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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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179
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]