This irritation with the coverage of steroids in sports is fairly common - Dave Winer is hardly the only person wondering about it:

I'm a lifelong baseball fan, and I don't care if Roger Clemens took steroids, or if he is lying or if McNamee is lying. News is stuff that's important. If it's national news, it's stuff that is important to everyone in the nation. Whether Clemens took steroids or not is a proper topic for a 60 Minutes, Fresh Air or Nightline segment. To take a whole day across all the cable channels the day after three pivotal primaries is very wrong.

The thing is, there's a simple reason it gets covered: ratings. The potential audience for the things Dave is more interested in is fairly small, while - much as we might wish otherwise - the potential audience for the sports hearings is large. Ultimately, the news networks are a business, not a public service. It's useful to remember that.

Now, the more interesting question is this: why can't the news outlets recognize that there's a useful niche audience for what Dave is on about? It's not nearly as big as the one for gossip, but - I suspect that it's a pretty well off demographic that advertisers would be interested in. It's not (or at least should not be) an either/or situation.

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