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Rex Murphy | 13/01/18 | Last Updated: 13/01/18 8:17 PM ET
I see great symmetry in this Lance Armstrong/Oprah Winfrey affair: The worthless admission and the worthless venue in which it was made; between confessor and confessee.
Armstrong is the infamous multi-year cheat, liar and fraud now known and despised the world over as the ultimate con-artist, a slick, brassy narcissist who has hogged fame and fortune neither of which were honestly acquired. His reputation has been ground to dust and blown off the planet.
I recall the late Christopher Hitchens’ scathing title for his book about Bill Clinton: No One Left To Lie To. But Clinton was an amateur in this lying business. Armstrong has blown past Clinton with ease. (At least Clinton wasn’t collecting medals for his exertions.) In Armstrong’s case it’s not that he’s run out of anybody to lie to. He’s run out of anyone who can stomach his worthless, latter-day and redundant “confession.”
This presents the fraudster with a real problem. When the world knows you’re a rodent, is jaundiced by the very thought of you, where do you go? To whom do you turn? If you want, under the guise of “confessing,” one last crack at gulling the public, one last circus in which to splutter a final volley of mendacity and conceit, who’s gonna have you?
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Why, of course you go to the scented-candle ghost of cable TV, the once puissant main channel empress of body fat and mind shrinkage, Oprah Winfrey. In her grim prime she was the great merchantess of tosh therapies, host variously to the jackrabbit Tom Cruise and every other hollow A-lister.
Where is she now? Off in the wild bleak unwatched barrens of the back channels. She who once summoned presidents to her couch is now in the grey twilight of empire, vying with tire commercials and one-tooth hillbillies chasing alligators all day for a living. She who once fanned the incense sticks for warblers Beyonce and Barbara Streisand, who first-named America’s celebrity artistocrats, now strikes a deal with the most despised “athlete” in a generation.
She was also — and this stands separate, her one truly unforgivable trespass — the midwife of Dr. Phil; it was she who gave this hairless blustering bully “therapist” his perch on the airwaves.
As long ago as 1961, the great prophet Newton Minnow proclaimed television a “vast wasteland.” (Ah Newton, thou should’st be watching at this hour.) He was right, even though he was speaking in TV’s novitiate days of innocence and virtue. What he didn’t know and could not have predicted was the rise, decades and decadence later, of the afternoon talk shows, from the hyper-vulgarian Jerry Springer to the various exhibitionists and ignoramuses that have owned it since. It is a vast tedious wasteland. And then came Oprah who sowed it with salt and ashes.
Fame, celebrity, harbours two compulsions. The first is to get it, the second to hang on to it regardless of what happens. These compulsions brought Lance and Oprah together. Both thought they had a use for each other, but overlooked the key consideration, that so few have any use for them.
Fitting, somehow, that two comets, both in sharp and fatal decline, on the point of full dispersion, should intersect at this moment. When you need Lance Armstrong as a guest, or you need Oprah as a confessor, well, for both of you, the (other) wide lady has stopped singing, the orchestra has packed up, the curtain is down, the audience has gone home.
National Post
http://www.forbes.com/sites/monteburke/2013/01/16/selena-roberts-says-lance-armstrongs-admission-of-doping-will-still-be-a-manipulation-of-the-public-and-is-not-even-half-of-the-story/
Selena Roberts, a former reporter with the New York Times and Sports Illustrated, was really at the vanguard of much of the reporting about Lance Armstrong and his doping. Her cover story in the January 24th, 2011 issue of Sports Illustrated (“The Case Against Lance Armstrong“), written with co-author David Epstein, was one of the first instances when the mainstream United States press turned the screws on Lance. (She also wrote a book about New York Yankees third baseman, Alex Rodriguez, which detailed his PED use.)
Still, the experience of writing about Armstrong was not entirely a positive one for Roberts. It played a role in her decision to leave Sports Illustrated and the mainstream press to, as she says, “try the other side” with her startup mobile content company, Roopstigo.
Move up http://i.forbesimg.com t Move down
With His Admission Of Doping, Lance Armstrong Could Also Take Down Some Very Powerful People And Companies Monte Burke Monte Burke Forbes Staff
No One Should Really Care What Lance Tells Oprah Lee Igel Lee Igel Contributor
We caught up with Roberts, 46, on the phone last night.
–
Forbes: So what are we to make of Lance Armstrong’s forthcoming “admission” to Oprah Winfrey?
Selena Roberts: Well, I think his smartest move was to do it with Oprah. She will provide him the room to tell the narrative that he wants to tell. And if you ask me, that narrative is still going to be one of manipulation of the public. I think he will use this platform to his advantage, to cast himself as sympathetic, to say he was a victim of the doping culture and not a ringleader. He’s going to try to leverage Oprah and this moment to find his way, or at least begin to find his way, back into the public graces. Not because he’s a swell guy, but because there’s a great upside if he goes back to the public domain at some point, whether he wants to race in triathlons, or run a triathlon series or even become a race owner. The public domain has been his cash cow. He’s made his fortune there and I suspect he wants to get back there for that reason.
IN PICTURES: THE RISE AND FALL OF LANCE ARMSTRONG
Forbes: Tell us about the difficulty you faced when trying to write that piece about Armstrong.
Roberts: During the process, when you are dealing with Lance and you have questions, it’s not a situation where you ask a question and get an answer. He has an entire machinery around him and the machinery consists of high-powered DC lawyers and PR operatives, well-known ones, like Mark Fabiani and the law firm, Patton Boggs. So when you deal with Lance, when you ask questions, there’s this great attempt to make you the bad guy and him the good guy. You’re the bad guy for asking the questions, and he’s the American hero who you are trying to go after. I’ve never met another athlete with that kind of machinery around him, who would turn reality on its ear like he did.
Forbes: How about after the piece came out?
Roberts: He delivered what he usually delivers, through his alter-ego Twitter account, @juanpelota, which means “one ball.” There were little taunts, some name-calling and the usual casting of doubt on credibility. But I would say when you look at the totality of all the people he’s tried to hurt, of all the people he’s come after, I would say I’m a minor player. He really tried to crush and hurt others, and he did so. In many cases these were people who had the courage to speak out many years ago, the Andreus, the LeMonds and people who worked for him, like Mike Anderson. All of these people had really nothing to gain by coming forward. He made sure to try to ruin their lives. As a journalist, it’s OK if he comes after you. That’s part of the job. But when he starts playing with people’s entire lives and trying to ruin them, it takes those sociopathic tendencies to an entirely different level.
Forbes: Do you feel vindicated?
Roberts: For a journalist, you’re just trying to get out there and do your due diligence and get to the truth. He will admit that he was a doper. But that’s not even the half of it. The bigger picture is the conspiracy and all the people he’s hurt. I hope there’s some solace for the people he tried to take out over the years. I hope there’s some closure, especially if he does what he says he’ll do and testifies. But for the journalist, the story just keeps going. It’s probably a long way from being over to be honest.
Forbes: Did your Armstrong story play a part in your decision to leave Sports Illustrated and mainstream journalism?
Roberts: I did feel some frustration with the fact that his law team, his PR team, did have some influence over the piece. We still ran it, and I give Sports Illustrated credit for that. But I felt frustrated, not just with Sports Illustrated, but with big media in general, and I decided to try the other side after that.
Forbes: So what happened? Did the teeth get taken out to of the piece?
Roberts: A little bit, yeah. Part of what was disillusioning for me was that Armstrong himself would interject into our ability to do the reporting, and he did things like calling our boss after the story ran. His legal team tried to sort of launch into a character assassination of me and the other reporter [David Epstein] working in it. I think that with those kinds of things, you wish that your organization would kind of shrug it off a little bit more than what happened for us.
Forbes: Will you ever go back to journalism?
Roberts: I still write. I’m still out there. I’m just doing it in a different form. Roopstigo is a personal sports network. We do longform investigative journalism and documentaries. We’re trying to create the first sports network for your mobile device. There’s a lot of management involved, but I still write. I still get out there and mix it up.
He was light on the details and didn't name names. He mused that he might not have been caught if not for his comeback in 2009. And he was certain his "fate was sealed" when longtime friend, training partner and trusted lieutenant George Hincapie, who was along for the ride on all seven of Armstrong's Tour de France wins, was forced to give him up to anti-doping authorities.
But right from the start and more than another two dozen times during the first of a two-part interview Thursday night with Oprah Winfrey, the disgraced former cycling champion acknowledged what he had lied about repeatedly for years, and what had been one of the worst-kept secrets for the better part of a week: He was the ringleader of an elaborate doping scheme on a U.S. Postal Service team that swept him to the top of the podium at the Tour de France time after time.
"At the time it did not feel wrong?" Winfrey asked.
"No," Armstrong replied. "Scary."
"Did you feel bad about it?" she pressed him.
"No," he said. "Even scarier."
"Did you feel in any way that you were cheating?"
"No," Armstrong paused. "Scariest."
"I went and looked up the definition of cheat," he added a moment later. "And the definition is to gain an advantage on a rival or foe. I didn't view it that way. I viewed it as a level playing field."
Whether his televised confession will help or hurt Armstrong's bruised reputation and his already-tenuous defence in at least two pending lawsuits, and possibly a third, remains to be seen. Either way, a story that seemed too good to be true — cancer survivor returns to win one of sport's most grueling events seven times in a row — was revealed to be just that.
Winfrey got right to the point, asking for yes-or-no answers to five questions.
Did Armstrong use banned substances? "Yes."
Did he use EPO? "Yes."
Did he do blood doping and transfusions? "Yes."
Did he use testosterone, cortisone and human growth hormone? "Yes."
Did he did it in all seven of his Tour wins? "Yes."
In Reversal, Armstrong Is Said to Weigh Admitting Drug Use
By JULIET MACUR
Published: January 4, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/sports/cycling/lance-armstrong-said-to-weigh-admission-of-doping.html?_r=0
starlight
今天力氣『43』
主題： 這是藥物造成的神話故事
發表時間：2013-01-01 13:14:16 IP：116.233.156.* 所在地:歐洲 出處：原創 〖5樓〗
體育也好，文藝也好，政治也好，經濟也好，裏麵都有故事，百姓不明白的大忽悠
You were all right on. Thank you for the notes.
因為我的博客內容涉及了他， 感到有義務給他一個完整的描述。