“It” was an investigative story on New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez and his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs. Prescient, too: More than a year after Kovaleski had his almost-publish moment, Rodriguez would end up serving a one-year suspension over such allegations and his ties to south Florida clinic Biogenesis, which is now closed.

“We didn’t have a good feeling about this one flaky source we had, who turned out to be flaky but at moments had great information. We did what good journalists would do,” said Kovaleski. “We didn’t run it ’cause we had it 99 percent, but that wasn’t enough.”

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Timely input from Kovaleski. As he spoke, a doping investigation by Al Jazeera — “The Dark Side” — was continuing to draw attacks from athletes highlighted in the hour-long documentary, which aired between the holidays. The investigation consisted of much undercover work by British hurdler Liam Collins, who approached alleged doping types in Canada in blazing a trail to the door of one Charlie Sly, a Texas pharmacist who speaks at length on the secret video about his dealings with professional baseball and football players including Ryan Howard (Philadelphia Phillies), Clay Matthews (Green Bay Packers), Michael Neal (Green Bay Packers), Ryan Zimmerman (Washington Nationals), among others. Sly even claims to have assisted in then-Indianapolis Colt Peyton Manning’s recovery from neck surgery in 2011 and adds a specific allegation that an anti-aging clinic where he worked — the Guyer Institute of Molecular Medicine — sent numerous shipments of human growth hormone to Ashley Manning, the wife of Peyton Manning.

Peyton Manning has denied ever taking such medication, and the other players mustered a mix of denials and no-comments to the Al Jazeera allegations. Sly himself issued a one-minute YouTube video statement in which he bailed on all of his statements made to Al Jazeera. They were all false, he said.

Now the athletes are mustering paperwork. Both Zimmerman and Howard have filed libel suits against Al Jazeera over the documentary, claiming that the report carried false information injurious to their reputation. From Zimmerman’s complaint: “Due to Defendants’ defamatory statements, Mr. Zimmerman has been at the center of a media storm speculating as to his alleged use of Delta 2 and other performance-enhancing substances. Mr. Zimmerman’s reputation for honesty, both generally and as a competitor, has been called into question, not only in front of the athletic community, but in front of the public at large.”

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And from Howard’s complaint: “These remarks are further defamatory in that they falsely suggest that the taking of these illegal and banned substances by Mr. Howard was part of an ongoing ‘maintenance’ plan directed by Sly, and imply that Mr. Howard’s career accomplishments, including having ‘a ton of home runs’ and reaching 50 home runs, were the result of taking these substances.”

As for damages, the plaintiffs ask for unspecified amounts to be determined at trial. They also ask for removal of the allegedly offending content from Al Jazeera’s website and from YouTube. And there’s one more sui generis remedy: An “injunction requiring Defendants to publish a retraction of all false and defamatory statements about Plaintiff in the New York Times or a similar newspaper with nationwide distribution,” notes a demand common to both lawsuits and viciously insulting to Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera declined to comment on the lawsuits.

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A good civil action always sheds some light on the ugly process of producing journalism, and these cases are no exception. Both complaints note that Sly is the lone source of the Al Jazeera allegations against Howard and Zimmerman. That’s a little extreme — many investigative units, as Kovaleski suggests, would demand greater source diversity, or at least some documentation that the athletes were, in fact, doping. As it is, the Al Jazeera investigation at key points boils down to Collins coaxing scandalous details out of Sly. For example, here’s part of their discussion regarding Zimmerman:

Collins: How long have you known Zimmerman? Sly: Probably six years. I worked with him in the off-season. That’s how I get him to change some stuff. Collins: Is he on the D2 [a banned supplement] as well? Sly: Yeah.

Yeah?

The filings draw out another issue with the reporting: Al Jazeera, they claim, wouldn’t even identify Sly as the source of the information when it requested comments from the Howard and Zimmerman camps. Prior to the airing of the investigation, counsel for Howard sent Al Jazeera the following email:

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In an effort to disabuse Al Jazeera of the error of its ways, we asked that you identify the lone individual who allegedly serves as the source of these charges, but you refused to do so. You have also refused to provide us with any information that might lead us to help you understand how it could be that such a falsehood could have been charged of [our client]. Consequently, you have disabled us in our ability to demonstrate that your source is either untrustworthy or just plain wrong, and therefore Al Jazeera will be taking the risk that false and shoddy journalism could have been rectified had not its reporting protocol been grossly irresponsible.

The same email issued from the Zimmerman camp.

Last weekend, Deborah Davies, an Al Jazeera reporter who helped guide the investigation, told CNN’s Brian Stelter that her organization had secured a second, anonymous source for the allegations relating to Manning — namely, that the clinic had sent human growth hormone to Ashley Manning, the wife of the famous quarterback. Add-ons notwithstanding, the investigation does indeed rest on the random boasts of, basically, a guy.

In deference to Al Jazeera, that guy apparently has some standing among doping types. As the documentary makes clear, Al Jazeera arrived at Sly’s door through referrals from savvy sources in Canada, who agreed that Sly was a U.S. kingpin of sorts when it comes to pharmaceutically boosting the capabilities of athletes. A measure of support, too, has come from the very source where Al Jazeera’s enemies want to see a retraction: The New York Times’s Michael Powell, in a compelling and deeply reported column, cited connections among some of the athletes that Sly had name-dropped in his many conversations with Collins. Seems “nearly all” of these highly fit specimens, reports Powell, are clients of a trainer — Jason Riley — who had partnered with Sly.

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Powell’s scoop, however, could grind in the opposite direction. What if Sly threw out those names because those are the fellows he’s familiar with, and exaggerated or lied about their supplement use? He certainly had an incentive to do so, after all: Collins, the British athlete, is supposedly helping Sly sell his services to elite soccer players in Europe, an endeavor that required deep familiarity with Sly’s book of business. Why wouldn’t Sly stretch the truth in those circumstances?