Howard Kurtz in a Q&A today:

Look at the steroids scandal. Many sportswriters wondered how these baseball guys were bulking up, but only later did we learn that McGwire, Sosa, Giambi, Clemens, Bonds and A-Rod were using banned substances. The era of unvarnished hero worship has passed.

Wrong. The only so-called performance enhancing drug we have “learned” that Mark McGwire used is androstenedione, which was a legal, over-the-counter product that was not banned by Major League Baseball. (Andro was banned by the FDA and Major League Baseball years after McGwire retired.)

If Howard Kurtz has any evidence the rest of the world lacks that Mark McGwire used a “banned substance,” he should produce it. Otherwise, an apology is in order.

I won't bother going through the other players Kurtz mentioned, but suffice to say that Kurtz's certainty that they “were using banned substances” is overstated. “Using banned substances” and “using substances that were later banned” are very different things, and Major League Baseball did not ban THG, for example, until 2004.

What's really hilarious about Kurtz's claim is that it came in response to a questioner who asked “Is it too much to hope to see honest coverage of sports figures?” Kurtz replied that “it's already happening” -- then wrote a dishonest paragraph about “banned substances.”

This isn't directly about politics, of course, though the question of the standards and process we use to determine guilt certainly has implications broader than Major League Baseball. And Kurtz's reckless claims certainly say something about his approach to journalism.