The capacity of AFL football to generate ephemeral stories, briefly magnified and then virtually forgotten, has again been amply displayed in recent days. The big issue in the first half of this week has been Barry Hall's run-in with the North Melbourne defence last Saturday afternoon. There wasn't a huge amount in it, no punches or injuries, yet it filled endless media space for three days. Now it's gone. My hand is up; I am as guilty as the rest.

Before Bazza there was Aker and his take on the possibility of a gay footballer coming out, and before Aker there was Michael Johnson and cocaine. Two men who became entangled amid a football match, one who expressed an opinion of negligible significance, and a third who probably intended using cocaine, have covered the pages of newspapers for days. Sometimes we become so fixated with the trees that we fail to see the forest.

I believe this is particularly true of the Johnson story, the obsession with Ben Cousins, and the general media conversation about the AFL's Illicit Drugs Policy. It is partly why I continue to believe that the introduction of the policy was a mistake.

There are sections of the media that need little encouragement when the possibility of linking well-known people with illicit drugs might exist. Yet even the most zealous of these media snouts would agree that there are limits to the extent to which privacy can legitimately be invaded for the purpose of gathering information. So, such information usually only emerges when there are problems in a user's life, or when usage ceases to be private.

Yet football has made private drug use, per se, a matter of public interest. That there are rules relating to it which can lead to a player's disqualification, means the public interest - and therefore the media's interest - can't be denied. The least reputable of media operators thus have their interest legitimised. And it's a seductive topic. Unfortunately, it's also a bedazzling one. It blinds people to issues of greater significance.

One such issue is that of performance enhancing drugs. The clamour of discussion around Cousins, Johnson, and Matthew Stokes this year has been deafening, yet the story of former Hawthorn and West Coast player, Daniel Chick, has scarcely raised a murmur.

A member of the Eagles' 2006 premiership team, Chick was charged late last year with the importation of steroids. The charge related to nine vials and a large number of tablets being imported from Singapore. In February this year he was found guilty of that offence and fined $5000, as well as being fined $2000 for making a false declaration. It is impossible, now, to make any provable connection between this and Chick's football career, but the fact that the offence occurred is significant. It's far more significant, in a sporting sense, than Johnson or Stokes being caught in possession of cocaine, or Cousins dealing with an addiction.

Chick arrived at Hawthorn in 1996 as a lightly built 20 year-old. Within a few years he had developed himself physically to the point that he was generally regarded as a mini-powerhouse. In the dying minutes of the 2006 grand final, he applied a smother and shepherd that enabled Adam Hunter to kick what proved to be the winning goal for West Coast. These selectively chosen aspects of Chick's career are cited not for gratuitous reasons but to make a point.

Over the last few years, as the Ben Cousins story has been incessantly spotlighted, some have claimed the West Coast Eagles' 2006 flag is tainted. Yet scarcely has Chick's name been mentioned. We will never know for certain whether Chick was involved in anything untoward, but the episode does raise questions that need to be examined.

Nevertheless, Cousins and his supporters are entitled to feel bemused that suspicions of a tainted premiership win appear to fall entirely in his lap.

Perhaps, as we of the sports media go about our work, we should apply ourselves more to the hard and fast rules of the game than to our own personal moral standards. Those who have pursued Cousins and not Chick should ask themselves why.