Not really, the first magazines I read were MM2000, and they'd have articles on which girls were escorting, which guys were caught doing gay porn, which guys were in trouble for steroids, etc.... Also the first board I read was the old Misc.Fitness.Weights where a lot of the guys were old timers and industry folks so there were always fights, and stories to be read.
Also, for folks that never saw the newsgroups, you could cross post to hundreds of related and unrelated groups. So you could have alt.amazon.admirers, Misc.Fitness.Weights, Soc.Motss (a gay group), Rec.arts.movies.erotica all discussing something, and some interesting stories came about that way.
So I always sort of understood that the hobby at the upper levels was and is very sleazy.
The one thing that still caught me for a couple of years were the fake naturals that pimped for supplement companies. It wasn't until I got around real lifters that I understood that even the smaller naturals were on decent levels of drugs.