As Barry Bonds approaches the record-breaking home run, some of our more respectable news media voices are joining the feeble bandwagon lumbering after Bonds to attack him. The Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam weighed in with faint praise and a superficially balanced appraisal of the treatment of Bonds in this week's "Department of Human Behavior," usually a pretty good column. Bob Schieffer weighed in with a not especially telling editorial on this week's Face the Nation.

The more volatile wing of the ape family, of course, is still carrying on its defamation of Bonds in connection with "steroids." Some cable channel ran The Natural, the Robert Redford baseball movie, all week with promos advertising that its fictional baseball hero did not use steroids.

This is the kind of thing that makes one faintly embarrassed to be a human being.

Set aside -- if one could -- that the political wizards going along with the creepiness against Bonds are exactly the so-called journalists who enabled George Bush to get the White House without winning it, who knuckled under to a ridiculous lack of investigation of 9/11, and who went along with this terrible Iraq war. Set aside, in short, that their judgment might be regarded as flawed, even suspect, on everything harming the American public.

Larger issues aside, how clear is their judgment on baseball? Square one (1) in regard to Bonds is that there is absolutely no evidence, physical or otherwise, that Bonds used prohibited substances. Square two (2) is that there is absolutely no chance that he is using them now or that he has used them any time in recent years. His every move is scrutinized, every word and action is recorded; literally, there is no possibility of performance-enhancement use within reasonable memory. Square three (3) is that IF, ever in his life, he used the stuff -- and this is mentioned only for logic since, once again, there is no evidence that he did -- it was only when many players did so. If he had done so alone or uniquely, he would have been caught. That everybody was abusing prohibited substances is not an excuse. But it does mean that any broadcasters serious about steroids would have gone after all the abusers -- something they never did.

In other words, if there is any chance, any chance at all, that media personalities including Michael Wilbon, Bob Schieffer, David Brooks and a host of others are even halfway serious about abuse of prohibited substances in baseball, they have a simple option. They can all, to a man, support a ban on awarding records or other honors in baseball based on the years of maximum steroid abuse in baseball.

That would be roughly the years when George W. Bush owned the Texas Rangers baseball team. The sportswriters left Bush alone, probably partly in deference to his family connections including George Herbert Walker, of golf and baseball fame. But they should not have. Bush had a history of substance abuse himself when he entered politics; he owned the Rangers at a point when prohibited substances were not monitored in sports as they are now; and he has made a career of connections, bailouts, and cover-ups. We'll know we've got some genuine investigative journalism in the sports world when we get the full material on Bush's acquisition of his baseball team.

An unbiased evaluation of the attacks on Bonds has to take into account that Bonds has never played the interviewee game. He never schmoozed up reporters. He did not spend his energies going after endorsements or hitting any circuits. That, along with his race, undoubtedly accounts for most of the 'jerk' characterization. The rest of it comes largely in response to his reaction to the 'steroids' campaign; he gets vilified and worse over bogus allegations, reacts predictably -- and gets attacked again for the reaction. Which is fascist.

I think that Barry Bonds must be one of the bravest men in America, at least one of the bravest outside the increasingly dangerous occupations of war, firefighting and police work. Obviously bigtime baseball players are handsomely rewarded for what they do, and he's not hurting unduly in some ways. But it is no small matter to have to avoid the newspapers and the news media, in America. Pitiful though our media have been in their failure to keep us informed, they are still important, even while inadequate, as our way of communicating to each other.

Speaking of information and sports, I would still like to know why personnel on Imus' program launched into a gratuitous attack on some college girls who lost a basketball game. Did MSNBC or its parent companies ever bother to check, to see whether maybe there was some betting going on?

Meanwhile, neither Shankar Vedantam nor Bob Schieffer mentioned that Bonds has kids, and that his kids cry over these media attacks.