In the wake of the decision by cycle-racing authorities to strip Armstrong of his awards and ban him from the sport, a number of outlets that were devoted to covering the cyclist admitted that they had been suspicious of Armstrong and his performance for years, but weren’t able to prove that he had been “doping” and therefore weren’t able to write about it. As Carr notes in his post, apart from a few standouts who questioned Armstrong’s performance publicly, “for the most part, the journalists who seemed to know the most about professional cycling told us the least.”

Why did this continue for so long? One likely reason was that the Armstrong story was so incredibly inspirational — an athlete who fights back after cancer and not only becomes healthy again but becomes a world champion. But there were other reasons as well, including the fact that media outlets focusing on the sport were reluctant to poison the well, since Armstrong was such an amazing story (although as noted in the comments here, some did try — including Irish sports writers Paul Kimmage and David Walsh).

Journalists were afraid to pursue the story

The former editor-in-chief of Bicycling magazine recently wrote about why he didn’t try harder to make the case against Armstrong, despite years of widespread suspicion by journalists who covered the sport. Among other things, he said that the “burden of proof was huge” because of Armstrong’s stature, and blamed cycling’s “code of silence” for a lack of corroborating evidence. But he also admitted that he was concerned about the effect that an investigation might have on the magazine and its financial health, given what he called Armstrong’s “Corleone-like influence” on the sport:

“Through his various sponsorship and endorsement deals, he could make an advertiser disappear from our pages with the same flick of an elbow that one rider uses to silently tell another to pass him. Helmets, sunglasses, wheels, bikes, all of these companies’ ads were the lifeblood of the magazine, the one that paid my salary and that of my staff. If we couldn’t make money during the boom years, when could we?”

Although the Bicycling editor doesn’t specifically mention it, there were undoubtedly other concerns as well, including the fact that questioning Armstrong publicly would have meant losing access to anyone in the rider’s inner circle, and that would have made it almost impossible to write about him or the upper echelons of the sport. This is the same fear that can cause mainstream media outlets to avoid covering contentious stories about virtually any kind of public figure, including the president — what if pursuing such a story meant losing access to the White House or senior officials?

In some comments earlier this year about the internet and journalism, Washington Post investigative superstar Bob Woodward questioned the validity or usefulness of digital media when it comes to important stories like the Watergate affair. According to Woodward, only good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting of the kind that he and his partner Carl Bernstein did was able to break the case of the Watergate break-ins. The senior journalist scoffed at students who said that “the political environment would be so different that Nixon wouldn’t be believed, and bloggers and tweeters would be in a lather and Nixon would resign in a week or two weeks after Watergate.”

So blogs and Twitter picked up the journalistic slack

But as Carr points out, it was exactly those Twitter accounts and bloggers who kept the heat on Armstrong and the doping allegations while the mainstream sports press were celebrating his achievements: Twitter users like @TheRaceRadio and @UCI_Overlord, and a relatively little-known blog called NYVelocity — a site run by a commercial photographer and amateur cycle-racer. Since founder Andy Shen didn’t have any connection to cycle-racing, he was free to pursue whatever stories he wanted, and others picked up and redistributed his links and commentary. As the wife of a former Armstrong team-mate tells Carr:

“Not every single person in the mainstream media bought the story, many did good work, but many just went along out of fear or self-interest. The beauty of NYVelocity is that they knew the sport, knew the reality, and they were not beholden to any advertisers and the powers in the sport. They weren’t afraid to print the truth.”

This is another example of the benefits of what Om has called the democratization of content: the fact that anyone can publish information and distribute it allows sources that might never have been available before to reach a fairly broad audience — whether it’s someone live-tweeting the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound or demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Egypt. And as NYU professor Jay Rosen has argued, while some of this commentary and publishing might appear to be noise, journalism as a whole tends to get better the more people there are engaging in it.

Whether a professional bicycle racer took blood-doping products may not be an earth-shattering public interest story on the scale of the Watergate break-ins, but there is no question that sources outside the mainstream media can do a lot to advance such a story — whether through blogs or Twitter or any other platform — when those covering it might be reluctant to do so. That’s not to say that blogs or “citizen journalism” can replace traditional media or investigative reporting, just that they can be a powerful addition to the journalistic ecosystem.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and Yan Arief Purwanto

MLB.TV warns subscribers from the start that some games are blacked out, including nationally televised Fox and ESPN games; Tuesday night’s game in Kansas City is one of them. Based on tweets about MLB.TV, it looks like a lot of people skip the fine print or assume the All-Star Game is an exception.

Damn it, MLB TV. I just want to watch the All Star game at home. That is why I bought MLB TV. But nooo, you have to black it out. Grrrr..

— Dan_Rowinski (@Dan_Rowinski) July 11, 2012

It’s only a video blackout. The audio is being streamed on MLB Gameday Radio, a subscription product that runs $20 for the season and post-season. Stats are online and on mobile. (I haven’t seen any unauthorized feeds yet but if this is like any other event, if there’s a will, there’s a way until rightsholder whac-a-mole takes them out.)

It’s not an issue for me. This sports geek household planned dinner at home with the ASG in mind. But the black-out window is a reminder that even though NBC Sports plans to stream thousands of hours live from the Olympics in a few weeks and even though tens of thousands of hours of sports are streamed live now, we are nowhere near a time when all televised sports are available across platforms.

And that’s not likely to happen until the leagues, the programmers, the distributors and advertisers find a way to make cross-platform viewing as valuable as broadcast or cable. Even when events are streamed, most require authentication through a pay TV subscription — as is the case with the Olympics and Wimbledon — or a subscription fee for a package like Tour de France Live.

In some cases, even paying for TV isn’t enough. As a Charter household, we can watch broadband network ESPN3 on computers but not streaming linear networks ESPN and ESPN2 because Charter lacks a WatchESPN app deal. That’s one reason sports fans are among the least likely to cut the cord all the way.

At least this game, unlike those only on cable networks, is available to anyone who can get the Fox signal.

Also, Screw you @MLB. You’re VERY lucky that I’m paying for cable TV cause tonight’s game is blacked out on MLB.TV mlb.mlb.com/mediacenter/in…

— Adam Jackson (@adamjackson) July 10, 2012

Another reason this blackout stands out: the 83rd All-Star Game may be the most digital ever in many respects. Major League Baseball and its teams have been hyping social media, especially Twitter (#ASG), like crazy. Fans who want to play All-Star Bingo can earn cards by sharing them with friends with a trip to the World Series as the grand prize and free days of MLB.TV for runners up. Everything — from last week’s intense Final Vote contest to All-Star Bingo and more — was designed with one goal in mind: sending fans to their TVs and keeping them tuned in throughout the game, even if takes other screens to do it.

Here’s Derek Jeter himself answering YOUR questions in the Social Media room: #ASG #AL twitter.com/MLB/status/222…

— MLB (@MLB) July 11, 2012