News Media is powerful. Daily, it tosses stories in front of our faces that hypnotize us like children amused by fragments of a spinning mobile. We consume audio/video bites like popcorn. It's such a steady stream and the stories are so coated with candy or salt that we easily forget that the stories are real. Like children raised on blood-image video games, we've become desensitized to carnage. We don't really buy it as nonfiction, because it feels more like fiction that's been spun to look real -- all for our entertainment. In fact, we end up assuming that nobody gets hurt. But people do get hurt.

Further, those who write our news tend to intentionally spin a story for tantalization, not fairness. They want to excite us more than inform us. Too often their sense of fairness is not only forgotten, but responsibility and decency as well. And so we have the phrase, "Tried in the court of public media."

Floyd Landis won the Tour de France, a 2600 mile bike race, on a hip that needed replacing. Some days later, a lab charged with testing samples released information that a Landis sample revealed a ratio result that raised flags. This information hit the news, and Landis was assumed guilty despite his ceaseless claim of innocence. I remember this. I remember thinking something seemed wrong about this whole news story.

A year or two later, my girlfriend remembered my defending Floyd and picked up "Positively False", I read it, and enjoyed it.

The book is written "with" Loren Mooney (editor of Bicycling Magazine) and is half biography of a bike racer, half Floyd's side of the doping controversy. It's well written, inspirational, and quite interesting. Like so many things in life, you'll have to draw your own conclusion. Floyd got railed in the news, but you can take your time and read his side of the controversy.

If, in fact, this man is innocent, then what a monumental tragedy it had been to strip him of his victory and public dignity. Might it even be a larger wrong than had a guilty doper gotten away with winning a bike race?

And I have one more passionate opinion before I close. I, for one, don't want one penny of my taxpayer dollars spent on sorting this out. Our politicians have a full enough plate. Once they nail down the economy, education, and social security -- well maybe then they can dabble in policing the world of sports.

Read more Book Reviews by Author/Illustrator Ross Anthony.