Charlie Hustled?

(AP)

The "Evening News" gave the story pretty big play, with a roughly 90 second package before the first commercial break. (ABC's "World News" didn't mention it; NBC's "Nightly News" gave the story 20 seconds.) Rose's comments are also being widely reported elsewhere in the media.

But Keith Olbermann, who conducted the interview with Patrick, suggests in a blog post today that the story has been significantly overblown. He writes that the notion that the comments represent "a damning admission that his gambling was far worse than we ever thought" is "fiction." Here's why:

His admission of nightly betting came up only because, before he came on the air with us, I had repeated the standard history of his gambling while Reds' manager: that he never bet against his own team, but that he often didn't bet at all on their games. This, to me, was as great a transgression as the gambling itself, because it left open the prospect that he wouldn't use his closer or would rest his key players during the games in which he had no wager. To me that was a kind of passive-aggressive game-fixing.

Rose was correcting me. Used that term. The emphasis was not "I BET on the Reds every night," but "I bet on the Reds EVERY night." To me, that takes a little of the sting out of the process. At least Pete Rose the manager wasn't subservient to Pete Rose the compulsive gambler. At least the game outcomes weren't affected because he was saving John Franco until a night he had $500 riding on the result.

Writes Olbermann: "Every reporter should have a story written about him, or failing that, have about 100 stories written about a story he generated. It's the best reminder you can get of how easily assumptions, misunderstandings, and sloppiness can creep into the coverage of almost anything, from the weather forecast to a Pope's funeral."