Sunday, May 15, 2016
Shooting the messenger is what people do when the message is not what they want to hear.
Penn State got a message last week and the firing commenced quickly.
The shooters? Joe Paterno’s son Jay and Penn State president Eric Barron.
They came out swinging last week in the wake of allegations that Paterno’s knowledge of Jerry Sandusky’s sickening crimes dated as far back as 1971.
A CNN report introduced claims by a victim who said he reported to Paterno himself that he had been raped by a then 27-year-old Sandusky in a Penn State locker room. The victim, then a troubled teenager, claims Paterno and another unidentified man told him — in a phone call — to forget the accusations and even threatened to report him to the authorities for making them up.
An NBC News report, released at the same time, indicated that as many as six Penn State assistant coaches had witnessed “inappropriate” behavior by Sandusky with boys over a period of years when the former Penn State defensive coordinator was on Paterno’s staff.
Almost instantly, the propping up of Paterno’s tarnished legacy began anew.
Instead of expressing any form of disgust about what Sandusky was long ago convicted of doing or the growing possibility — if not probability — that he operated for years while Paterno and others at Penn State knew what he was, they went after the messenger.
Jay Paterno wrote an op-ed for a State College newspaper and website decrying “clickbait” journalism. In it, he accused news organizations of sensationalizing the story for click.
“They reported what would make them money,” he wrote.
Barron wrote a letter to the university community, but its purpose wasn’t to express his shock that knowledge of Sandusky’s crimes might have gone back decades more than previously thought.
Among other things, Barron wrote this:
“I want you to know I am appalled by the rumor, innuendo and rush to judgment that have accompanied the media stories surrounding these allegations. All too often in our society, people are convicted in the court of public opinion, only to find a different outcome when all the facts are presented.”
Barron may, in fact, have established a new gold standard for tone-deaf reactions. It was as if he — and by extension Penn State itself — had learned nothing from the original sordid case.
Barron was playing to his audience, most of which apparently isn’t interested in hearing Penn State’s president admit that some university officials didn’t do enough to stop Sandusky and perhaps even apologize. At the very least, Barron could have promised a new attitude of transparency and made it clear that he’d do everything in his power to make sure such an abuse of children — and an abuse of power by university officials — would not happen again on his watch.
But that kind of introspection and concern doesn’t seem to ever have been part of the norm at Penn State, so why should we expect it now?
These most recent stories raised new questions about what Paterno and some of his coaches knew and when they knew it. They were described as “bombshells,” which implies some sort of shock or surprise. To me, those CNN and NBC News stories were not surprising at all. Most rational thinkers would have to suspend disbelief to think that people could work alongside Sandusky all those years, break bread with him and travel with him and not have any idea something was amiss.
But as any Penn State defender will tell you, that last sentence is not a fact, and he’d be right.
The fact is that Paterno is dead, his legacy is forever tarnished and he isn’t able to defend himself. But there seems no lack of people willing to take on that job. That speaks to the regard we had for the man we thought he was and that some desperately want him to be again.
I’ve thought all along that the true story about Sandusky, Paterno and Penn State had not completely been unearthed. It may not ever happen to the extent that either side — those who want to exonerate Joe and those who want to convict him — will be satisfied.
But you’d think one small bit of common ground for both groups would be to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.
You might be wrong. Jay Paterno didn’t mention the word “victim” once. Barron did, but each time the word “alleged” preceded it. And it wasn’t until the second-to-last paragraph that he got around to mentioning how “heinous” the sexual assault of a child is, and how “appalled” everyone at Penn State was by Sandusky’s crimes.
That passage almost seemed thrown in as an afterthought, as if Barron had forgotten why this all happened.
But that’s easy to do when you get caught up in shooting the messenger.
Write Vindicator Sports Editor Ed Puskas at epuskas@vindy.com and follow him on Twitter, @EdPuskas_Vindy.