What did that new source confirm? That an Indianapolis anti-aging clinic — the Guyer Institute of Molecular Medicine — had sent multiple shipments of growth hormone to Manning’s wife, Ashley Manning, around 2011, when Peyton Manning, then with the Indianapolis Colts, was attempting to recover from a severe neck injury. Allegations about those shipments came from a man named Charlie Sly, an Austin-based pharmacist who was secretly taped over 27 hours by undercover Al Jazeera operative Liam Collins, a British hurdler who claimed he was seeking performance-enhancing drugs for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The Al Jazeera documentary has rested almost entirely on Sly’s claims, which he later disavowed in an awkward, apparently lawyered one-minute video statement.

Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary who now runs a sports communications firm, speaks for the Manning camp on the Al Jazeera documentary, and doesn’t appear impressed with the network’s sourcing. He cites Peyton Manning’s statement that he has never taken growth hormone, plus the statement of Manning’s agent, Tom Condon, that any medication shipped to Ashley Manning “was prescribed by her doctor and taken solely by her.” Says Fleischer to the Erik Wemple Blog, “It doesn’t matter whether Al Jazeera has one source or ten sources about Ashley Manning. All they’re doing is violating her right to medical privacy so they can smear Peyton.”

AD

AD

Davies’s claim certainly does little to push Al Jazeera’s reporting on Manning out of its current limbo. In his loose talk in “The dark side: The secret world of sports doping,” Sly mentions a number of high-profile football and baseball players — including Green Bay Packer Clay Matthews and Ryan Howard of the Philadelphia Phillies — and discusses being part of a medical team that assisted Manning in his 2011 recovery. Though the Al Jazeera piece doesn’t feature Sly saying that Peyton Manning actually took growth hormone, he is effusive about the shipments. “All the time we would be sending Ashley Manning drugs. Like, growth hormone, all the time, everywhere, Florida. It would never be under Peyton’s name. Always under her name,” said Sly in one chat with Collins.

It’s that narrow claim that Al Jazeera has trumpeted as the totality of its reporting on Manning. “We’re not making the allegation against Peyton Manning,” said Davies last week on the “Today” show. Yet the documentary sort of folds in a fractional allegation against Peyton Manning. “Extraordinary claims that raise questions whether an American sporting hero, Peyton Manning, is linked to performance enhancing drugs,” notes the documentary in its introduction.

When Stelter argued that this just-raising-questions approach to journalism amounts to insinuation, Davies replied: “We’re saying we have raised questions, and those questions haven’t been answered.”

AD

AD

Along those lines, both the NFL and Major League Baseball have vowed to review the allegations, meaning that answers may have to come from non-journalistic organizations.

Fleischer tells this blog that “a number of national investigative writers” have emailed him to say that they never could have sneaked such allegations past their editors, much less layers of legal review. Of course, investigative reporters who’ve been scooped commonly say such things. “We as a society can never, ever lose the ability to dig deep and ask the appropriate questions and that’s why the Al Jazeera story is such a mess….It’s to the point now that they’re reduced to going after a player’s wife.”