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Lewis, of course, won the 1988 100-meter gold medal after Canadian Ben ... With ten Olympic medals, nine of them gold, Carl Lewis is considered by some.
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© Copyright ISSA and SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com 10.1177/1012690204043460

HERO OR HYPOCRITE? United States and International Media Portrayals of Carl Lewis amid Revelations of a Positive Drug Test

Bryan E. Denham Clemson University, USA Abstract This article examines press coverage of track and field athlete Carl Lewis amid reports in April 2003 that he tested positive for three banned stimulants prior to United States Olympic Trials in 1988. Lewis, of course, won the 1988 100-meter gold medal after Canadian Ben Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids, a development that brought disgrace to Johnson and adulation to Lewis, the ‘purer’ athlete. Because Lewis repeatedly, and perhaps arrogantly, declared himself drug-free throughout his career, berating competitors from other nations, the author expected to observe differences in how newspapers published in the United States and newspapers published internationally covered the story. Contributing to this expectation was the time at which the story broke, when the Bush administration, dismissing the concerns of other nations, launched a military assault on Iraq. Content analysis found support for expected differences in that international journalists were highly critical of Lewis and the US Olympic Committee, portraying both as sanctimonious, arrogant, and hypocritical, not unlike broader portrayals of the Bush administration amid perceived US aggression in the Middle East. Key words • drugs in sport • nationalism • Olympic athletes • political economy of mass media • sports communication

With ten Olympic medals, nine of them gold, Carl Lewis is considered by some the greatest athlete in the history of track and field. Indeed, in the United States, one cannot mention names such as Wilma Rudolph and Jesse Owens without mentioning Lewis, an athlete who won ten World Championship medals in addition to the ten Olympic honors. Throughout his celebrated career, he espoused strict, drug-free training methods and chastized those who used performanceenhancing medications in an effort to defeat him. But in April 2003 a report surfaced indicating that Lewis had tested positive for three banned stimulants prior to the 1988 United States Olympic Trials, just two months before the Olympics took place in Seoul. Because Lewis had ‘inadvertently’ ingested the stimulants, apparently unaware of their presence in an herbal supplement he had taken, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), which initially had disqualified him based on the test results, reinstated the athlete upon appeal. Lewis, of course, went on to win the 1988 100-meter gold medal after Canadian Ben Johnson tested positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol — a drug Lewis openly criticized Johnson for using. Additionally, the

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United States had taken the moral high ground on numerous occasions, crying foul about alleged drug use among Eastern European athletes, among others. The Lewis story broke when Dr Wade Exum, director of drug control for the USOC from 1991 to 2000, turned over to Sports Illustrated and the Orange County Register some 30,000 pages of documents revealing that in 1988, 12 United States athletes in six sports were cleared of positive drug tests, mostly for ‘inadvertent’ use. Exum suggested that more than 100 US athletes, who collectively won 19 Olympic medals, tested positive for banned substances from 1988 to 2000. According to the ‘Exum documents’, Lewis, in particular, had tested positive in 1988 for trace amounts of ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, and phenylpropanolamine, all stimulants found in cold medicines as well as in some herbal supplements. Baaron B. Pittenger, then executive director of the USOC, wrote to Lewis, indicating that the stimulants conceivably could have given the sprinter an edge on the competition; however, at the time, the USOC had in place a policy addressing intent. Because Lewis apparently had ingested the stimulants unknowingly, the USOC lifted his initial suspension and the athlete returned for the 1988 Olympics. With respect to April 2003, it should be noted that, just before releasing the documents, Exum saw his lawsuit filed against the USOC for racial discrimination and wrongful termination thrown out of federal court for lack of evidence. Consequently, ‘USOC officials are painting Exum as an embittered former employee now grinding an ax’ (Zeigler, 2003).1 The USOC had assigned drug testing to the US Anti-Doping Agency in October 2000, and when Exum lost in court, the USOC characterized allegations stemming from the documents as ‘baseless’ (Associated Press, 2003a). For purposes of the current study, whether Exum sought retribution by releasing the documents is less important than their factual revelations and whether newspapers published in the United States differed from newspapers published internationally in how they reported the news.2 Because the United States had launched a widely opposed military operation just weeks before the Lewis story broke, the opportunity arose to study how an internationally accomplished athlete, outspoken and self-assured throughout his career, stood to symbolize, through media representations, the approach of his country to foreign policy. Put another way, the opportunity arose to examine how anti-American sentiment may have manifested itself through international press reaction to Lewis, an athlete whose fame, perceived arrogance and propensity to judge the morality of others may have made him the perfect target for international criticism. The next section describes how a United States military attack in the Middle East may have helped to precipitate a verbal attack in the realm of sport.

An Opportune Moment for Sport Scholarship On 20 March 2003, the United States launched a military assault on Iraq and its defiant dictator Saddam Hussein, who refused to leave the country and relinquish power. But while Hussein had long been recognized as a brutal tyrant, capable of horrific acts of violence, not all countries supported the United States and

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President George W. Bush in removing the dictator through military force; in fact, public opinion in some countries, such as France, Germany, and Russia, ran strongly against it (e.g. Chu and Dixon, 2003). In the UK, Prime Minister Tony Blair suffered major losses in popularity because of his support for the Bush administration and for being willing to commit British troops to a sustained military action (e.g. Stobart and Rotella, 2003). Indeed, when Bush said the United States would remove Saddam Hussein from power with or without the assistance of other nations, he may not have realized how many nations would not lend support, angered with a US president they considered dismissive of opposition to a military campaign. A large contingent of those opposing the Bush administration did not accept alleged connections between Saddam Hussein and terrorist Osama bin Laden, considered responsible for what the president termed ‘acts of war’ against the United States on 11 September 2001 (Jamieson and Waldman, 2003).3 The Bush administration contended that Hussein had been developing weapons of mass destruction and that he either had sold such weapons to known terrorists or would do so in the future, if not use the weapons against the United States himself. United Nations inspectors could not locate the weapons Bush had suggested were being developed, however, and even after coalition forces had fought Iraqi troops to Baghdad, the president had to accept responsibility for conveying misleading information about uranium transfers in the Middle East. Additionally, in the weeks following what would be declared a military ‘victory’ in Iraq, reports of US troops killed in guerrilla warfare attacks appeared routinely and reminded many in the United States of the war in Vietnam. Still, the administration held to its position, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld challenging, or defying, journalists and others to question military strategies. An attitude of ‘we know best’ permeated the air. That same kind of attitude may have permeated the air in 1988, when the USOC reinstated Lewis to the Olympic team. Perhaps more importantly, in 2003, journalists working for select newspapers published internationally may have perceived that kind of attitude to have been present. Thus, given the point at which the Lewis story broke, it may very well have served as an avenue for international journalists to denounce the United States on a broader level for being arrogant and presumptuous where the rest of the world was concerned. Conversely, and consistent with political–economic theory of mass media, journalists writing for newspapers published in the United States may have found ways to avoid, explain, or justify the situation, based largely on the political and economic interests of media companies, as well as the sources on whom journalists rely for information about politically charged events.

The Political Economy of Mass Media As a conceptual framework, the current study draws on political–economic theory, which suggests that media companies operate as part of, and thus help to sustain, predominant power structures in society. Media content, therefore, tends to reflect the interests of political and economic elites (Bagdikian, 1997; Bennett,

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2003; Graber et al., 1998; Herman and Chomsky, 1988; Parenti, 1993) and, where US media are concerned, tends to be biased in favor of societal assumptions (Hahn, 1998). Media companies, like all commercial enterprises, seek to maximize profit, and consequently content tends to reflect the interests of those who keep profit systems in place, namely government regulatory agencies and the large corporations who both own media conglomerates and fund them with hundreds of millions in advertising dollars. As an example of research locating support for this media theory, Beam (2003) found recently that market-driven newspapers tend to report less on government and public affairs than do newspapers with lower market orientations. A consequence of such reporting is that dissenting political voices tend to be marginalized, with the ethnocentric mainstreaming of information a key factor (Entman, 1989; Gitlin, 1980; Graber, 2002; Gurevitch and Blumler, 1990; Jamieson and Campbell, 2001; McLeod et al., 1994; Olien et al., 1989). Graber (2002: 125) explained: Although the media regularly expose the misbehavior and inefficiencies of government officials and routinely disparage politicians, they show respect and support for the American political system and its high offices in general. Misconduct and poor policies are treated as deviations that implicitly reaffirm the merit of prevailing norms. News stories routinely embed assumptions that underscore the legitimacy of the current political system.

In his seminal study of major US newsrooms during the 1970s, Gans (1979) suggested that the clearest expression of ethnocentrism in news appears in war reporting, with journalists in the United States, for example, proceeding from ethnocentric assumptions about how political systems ought to operate. More recently, Gans (2003: 75) suggested that reporting practices following 11 September 2001 helped to silence opposition to popular patriotism, ‘thus unintentionally helping the government reduce disagreement with its policies’. Herman and Chomsky (1988) also wrote of the ‘patriotic agenda’ of media, noting chiefly how news companies tend to serve the interests of their respective governments. Alterman, in a text refuting assertions made by Goldberg (2002), Coulter (2002), and others that United States media tend to be ‘liberal’ in their news reporting, suggested that conservatives essentially seek media that report world events from their own conservative perspectives, and ‘In the aftermath of 9/11, that is what they got’ (Alterman, 2003: 204). Further, as Hachten and Scotton (2002) explained in a text about media performance following the terrorist acts of 9/11, critics characterized US journalists who pursued their most fundamental role — monitoring the actions of government — as unpatriotic and not sufficiently ‘antiterrorist’. Writing about news audiences following the terrorist acts, Hachten and Scotton (2002: 144) observed, ‘In the highly charged patriotic atmosphere after September 11, few Americans were willing to second-guess the military policy of harsh controls over war news’. Thus, to meet the expectations of audience members and thereby maintain newspaper sales and television ratings, media companies largely acquiesced with government and the officials who supplied information. With respect to the current study and its focus on sport, the preference given to ‘official’ news sources in defining events has important implications. Public

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officials, for the most part, want to see their names in the news, so long as the stories reflect their political initiatives and offer positive (i.e. patriotic) representations for their constituents. Officials thus make themselves available to journalists for comment, and journalists, considering officials highly credible, call on them routinely. With regard to the Lewis story, one might expect journalists working for both United States newspapers and newspapers published internationally to have contacted US Olympic officials for comment, with international journalists contacting sources independent of the United States more frequently. Unlike international sources, US officials likely would have offered remarks in support of the USOC as a governing body, as well as in support of Lewis as a US athlete who had ‘played by the rules’ set forth. Considering the political economy of mass media thus offers a conceptual framework for the present study, in that established, or elite, institutions in the United States — the USOC, for example — could have been embarrassed, or even censured, on an international stage at a point when United States military forces had gone to war in Iraq. Given the international importance of the Olympics (Bairner, 2001; Rivenburgh, 2003), and the fact that United States media companies may have been operating at unusually high levels of nationalism (Hachten and Scotton, 2002), one might expect United States media to have stayed relatively quiet on the Lewis story. In contrast, one might have expected journalists writing for newspapers published internationally to have considered the Lewis situation yet another instance of arrogance on the part of the United States, its own Olympic committee having found a way for Lewis and others to compete internationally — just as US political leaders found a ‘reason’ to dismiss opposition to the war in Iraq.

Olympian Ethnocentrism In terms of ethnocentric media portrayals in the realm of sport, Larson and Rivenburgh (1991) examined how the United States, the UK, and Australia shaped national images through their respective coverage of the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, while Riggs et al. (1993) examined political nationalism in mediated discourse surrounding the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona (see also Bernstein, 2000; Hargreaves, 1992). Shinnick (1982) considered nationalism in the context of a United States boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, and more recently, Tomlinson (1996) addressed nationalism in a series of Olympic Games, pointing out that the 1984 Los Angeles Games, in particular, essentially reached the point of ‘crude ethnocentrism’. In short, while officials tout the Olympics as a globalizing series of competitions spanning 17 days every four years, media outlets tend to serve the interests and societal assumptions of their respective countries. As an example of how important the Olympics can prove for an entire nation, Jackson (1998a, 1998b) examined Canadian national identity crises in the late 1980s, with fallen champion Ben Johnson as a focal point. Tying that situation to the present, Lawrence and Jewett (2002), in a text examining ‘heroic mythmaking’ in the United States, suggested that US media tend to convey images of

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absolute victory over those who commit wrongs, downplaying any degree of compromise, middle ground, even outright hypocrisy. Part of mythmaking in the US media is that, in the end, the pious, or righteous, win out categorically over wrongdoers, even though such absolutes seldom exist. Until April 2002, Lewis served as the superhero of four Olympics, while Johnson was portrayed as a cheating disgrace — the quintessential wrongdoer. Jacqueline Magnay (2003a, b), for instance, blamed Johnson for having broken ‘the collective heart of Canada’ in the 1988 Olympics. Sports Illustrated had featured the muscular Johnson on its 3 October 1988 cover with the word ‘Busted’ in bright, bold type. Inside, William Oscar Johnson and Kenny Moore (1988) covered the events leading up to Johnson’s relinquishment of his gold medal. Literally thousands of similar newspaper and magazine reports have appeared over the years, indicting the athlete and his country. As a consequence, one might expect journalists from Canada, in particular, to have offered Lewis and the United States in 2003 a glimpse of the treatment US media offered Johnson in 1988. Denham (1999, 2000) has written about high-profile athletes, images of nationality, and the use of performance-enhancing drugs, noting that when Florence Griffith Joyner passed away in 1998 from an epileptic seizure, as opposed to the side effects of performance drugs, USOC President Bill Hybl attempted to preserve the sprinter’s legacy with the following statement, fully 10 years after the deceased had won her medals at the 1988 Seoul Games: We now hope that this great Olympic champion, wife and mother can rest in peace, and that her millions of admirers around the world will celebrate her legacy to sport and children every day. It is time for the whispers and dark allegations to cease. (Denham, 2000: 61)

Like athletic officials such as Hybl, United States media tend to treat US athletes with reverence on the international stage. At a minimum, in this case, one can expect US media to have pointed to the ‘inadvertent’ nature of the stimulants ingested by Lewis and two other gold-medal winners from 1988. In contrast, international media outlets may have been harsher, as both Lewis and the United States had taken the moral high ground on more than one occasion, alleging the use of performance drugs by athletes from other nations. This is not to suggest that all international journalists would have identical motivations for reacting vocally to the Lewis story; however, given the sociohistorical context of the study, and the origin of the newspapers analyzed in this study, one might expect journalists from Western Europe, Canada, and Australia to have been hypersensitive to uncompromising attitudes in the United States. Just as Lewis had been self-assured in his criticism of Johnson, the United States had been dismissive of nations that did not support the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The following section describes how US and international media reports of the Lewis story were analyzed and compared.

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Methods United States and international newspaper articles analyzed in this research were downloaded from the Nexis Academic Universe database using the primary search term ‘Carl Lewis’ and the secondary term ‘drug’. Major newspaper articles had to be published between 16 April 2003, when the story broke, and 19 May 2003, the point at which the USOC agreed to provide the International Olympic Committee (IOC) with documents describing past drug-testing procedures. To be included in the study, an article had to address specifically the positive drug test and had to be published as a hard-news story, an opinion column, or a staff editorial. The study thus did not include incidental mentions, letters to the editor, cartoons, and so forth. In all, 115 newspaper articles containing 1749 paragraphs of copy (mean = 15.21) were analyzed (77 news reports, 36 columns, two staff editorials). The study included 28 articles from US newspapers (24 news reports, four columns) and 87 from international outlets (53 news reports, 32 columns, two staff editorials). Early findings, then, are that three in every four reports analyzed came from international newspapers. Additionally, opinion columns accounted for approximately 14 percent of US articles and nearly 40 percent of articles published internationally.4 One of the most informative ways to examine news content quantitatively is to study the sources journalists attribute in their reports. As Sigal (1973) explained, sources define the news for mass audiences, and thus much of what news sources have to say will impact much of what audience members will infer about an issue. In the current study, articles in which US officials served most commonly as news sources could be expected to contain more support for Lewis and the USOC itself as an established institution; articles that cited more international sources could be expected to contain more criticism, given the sociohistorical context of the study. To this end, the author coded reports for the presence of 10 source types, with the number of paragraphs in which the source appeared in a given report serving as the numerator, and the total number of paragraphs in the report as the denominator, creating fractions for every story in the analysis (Denham, 1997). The fractions yielded coefficients between zero and one for each source type in every article, and each coefficient was rounded to the nearest whole number. This created ordinal units that allowed the researcher to evaluate how prevalent, or ‘saturated’, different source types were in both US and international reports. Source type included the following: US Olympic official, international Olympic official, Lewis or Lewis representative (e.g. coach, attorney), Lewis competitor or competitor representative, other competitor, Exum, medical expert, man-on-the-street, anonymous source, and other. To be considered a source, a person had to be attributed for providing a direct quote or for providing information paraphrased in the article. Paragraphs that did not reference any source were simply part of the denominator in the fraction described above. If a source appeared in a given article, the minimum code (whole number) for that source was ‘1’, in order to recognize the presence of that source. With respect to news columns, the author coded for whether a column con-

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tained an overt call for Lewis to return his 1988 Olympic gold medals. For this variable, categories included no call, call by US journalist, call by source in US report, call by international journalist, and call by source in international report. This variable was considered important because if a substantial number of journalists or their sources called for the medals to be returned, one might infer that those commenting made little effort toward understanding and/or transmitting the difference between trace amounts of the stimulants found and the powerful effects of an anabolic steroid such as stanozolol.

Results This study included 115 articles published in 39 newspapers (14 published in the United States, 25 published internationally). As Table 1 shows, while some US newspapers published a story on 16 April, select international newspapers began reporting the story on 18 April and kept going in higher numbers than their US counterparts did. The Sydney Daily Telegraph ran seven stories, and the following international newspapers ran six: Irish Times, and in London the Guardian, Independent, and The Times. In the United States, while the Los Angeles Times ran five stories, the first report did not appear until 23 April. USA Today did not publish its first report until 1 May, more than two weeks after the original story broke. By that point, an announcement had been made that the USOC followed protocol in 1988 and did not need to reopen the Lewis case. Table 1 also reveals that, in this study, three in four articles analyzed came from international newspapers, with Canadian newspapers accounting for 13 of those. Additional frequency analyses indicated that, of the articles published internationally, approximately two in five were opinion columns. In US newspapers, opinion columns accounted for just one in seven articles. Perhaps to no surprise, 15 of 16 articles that mentioned a call for Lewis to return his medals came from international newspapers, and the majority of those calls came from Lewis competitors or their representatives quoted in those articles. To explore who defined the Lewis story for mass audiences, the author split the data file into frequencies for United States reports versus those published internationally, and several interesting findings emerged. Consistent with political–economic theory of mass media, USOC officials had a strong presence in US newspaper reports, appearing in 15 of the 28 articles (54%); in reports published internationally, USOC officials appeared in 27 of 87 (31%). Thus, while more than one in two reports published in the United States contained reaction from a US official, less than one in three reports published internationally contained such a source. Moving to IOC officials, United States newspaper reports again attributed such officials 54 percent of the time, compared to approximately 40 percent of reports published internationally. Interestingly, in terms of ‘source saturation’, approximately 25 percent of both US and international reports contained a source coefficient greater than 1 (as described in the ‘Methods’ section). Yet, in looking at the numbers closely, the stories that contained the most information supplied by members of the IOC appeared in news reports published internationally, with

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Table 1 United States and International Newspapers Reporting on the Lewis Story Reports

Date of initial coverage

1 1 3 1 5 3 1 4 1 2 2 1 2 3

27 April 22 April 16 April 17 April 23 April 17 April 17 April 17 April 17 April 23 April 16 April 27 April 16 April 1 May

2 1 5 1 6 5 1 6 6 2 3 3 1 1 1 5 3 2 7 5 2 6 5 4 2

19 April 26 April 18 April 25 April 18 April 18 April 18 April 19 April 18 April 19 April 18 April 18 April 1 May 27 April 16 April 19 April 19 April 19 April 18 April 18 April 27 April 18 April 17 April 25 April 26 April

United States newspapers Boston Globe Columbus Dispatch Denver Post Hartford Courant Los Angeles Times Milwaukee Journal Sentinel New York Daily News New York Times Newsday Rocky Mountain News San Diego Union-Tribune San Francisco Chronicle Seattle Times USA Today International newspapers Advertiser (Australia) Business Times (Singapore) Daily Telegraph (London) Dominion Post (New Zealand) Guardian (London) Glasgow Herald Hobart Mercury (Australia) Independent (London) Irish Times Melbourne Age Melbourne Herald Sun Montreal Gazette Nelson Mail (New Zealand) Observer (London) Ottawa Citizen Queensland Courier Mail Scotsman Straits Times (Singapore) Sydney Daily Telegraph Sydney Morning Herald Sydney Sun Herald The Times (London) Toronto Star Toronto Sun Weekend Australian

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13 stories containing the coefficient 3 or greater. The maximum coefficient encountered in a US report was 4, compared to 7 for an article published internationally. One also must consider that three times as many stories came from international outlets, and with sparsely attributed opinion articles accounting for many of those stories, the number of international news sources was substantial. Lewis or one of his representatives — most commonly his attorney — appeared in 17 of the 28 articles (61%) published in US newspapers, the majority containing a brief reaction to the news report. Lewis or one of his representatives appeared in 37 of 87 articles (43%) published internationally. United States journalists, then, appeared to have gone straight to the athlete a bit more than did those reporting for newspapers published abroad. Fewer reports published in both the United States and in other countries attributed Lewis’s competitors, although articles published internationally did contain a slightly higher percentage (27.6% compared to 21.4), and with greater saturation in those articles. In terms of other competitors, the same pattern held, although one international article yielded a coefficient of 8, with virtually every paragraph in the article seeking the reaction of a world-class athlete to the Lewis story. About two in three reports published in US and international newspapers directly attributed Exum, primarily his claims of what the documents he released showed. Reports that did not attribute Exum tended to assume that readers would have become familiar with what had transpired from an earlier report, the documents having been released to Sports Illustrated and the Orange County Register by Exum in the wake of the failed lawsuit. Medical experts, apart from those in the IOC, as well as man-on-the-street sources were virtually nonexistent, while international articles contained slightly more anonymous attribution, although certainly not enough to warrant commentary. ‘Other’ did include a few sources not accounted for in content categories, such as US and international athletic figures who were not associated with the USOC or IOC, nor any of the athletes themselves. Journalists often seek local reaction to major news events and, in this case, some of the people with whom they spoke were individuals associated with local athletics.

Discussion In this study, the sheer number of international reports compared to US news items offers important information about a story US news companies largely seemed to ignore. Three in four reports analyzed came from an international newspaper, and perhaps even more telling is the fact that 40 percent of international reports were opinion articles, compared to just 14 percent opinion articles in US newspapers. Thus, not only did US newspapers publish fewer reports; most of the reports they did publish tended to be obligatory news items. This pattern is consistent with what one would expect, given the political economy of mass media in the United States, as well as the point at which the Lewis story broke. US newspapers downplayed the Lewis revelations, and in the coverage they did offer, journalists tended to dismiss any notion of wrongdoing on part of Lewis

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and the USOC. As one would expect, USOC officials defined the news more for US audiences than they did in reports published internationally, and while international reports certainly did not exclude USOC sources, they did seek comments from IOC officials and others on the international stage in greater depth. One of the ways in which US media diminished the importance of the Lewis story was to point out Exum’s failed lawsuit against the USOC, and the fact that he released the documents shortly after a federal court found a lack of evidence for the suit. Powers (2003), writing in the Boston Globe, essentially assumed that, had it not been for Exum’s failed legal action, the seemingly trivial news item never would have surfaced at all. ‘The rules were different (in 1988)’, Powers wrote, . . . and the doping levels in most cases were so small that they wouldn’t be violations now . . . The reason the issue is surfacing now is that Exum was suing the USOC in federal court for racial discrimination and wrongful termination.

In the Denver Post, Briggs (2003) quoted Darryl Seibel, a spokesman for the USOC, who said, ‘These allegations are baseless, misleading, irresponsible and could pose serious legal consequences for Mr. Exum and his attorneys.’ In the New York Times, Vecsey (2003) suggested that Exum had confused even his own lawyer by releasing the documents, and in the Los Angeles Times, Abrahamson (2003a) quoted Carl Lewis himself, who said, ‘I am extremely disappointed in Wade Exum basically being vindictive in causing problems because he couldn’t get what he wanted.’ Finally, the Seattle Times ran a widely distributed AP report indicating, ‘Exum, who is black, sued the USOC for racial discrimination and wrongful termination. He had planned to use the documents in his suit, but the case was dismissed in federal court last week because of lack of evidence’ (Associated Press, 2003a). Thus, a common reaction by journalists and news sources in the United States was to call into question the motivation Exum had for releasing the documents; if it was little more than spite, they may have reasoned, his credibility would be suspect. As is commonly the case, then, an individual stood to be blamed instead of the anti-doping system more generally (Gurevitch and Blumler, 1990). In terms of source attribution, the New York Times used an interesting approach in its report, which contained the following headline: ‘Olympics; AntiDoping Official Says U.S. Covered Up’ (Associated Press, 2003b). Of note here is the source in the headline, as well as the attribution in the lead paragraph, which was not Exum but Dick Pound, a high-ranking member of the IOC and head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. ‘Newly disclosed documents prove long-held suspicions that the United States Olympic Committee covered up drug use by athletes, Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said yesterday’ (Associated Press, 2003b). Thus, even though Exum released the documents to Sports Illustrated and the Orange County Register, the Times attributed the allegations to an ‘outsider’. While the writer may not have intended to introduce ambiguity over what had transpired, that nevertheless is what happened. Suddenly, it was not an expert from within the USOC, but rather someone from an international organization.5 Another approach taken in some US reports was to point out the actual

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amount of stimulants found in the Lewis sample, portraying such an amount as virtually undetectable, hardly worth mentioning. In the Los Angeles Times, Abrahamson (2003b) filed as part of his story a comparison between the pseudoephedrine Lewis tested positive for prior to the 1988 Olympic trials and the pseudoephedrine British sprinter Linford Christie tested positive for at the 1988 Games themselves. Because the IOC had given Christie the ‘benefit of the doubt’, Abrahamson seems to have reasoned, it would have done the same thing for Lewis, ‘because the amount at issue was so low’. The journalist then reminded readers that the IOC would have been in the business of ‘rewriting history’ should it have taken action on the Lewis matter.6 Michaelis (2003), in USA Today, noted that Lewis and the USOC had played by the rules, and in the New York Times, Vecsey (2003) offered this rationale: Exum skips over the fact that all three readings were below the maximum level allowed in today’s testing . . . Also, the rules of the time allowed for a pardon if the use was inadvertent and the dosage was small. In those days, the testing was done by the U.S.O.C., whereas today it is administered by a separate agency. It was a loophole, but loopholes are legal.

Finally, some US newspapers simply ‘waited out’ the story, as USA Today did by not publishing a news report until 1 May. As indicated earlier, by that point the news was that the USOC had done nothing wrong in 1988, and that, of course, is what USA Today reported. Journalists such as Abrahamson at the Los Angeles Times not only reported the news that the USOC had acted appropriately in 1988, but suggested that Lewis’s clearance ‘raise(d) significant questions about the scope and nature of the other tests — the more than 100 others — in the Exum papers’ (2003b). It thus appears that several prominent US newspapers reported in a manner consistent with political–economic theory, shielding US institutions either by not covering the story at all, or by offering potential explanations and alibis in the stories they did publish. Official sources defined the news, and the information that appeared supported the status quo. International Reaction Table 2 lists a series of international headlines, and as the table illustrates, journalists writing for newspapers published internationally told a dramatically different story than did their counterparts in the United States. The headlines listed in the table portray Lewis and the USOC as arrogant, hypocritical, deceitful, scandalous, and ultimately, shamed. Headlines included terms such as ‘coverup’ in alleging intentional wrongdoing, and as the paragraphs that follow here indicate, the point at which the story broke appears to have exacerbated the criticisms of select international journalists. Indeed, just as international journalists were hard on Lewis and the USOC, they were equally critical of US journalists for ignoring or ‘explaining’ the Lewis situation. Morais (2003), in the Business Times of Singapore, chastized Vecsey (2003), in particular, for writing in the New York Times ‘a thinly-veiled attempt to defend American athletic supremacy and excuse Lewis for his actions’. Using irony to make his point, Powell (2003) called perceived silence by US media toward Lewis ‘deafening’. Humphries (2003), in the Irish Times, referenced the

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Table 2 Headlines from International Newspapers in Response to Lewis Story America: Land of the Great Dope Scandal

Glasgow Herald, 18 April

Drug Cover-up a Shame, but No Surprise

Glasgow Herald, 18 April

Drug Runners: Carl Lewis’s Positive Tests Covered Up

Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April

Lewis Joins Hall of Shame

Irish Times, 18 April

U.S. Doping Cover-up Height of Hypocrisy

Montreal Gazette, 18 April

U.S. Had Drug Cheats

Montreal Gazette, 18 April

Was King Carl a Drug Cheat?

Melbourne Herald Sun, 18 April

No Room for Complacency after Lewis Exposed as Cheat

Scotsman, 19 April

Share the Shame

Sydney Morning Herald, 19 April

Strip Carl of Medals — Hackett

Queensland Courier Mail, 19 April

The Dirtiest Race in History

Straits Times, 19 April

Hypocrisy: The Poisonous Virus which Knows No Bounds

Straits Times, 20 April

Shamed

London Times, 20 April

Could Lewis Turn from Great Athlete to Great Hypocrite?

London Guardian, 21 April

American Drug Cover-up Must Not Go Unchecked

Glasgow Herald, 23 April

Davies Disturbed by US Coverups

Dominion Post, 25 April

Morality Missing as Lewis Seeks Refuge in Numbers

Daily Telegraph, 26 April

King Carl Dethroned by His Own Arrogance

Sydney Sun Herald, 27 April

Race of Shame — Sprint Stars’ Fast Lane to Disgrace

Sunday Mail, 27 April

Shamed Lewis is Rapidly Running out of Credibility

Nelson Mail, 1 May

1984 Los Angeles Olympics, observing that the city, with the help of Hollywood, had made a lot of money when it ‘threw up a marketable star like Lewis’, and consequently, US media were not likely to undercut the people and the institutions that generated great revenue. In the Glasgow Herald, Gillon (2003b) shed additional light on the political economy of mass media in the United States: Serial disregard for international anti-doping rules by the U.S., revealed yesterday, will surprise few observers of world sport. It was rife in the former East Germany when it was used to promote a flawed political ideology. Now, it is evidence of an equally flawed, grasping commercial culture . . . Money has spoken in creation of the American sporting monster, and will continue to do so. Loudly.

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Coe (2003) also suggested that oppressive political regimes had used sport to bolster their international status, and several writers, such as Prichard (2003), made the point that dishonorable actions are not justified simply because others have committed wrongful acts. Gillon (2003c) suggested that ‘Banning (Lewis) from the 1988 team in Seoul, denying his right to defend, would have humiliated America, and damaged sponsorship of the team, for whom he was an icon.’ In the Independent, Gumbel (2003) noted that Lewis had taken to autographing bibles ‘as though he was himself imbued with some kind of divine power’. Huxley (2003), in the Sydney Morning Herald, also wrote of Lewis ‘happily’ autographing bibles, even though, as Coe suggested, Lewis and the USOC may have stood on shaky moral ground. In the 34 international editorials analyzed in this study, writers raised the issue of hypocrisy more frequently than any other. Labeling Lewis ‘Sanctimonious Carl’ (Walsh, 2003a, b), journalists accused US officials of being ‘derelict in their duty’ (Johnson, 2003), with Gillon (2003a) calling the United States ‘the most widespread and consistent cheat in sport’. In the Courier Mail, Smart (2003) suggested that ‘Cover-ups by the Yanks were rife’, with Gillon (2003d) writing that Lewis deserved ‘a gold medal for hypocrisy’. In the Irish Times, Mackay (2003b) wrote that Lewis had joined Ben Johnson and Linford Christie in the ‘Sprinting Hall of Shame’. Finally, ‘For sheer hypocrisy’, wrote the editorial staff of the Montreal Gazette, . . . it’s hard to beat the U.S. Olympic Committee. At the same time that it was accusing other countries of failing to control banned drugs in sports, we now learn the USOC conspired to suppress the news of failed drug tests among its own athletes.

Two international journalists, Engel (2003) of the Guardian and Wayne (2003) of the Nelson Mail, wrote commentaries reflecting the observations that Lawrence and Jewett (2002) made in their text addressing the myths of American superheroes, while also shedding light on the importance of sociohistorical context in the current study. Engel observed: (T)here is an ongoing national narrative, which requires Americans to be heroic and right. Stories that don’t fit with that narrative, whether they involve Shi’ite fundamentalists or doped up sportsmen, are not exactly suppressed but they get shorter shrift than those that do fit . . . But what the world sees is hypocrisy, of the sort that many identify in American international dealings in fields of more moment than this. Rules are for little countries.

Wayne offered similar observations regarding Lewis, the USOC, and perhaps the United States in general: Lewis has been described variously as one of the world’s greatest Olympic champions and an enduring example of the clean-cut all-American image of heroism and righteousness. Make that self-righteousness, throw in a healthy dollop of arrogance and a shovel-full of hypocrisy and the former sprint and long jump champion may finally be revealing his true colours — and it ain’t the good ol’ red, white and blue folks . . . The allegation that Lewis was one of 19 elite American athletes who failed drug tests prior to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and was then allowed to compete, is just another cynical expression of American sports bodies making up the rules as they go along.

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Adding to those observations, Walsh (2003a, b) suggested that Exum had offered proof of a long-held suspicion: ‘One law for the U.S., another for the rest of the world.’ Todd (2003) accused the USOC of engaging in the ‘most pervasive doping conspiracy since the East German steroid factory was shut down’. Todd even suggested that circumstantial evidence had indicated that the late Florence Griffith Joyner probably used steroids in winning the women’s 100 meters in Seoul. He accused the United States of blatant hypocrisy and suggested that Lewis return all of his medals. ‘When the world’s most powerful athletic nation flouts the rules that govern doping,’ Todd lamented, ‘the message is clear: If you’re rich enough or prominent enough, you can get away with it.’7 Clearly, then, several journalists writing for newspapers published internationally saw the Lewis revelations as another example of the United States looking out for its own interests and disregarding the interests of other nations. In Lewis, international commentators had what they considered the personification of hypocrisy and arrogance. Because Lewis had come across as sanctimonious during his reign atop the world of track and field, writers had little sympathy for ‘Pious Carl’ when he became the subject of a drugs-in-sports story. Walsh (2003b), of the Sunday Times in London, admitted as much in an article headlined ‘Why We Wanted to Bury Lewis’. That some writers would equate the modest amount of stimulants found in Lewis’s sample with the power of an anabolic steroid such as stanozolol is indicative of constant simmering on the part of some commentators where US athletes and US sporting institutions are concerned. In truth, though, some of what international journalists had to say about hypocrisy was justified, for as anyone associated with elite track and field realizes, drug use is pervasive (e.g. Wilson and Derse, 2001), and only the most naïve individuals would argue otherwise. Sports Illustrated, for example, called the 1996 Atlanta Olympics ‘a carnival of sub-rosa experiments in the use of performance-enhancing drugs’ (Bamberger and Yaeger, 1997: 62). Not only do athletes want to win their respective events, they sometimes feel they have to win their respective events, lest they disappoint their fans and let down, or even embarrass, their sponsors or their country. As the Lewis case demonstrates, even if athletes do test positive, they can appeal the test results, offering ‘explanations’ to athletic officials. In some cases, newspaper reporters will simply ignore the situation, allowing it to fade out of existence. Writers such as Engel (2003) saw in Lewis the kind of arrogance that many international observers saw in the United States when President George W. Bush gave little attention to those opposing a military campaign in the Middle East. Perhaps reflecting anti-Americanism beyond the world of sport, several commentators wrote of the United States having made up the rules as it went along, or having played by its own rules while expecting other countries to observe more rigid ones. While editorials accounted for nearly one in two international articles addressing the Lewis situation, such commentaries were rare in US newspapers. Editorialists from Western Europe, Canada, and Australia blasted Lewis and the USOC for being hypocritical and deceptive. US newspapers operated in a manner consistent with political–economic theory; that is, the newspapers supported the status quo, while newspapers published internationally called into question the market forces that may have precipitated the entire episode.

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Conclusions and Implications Competitive sport does not exist in a vacuum, and this study demonstrates that, under the right set of circumstances, media portrayals of a controversial event in sport can mirror representations of more important global events, in this case the questionable use of military force to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Results here demonstrate that journalists working in the United States, through the sources on which they relied for information and perhaps through a collective sense of nationalism following the terrorist acts of 11 September 2001, portrayed the Lewis story quite differently than did journalists writing for international newspapers. Journalists writing in the United States largely dismissed the news, while those writing for newspapers published internationally portrayed Lewis and the USOC as sanctimonious and hypocritical. The study thus demonstrates how journalists working in one country can differ markedly from others in how they report the same news event in sport, given international tensions and the political economy of mass media. With respect to future scholarship involving US Olympic athletes, in particular, drug testing has become the responsibility of the United States AntiDoping Agency, which touts itself as the ‘Independent anti-doping agency for Olympic sports in the United States’.8 As the 2004 Olympics approach, and after they have taken place, studies might explore whether the ‘independent’ agency offers increased rigor for drug testing, such that United States and international media outlets become less disparate in their portrayals of athletes caught cheating. In September 2003, for instance, US Olympic officials confirmed that competitor Jerome Young tested positive for anabolic steroids the year before winning a gold medal in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.9 If the IOC ultimately strips Young and his relay teammates of their gold medals, will US media portray the IOC as ‘rewriting history’? Will international media praise the IOC for enforcing the rules of competition, having seen enough of the United States ‘making up the rules as they go along’ (Wayne, 2003)? While cooperative efforts between the United States Anti-Doping Agency and the World Anti-Doping Agency will determine, to some extent, how future doping stories unfold on the international stage, the atmosphere, at present, is just as volatile as it was 16 years ago, when Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis took to their marks in Seoul.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

Newspaper articles used in this research were obtained electronically from the Nexis database and thus direct quotes do not contain page numbers from hard-copy editions. Readers should assume that cited material came from page 1 of the Nexis download unless otherwise indicated. It also should be noted that reports indexed in the Nexis database appear as they did in printed editions of newspapers, as opposed to electronic versions available on the internet. As indicated in n. 1, newspaper articles examined in this study came from the Nexis database, which archives English-language newspapers. Thus, in this study, the term ‘international’ applies to those newspapers which came largely from Western Europe, Canada, and Australia. Articles also came from newspapers published in countries such as Singapore and New Zealand. The term ‘acts of war’ proved important, Jamieson and Waldman (2003) contend, because it

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

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suggested a military solution to the problem of terrorism instead of legal one (e.g. FBI investigation). Two international staff editorials were collapsed into opinion columns for this finding. This certainly is not to suggest a ‘conspiracy’ over what may have been a chance occurrence. Nevertheless, the attribution could have affected the perceptions of readers as to alleged wrongs committed by Lewis and the USOC. Two headlines for articles published in US newspapers demonstrate further how some journalists approached the story: ‘Just a Dash of Stimulants in Lewis, DeLoach’ (Abrahamson, 2003a); and ‘Doctor’s Doping Charges are Positively Weak’ (Powers, 2003). It should be noted that the track rivalry between Canada and the United States did not end with Lewis versus Johnson. At the 1996 Olympics, United States media declared Canadian Donovan Bailey to be at odds with sprinter Michael Johnson of the United States for the title of ‘world’s fastest human’. Because Bailey specialized in the 100 meters and Johnson in the 200, as well as the 400, the actual ‘holder’ of such a title was somewhat subjective, especially when the two met in 1997 for the ‘Million Dollar, World’s Fastest Man’ race, held in Toronto, Canada. In the 150meter sprint, Johnson pulled up injured, leading Bailey to remark, ‘He didn’t pull up. He’s a coward’ (Associated Press, 1997). The rivalry (and animosity) thus continued. See www.usantidoping.org/. See e.g. www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/summer/track/2003–09–30-young-x.htm.

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Bryan E. Denham is Charles Campbell Associate Professor of Sports Communication at Clemson University. His articles addressing media portrayals of drugs in sports have appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, the Sociology of Sport Journal, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and Culture, Sport, Society. Address: Department of Communication Studies, 412 Strode Tower, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634, USA. Email: [email protected]