Despite his proclamation Tuesday, the media has been more than kind to Barry Bonds. AP

1.) Are you happy now? You media guys have driven poor Barry Bonds into seclusion.

We all saw the Bonds video from Tuesday afternoon in Scottsdale, Ariz. Barry sitting on a picnic table, squinting into the desert sun, looking some combination of wounded, angry and defeated. "You wanted me to jump off the bridge,'' he said to the small group of journalists. "I finally have jumped. You wanted to bring me down, you've finally brought me and my family down. Finally done it.'' Asked who had done this, Bonds answered, "You... and you... and you. All of you.''

Let me get this straight: Federal investigators raid BALCO headquarters and subsequently name Greg Anderson, Bonds' longtime friend and personal trainer, as a target of their investigation. BALCO founder Victor Conte says on television that he provided steroids to Anderson. A woman claiming to have had a 10-year relationship with Bonds tells a federal grand jury that Bonds described his steroid use to her and that he used unreported income to make a down payment on a home for her. The media reports all of this and thus the media is to blame for Bonds' current state of apparent desperation?

2.) Well, you've got admit, the media has been pretty aggressive in chasing down Bonds through this whole home-run chase and steroid investigation.

Wrong. I don't have to admit that at all. The media in general has made Bonds a superhero in the last half decade. In 1998, at the age of 33, Bonds hit 37 home runs with a .609 slugging percentage and had a .438 on-base percentage. Skip '99, when Bonds was limited by injuries to just 102 games. In the five years since then, as Bonds has gone from age 35 to 39, he has never hit fewer than 45 home runs, never had a slugging percentage lower than .688 (and only once lower than .749) and never had an on-base percentage lower than .440 (and only once lower than .515). He has done all this with a body that grew gradually from slender and athletic to cartoonishly blown-up. He went from Nate Archibald to Nate Newton. This could have -- and probably should have -- raised more red flags than you see on a football Saturday in Nebraska.

Yet through most of this time period, the media worshipped Bonds, replaying his towering home runs endlessly, crunching the numbers to calcuate precisely when he would pass Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, marveling at his ability to crush those very rare pitches thrown to him in the strike zone. As recently as last spring, media coverage of Bonds was overwhelmingly positive -- fawning, even; do you ever watch SportsCenter? -- and only occasionally wandered off into innuendo and skepticism that a man this old could become so big and so much better than ever before. He nearly was given a free pass. In some quarters, he still is being given one.

The last nine months, however, have been different. First leaks opened in the BALCO case and Bay Area newspapers laid open the details of grand-jury testimony. Then Congress became involved. But this has been a relatively recent development. Bonds has had it easier than Mark McGwire had it during the Andro-gate in '98. And that's saying a lot.