broward New Times, alleging that a prominent hedge fund manager, Bruce McMahan, had married his own daughter in Westminster Abbey.  This article was subsequently thoroughly debunked, as it depended on “evidence” and allegations even flimsier than the A-Rod connection in this story.  As it turned out, the New Times, and ultimately, its parent, the Village Voice, allowed themselves to be used as unwitting dupes in a clumsy extortion plot.

Unlike the A-Rod story, this tissue of snot was not picked up by the mainstream media — with the sole exception of the New York Post, which then ran a follow-up interview with one of McMahan’s daughters, in which she described the New Times story’s source as a delusional sociopath.   Here, however, there’s been a media rush to judgment.  Even the New York Times ran a lengthy recap of the A-Rod article, although it was very careful to repeat ”these allegations, if proven” as a kind of metronomic qualifier to its summary execution.

Here’s our problem:  There is a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” mentality operating here, fresh on the heels of the Armstrong catastrophe and last summer’s serial exposes about major league baseball.  The public is disposed to believe these stories, however shaky, for obvious reasons, with the grim pleasure of watching the mighty laid low not an insubstantial factor.

Someone who really does have an ax to grind — against A-Rod, against Bosch — could easily take advantage of a gullible publication in search of a blockbuster story.  And who better than the New Times?  Why them?  Well:

A group of senior executives and staff of Village Voice Media, the New Times parent,  only recently purchased the company  from Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, also notorious owners of Backpage.com, the subject of a national campaign against online teen prostitution.  Larkin and Lacey divested Village Voice Media when advertisers began blacklisting the publications because of their affiliation with Backpage.com.

Village Voice Media is struggling.  Deprived of its cash cow Backpage, it needs a healthy shot in the arm to boost its revenues and keep afloat in a world notoriously hostile to publications of all stripes these days.  We don’t suggest that they published this story in bad faith – far from it.  We do suggest that they may be a little quicker to dive for a rotten fish than most pelicans, that they have done so before, and that what they have published may be a thorough indictment of Biogenesis, Bosch and even Garcia — but when it comes to Rodriguez, they may be way off base.

Investigations are underway.  We’ll see what comes out.  But for right now, when it comes to the New Times and its lamentable tendency to sell its readers a bill of goods, well — caveat emptor.

Sometimes it seems to me that almost everything posted on Drudge is wonderful in one way or another.  Today:

REPORT: Fidel Castro suffers stroke, near ‘a neurovegetative state’…  

Is the “neurovegetative state” he’s “near” Florida?

Lebanon seeks legal action against ‘HOMELAND’ series…

Sure.  Sue them.

FL paper that backed Obama in ’08 switches to Romney…

Joe Nocera, business op-ed columnist for the New York Times, frequently fires indignant salvos at corporate chieftains who appear to act in their own best interests at the expense of their shareholders.  Imagine, then, how he would react to a public company that had jiggered its ownership structure to protect one family’s interests, keep the corporate leadership firmly in that family’s control, and thwart any effort by the shareholders to loosen that family’s stranglehold?

As a red-blooded capitalist, I understand why dual classes of stock are frowned upon. They deprive ordinary shareholders of the chance to have any say in how a company is run or who sits on its board.

And if that happens, you might get a company whose shareholders lose 4/5ths of their money (while the Dow Jones was doubling) over the last ten years — like this one:

Oops.  Careful observers have by now noticed the ticker symbol in the upper right corner of that chart:  “NYT.”   Yup.  “New York Times.”

Well, says Nocera, the Times is different.  You see, when you invest your money in the stock of the New York Times, you shouldn’t really expect to make a profit.  That’s for chumps.  Instead, according to Nocera:

If you buy New York Times stock, you are buying into the notion that you’ll let the family run the show, as it has done for more than a century. And the Sulzbergers will put The Times’s journalism ahead of all else, because that is what is in the family’s DNA.

Also, apparently in the “family’s DNA” is a gift for catastrophic investments (the Boston Globe), a blind eye to the nose in front of their face (the internet), a clumsier-than-a-clubfooted can-can-dancer approach to management and an appalling disregard for the journalistic ethics and practices that made The Times at one time “the paper of record.”

Part of the problem is the same attitude that justifies their stock structure, and permeates much of the behavior of the self-appointed elite.  This attitudes presumes that certain people and organizations should be permitted to do and say things that others must not do or say, because they and they alone have both the moral and intellectual credentials to use these methods responsibly and properly.  What authority confers this privilege is unsaid; it is, in fact, self-assumed, and generally as badly abused and selfishly misused it would be in the hands of any other mortal agency.

This same arrogance excuses misleading the public, and deceiving, either through omission or outright commission (also called “lying”) the public, because the public is too stupid and too selfish to be counted on to behave properly without the exercise of some discretion where reporting the facts is concerned.

And now Nocera has gone into the tank, despite his “red-blooded capitalism,” and pulls a Tony Ortega by attempting to defend an indefensible scheme.  He’s right about one thing: anyone who buys this stock without knowing they have nothing to say about who runs their company deserves what they get.  If The Times were even a shadow of what used to be, I would consider buying shares as something of a public service.  But I have no interest in financing what the Times has become, or, worse still, what it continues to degenerate into.

But, Joe, feel free.  Buy a few shares.  Consider it an investment in your future.  At this point, it appears that few others are willing to do so.

We still read newspapers, but have found a way to greatly reduce the time it takes.  All this requires is a simple screening technique.  The key concept behind the screen recognizes that certain topics do not vary in their general content to any significant degree; they are simply the same story repeated ad infinitum, with only minor differences in detail and with different dates.  Skip these stories.  Examples:

Car Bomb Kills 32.  Need we say more?  Exception:  if the dateline of the story is Hyannis Port instead of one or another middle eastern hot spot, it may offer some interesting possibilities (angry lobstermen?  Deranged Kopechne relative?).  In fact, skip all stories with middle eastern datelines, unless they are about food.  If anything really different happens over there, you’ll probably see it on The View before you read about it in the papers, which right now seem still unaware that our embassies there are under constant attack and have pretty much shut down.

Unemployment Still High  and would be through the roof if we actually counted how many people are really out of work instead of jiggling the formula until the answer comes out a single digit.  In fact, you can pretty much disregard anything in the newspapers about finance, as these articles are written by journalism majors who assiduously avoided any math or economics courses in college, and are too inept to qualify for important beats like politics or serial killers.

School Crisis Worsens and will continue to do so as long as we think, in spite of an Alps of evidence to the contrary, that throwing greater and greater gobs of cash at a Brobdingnagian bureaucracy will do anything more than increase its already-insatiable appetite for more administrators, consultants, metal detectors, broccoli salads and pseudocounselors.  Until we find a way to actually get kids to sit in their seats and do their schoolwork, no amount of test-rigging, cafeteria design or positive reinforcement will arrest our steady slide into a world where U.S. schoolkids cannot name a country that starts with “U.”  (Hint: U-nited…anyone?)

Politician Indicted For Fraud  is an almost weekly occurrence in New York State; on a national scale, the numbers would require powers of ten if everyone with their hand in the community cookie jar could be identified.  This falls into the “one cockroach in the kitchen, a thousand behind the wall” category of social phenomena.  Given the appetite that the government has for the earnings of its citizens and the extraordinary inefficiency it brings to its operations, adding corruption to the equation seems like a grievous insult, but these shenanigans are now so commonplace and so calmly accepted that nothing short of outright plunder, accompanied by bundles of shrink-wrapped cash stacked in the freezer, suffices to attract any serious attention.

Study Shows precisely what its authors want it to show, whether it relates to the correlation between eating six times your body weight in raw sugar and an enlarged scrotum, the rate at which Arctic ice is turning into styrofoam, the increase in traffic accidents caused by teenagers texting snapshots of funny road signs, or how some types of exercise (aerobic caroling, minefield polo) may actually be harmful to your health.  Given the number of “scientists” our universities turn out each year with little or no particular qualifications for useful employment, the number of hilariously-flawed and absurdly-premised research efforts we are daily showered with seems predictably, if lamentably, high.  This, by the way, also may account to the “consensus” on “climate change.”  Just because two hundred million Chinese firmly believed that a dragon was eating the sun (“Well, it’s disappearing, isn’t it??!!) did not make it so.

Obama/Romney have said/done/forgotten/insulted/visited/ignored/worshiped/stumbled across/slept with [whatever].  If you haven’t by now figured out that your chances of learning anything meaningful about either of these people by reading newspapers approaches the possibility of sheet ice forming on Mercury, you’re already lost.  Listening to them speak directly is only slightly worse:  remember who they are actually talking to.  Do you really fit into that demographic?  In any event, anyone still ”undecided” at this point is either a tease or a ditherer.  Since, at this point, presidential politics and affiliated items make up about one-quarter of all newsprint, eliminating these stories alone from your daily reading should save you enough time to finally finish that needlepoint you’ve been working on since you quit smoking.

Giant Panda Cub Wins $128 Million Lotto.   Bold, and possibly interesting, but obviously a piece of misdirection planted by the secret cabal of hedge fund billionaires to disguise some heinous transfer of wealth and avoid taxes.

Any and All Editorials and Op/Ed Pieces.  These have all become the purview of those annoying people who, when they were in high school, could always be counted on to say something in class that was both irrelevant and completely wrong:  ”Well, what if dinosaurs could talk?  We wouldn’t know that, would we?  Maybe a dinosaur wrote Macbeth.”  Now they rail against whatever they cannot understand, which generally includes all things fiscal (see above), scientific (see above) or social (no one in high school wanted to hang out with them).  My favorites remain the New York Times editorials, which frequently insist that “[so-and-so] must [whatever], as in “Romney must disclose his favorite porn star.”  Still, although they “must,” no one ever does.

So — where do you get your information, then?  Well, don’t bother.  You actually never got any information, just the appearance of it.  Newspapers exist purely for the purpose of persuasion and misdirection; raw information can’t be sprayed like bleach from a high pressure hose or people will die.  Anything “factual” they tell you is either missing more pieces than a preschool jigsaw puzzle or invented from whole cloth by a reporter desperate to meet a deadline but afraid to leave his hotel room.  Their definition of “balance” involves non-Newtonian physics and several hidden dimensions, and their opinion of your judgment is only slighter better than their regard for your privacy.  ”The public has a right to know” is code for “if you don’t tell us what we want to know we’ll just make something up” and “freedom of the press” has more to do with unlimited credit at the bar than censorship.

There is something you can do, of course.

Remember those carefree days when the only part of your local rag you read was the comic section?  When the paper’s only function was to make you laugh?  Well — nothing’s changed.  Just read the daily news with the same attitude you used to adopt when thumbing through the columns of newsprint searching for Archie and Jughead.  This time, though, the humor’s in the printed word.  And Archie and Jughead?  Still there.  Now they’re call “Mitt” and “Barack.”

The American public must be the most be most polite of all bodies politic.  It accepts insult of profound and disturbing depth with equanimity, and does not respond with anger or resentment, but turns the other cheek.  It forgives those who treat it with contempt, be they the politicians themselves or the media who pimp for them.

Yesterday, for example, in its lead editorial, the New York Times foisted with a sublime nonchalance an argument of such tissue-thin substance that even the most callous liar would blush to speak it, which is that the Republican Party really doesn’t want to nominate Mitt Romney:

The crowd at the Republican National Convention this week will faithfully support Mr. Romney’s nomination, but its heart will be closest to the younger man with the more radical ideas standing at his side.

An average person might wonder “Well, then, why don’t they nominate Ryan?”  Beats us.  We’re not clever enough to parse this subtlety.  But if the electorate can be persuaded that the Romney nomination is simply a clever GOP subterfuge to place Ryan in the driver’s seat, well, then, maybe they’ll vote for the other guy. I do not think that Mr. Romney is aware that the Republican leadership has him playing the role of a Ryan stooge in mind, but then, he has neither the information resources nor the acuteness of perception the Times editors enjoy.   Will Times readers object to this naked attempt to impose fantasies on them?  Most will not; those who might have long since left the room and turned to other news sources.

On the politician side, even more impressive was the recent interview conducted by Anderson Cooper with Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, they Chairman of the Democratic National Committee.  Cooper is hardly a right-winger, but he is to be credited for his refusal to accept W-S’s outre insistence that Romney favors banning abortion for rape victims and mothers with life-threatening medical issues.  W-S shouts down Cooper’s repeated attempts to correct the record with admirable intensity, evoking (in my mind, at least), a kind of bizarre Barbra Streisand impression of Joan of Arc.

Cooper’s reaction to this hilariously screechy performance is a great moment for journalism, where a reporter whose sympathies lie with one side stands up against someone similarly-aligned, but whose nonsense level has breached the levee of credulity.  One wonders if there are conservative journalists who would have the courage to perform similarly when confronted with an equally irrational screed from the right.  We have yet to see one.

Yet in all this, a breath of fresh air.  Meet Andrea Seabrook, our hero.  Ms. Seabrook just resigned from NPR, basically because she is tired of being an enabler for just the sorts of people who think that politics is a form of high school football, where you root for your side and call the other team names.  According to democraticundergound.com:

NPR’s Congressional reporter of a decade, Andrea Seabrook, got tired of repeating politicians’ lies every day so she resigned.

“I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say.

We need to stop coddling lawmakers, stop buying their red team, blue team narrative and ask harder questions of them.”

To be fair, Ms. Seabrook does not plan to leave the profession, but has founded a blog called DecodeDC, “a blog and podcast where she plans to do reporting that, ‘will decipher Washington’s Byzantine language and procedure, sweeping away what doesn’t matter so you can focus on what does.’ ”

Well, whatever Ms. Seabrook’s intentions, we here at The Daily Cannibal fervently hope this becomes a trend.  The more journalists who leave the media establishment with promises to provide more objective, less rah-rah reporting, the better.  Now, what alternative employment can we offer politicians who would like to do the same?

(Thanks to Bill Quick at dailypundit.com for passing the Cooper info along, and to CfE, America’s best (and first) electronic novelist, for the Seabrook tip.)

Are you scared of Mormons?  The media hopes you are, especially our friends at the New York Times, which has been beating a steadily-increasing tom-tom of Mormonophobia.

We first noticed this strangeness when the Times ran an editorial which referred in one sentence to “the Mormon Romney.”  There was no particular reason for this religious reference; the sentence had nothing to do with faith or any related topic.  Because of this, the modifier jumped out as though it had been printed in fire, and immediately brought to mind its ancestor-in-chief, “the Jew Roosevelt,” a favorite of a former European leader.

The tempo increased with other bizarre similar references over time, but this weekend, we were treated to a one-two punch.  First, on Saturday, we got Timothy Egan murmuring darkly about Romney’s “incendiary” polygamous great-grandfather:

His great-grandfather was a fugitive, tracked by federal marshals as he tried to plant polygamy throughout the Southwest for a radical new American faith. It’s a hell of a tale, Butch Cassidy with five wives.

Great-grandfather?  Really?  Butch Cassidy?  He shot people?  Robbed banks?  Are you insane, Mr. Egan?

Today, however, the Sunday opinion pages carried an article with the title “Why Race Is Still A Problem For Mormons.”  The article notes that the church has been an aggressive recruiter of blacks both here and in Africa, has a black membership in the “hundreds of thousands,” and from the days of Joseph Smith was “egalitarian” and unbiased in its attitude towards minorities.  But the notoriously problematic Brigham Young was in fact unfavorably disposed towards black people” which, of course, was a very unusual idea in the mid-1800s here in the US.

Yet the Times runs a headline that asserts that racism is a problem for Mormons.  How many people read the article?  Few.  How many read the headline, nodded, and moved on?  Many, many more.

We should by now have learned the silliness of holding people of earlier eras to modern standards of attitude and behavior, but when it’s convenient, we can’t resist it.  Washington, Jefferson, and even Lincoln had very unfashionable ideas about race, and, to be blunt, back in Lincoln’s day, very few black people would dare show their faces in a white congregation of any denomination.  Or in Roosevelt’s day.  Or in Eisenhower’s day.  Maybe even, in some places, in Obama’s day.

That the Times, and other so-called “mainstream media” outlets would resort to Mormon-bashing is unhappily unsurprising, given the general tenor of this campaign thus far, but distressing just the same.  Surely there are sufficient unsavory aspects to Romney — his wealth, his unapologetic pride in his accomplishment (he thinks he built that), his patrician upbringing (oh, wait a minute — he’s a Mormon), his Harvard diploma (oops), his joy in firing people, killing off the elderly poor and starving the rest — for the media to feast upon.

But then again, when you consider that the very survival of the nation rests on the outcome of this election, and are dealing with such an obvious and  fundamentally evil man, I guess anything goes.  Anyone know if Obama’s great-grandfather was polygamous?  Just wondering.