This isn't about baseball or steroids, or even the U.S. Congress's recent and shameless waste of tax-payer money in holding hearings about them --- while other actual issues requiring Congressional oversight have been completely ignored.
It's about the Bush Administration's continuing encroachment on the rights of a free press, their contempt for whistleblowers, and their attempts to chill much-needed and far-too-rare investigative reporting.
It seems that two San Francisco Chronicle reporters may now be facing 18 months of jail time each for having reported on leaked grand jury information from the recent steroids investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), whose banned products were apparently used by a number of big leaguers including Bary Bonds and Jason Giambi.
As the Los Angeles Times is reporting today, reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, twice praised by George W. Bush for having "done a service" at a private reception before the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2005, are now staring down the barrel of a prison sentence which would be longer "than the combined sentences of all the defendants convicted in the steroid scandal they helped expose."
Even a former member of John Aschroft's Justice Department is calling the developments "very disturbing" and says outright that this precedent could lead to the end of "confidential-source reporting as you know it."...