Penn State Scandal: Guilt by Association?

Let me stress at the outset that I’m not condoning in any way, the behavior of the assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky. I’m still one of these old school types who thinks that we should get a court conviction against him first before jumping to conclusions. Call me crazy, but there used to be something in this country known as civil rights, and remaining innocent until proven guilty. I’ve read most of the twenty-three page Grand Jury indictment, and if all of it is true, then Jerry Sandusky is truly the “Ted Bundy” of sex offenders. At the very least, the man should have been discharged from his “duties” at Penn State a long time ago. It’s a tragedy that it took all these years for this to become exposed, and no doubt the victims have suffered horribly.
But why fire Joe Paterno over this? To be perfectly frank, I’m not a Joe Paterno fan particularly, nor am I a fan of Penn State. But I’m a die-hard college football fan who thinks that what happened to Joe Paterno is bad for college football. In fact, I think it’s bad for society at large. Should Paterno have taken more steps to deal with this situation? Perhaps. But Paterno is a college football coach, not a police investigator. As I understand this, Paterno was scheduled to hold a press conference about the matter, and was denied the opportunity to do so by Penn State. Here’s a man who served Penn State for forty-six years and who has never had any kind of scandal in his program the entire time he’s been there. The graduation rate at Penn State for his players is second only to Northwestern in the Big Ten Conference. His reputation had been impeccable until this sex scandal broke.
I don’t believe the legal process was allowed to continue long enough to know the answers to key questions, such as who knew what, and when they knew it. Perhaps if it were made clear to me that Paterno knew more about the situation and did nothing to either report or stop it than what I’ve read, I might be calling for Paterno’s head as well. Frankly, who I’m upset with over this, is the media. They use a scandal like this so they can get ratings and thus report a lot of things that may or may not be true, and use their influence to try someone in the court of public opinion. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t trusted the media in a long time to get anything right. I usually wait until I’ve read some actual documents online such as the Grand Jury report, for instance, before forming an opinion. I’ve heard that media viewership is at an all-time low due to their obvious bias. Even being a Republican-leaning voter, I’m upset with the bias I see on Fox News, not just the left-wing bias I’m used to seeing whenever I do watch CNN or some of the others, which is pretty rare. All I’m saying is that my instant reaction to the whole Penn State/Joe Paterno saga was that the media was just using the scandal to try to get some of their lost credibility back.
But getting back to Paterno. Did he deserve to be fired after 46 years of running an otherwise clean program? If he was going to be fired, they could have at least done it in person, instead of over the phone. The man should have at least been allowed to finish out the season as head coach, absent any incriminating or damning information proving that he could have done more to stop all this. With what happened to Paterno, what should this say to the rest of us who put in five, ten, or twenty years at a job, knowing that someone could level an accusation of some type of wrongdoing such as child molestation or failure to pay taxes, and cause you to lose your job in a heartbeat? If the charges are valid, then of course, you should pay the price. But what if the charges are false and someone or some organization uses them to bring down an institution or public figure? If you’re tried in the media before you have your day in court, your reputation is already ruined. If I were the media, I’d stick to reporting about Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries and their high profile wedding and divorce. The phoniness of that couple pretty well reflects in my mind what the media is capable of covering.
I’m going out on a limb here for Joe Paterno, as I said earlier, not because I’m a fan of his, but because I think he was fired without cause. According to the Grand Jury report, there were other people who were aware of the child molestation going on, who failed to act as well. Are all of those people going to be fired, too? At what point do you stop firing people? If Sandusky did all these heinous deeds with children, which at this point seems to be the case, then the man definitely deserves the worst punishment that the law can throw at him. If there were others at Penn State who can be reasonably held accountable for not contacting the police, then certainly they should be fired as well. About the only argument being made that Paterno should step down right away, is that he should have contacted the police when he was notified. I didn’t know there was a handbook out there somewhere, spelling out exactly what you’re supposed to do in situations like that, that can hold you accountable years later, before any convictions (not allegations) are made. There’s always the chance someone could be falsely accused in a case like this. I’ll just conclude by saying that I hope the guilty parties get what’s coming to them and that the victims in this case can obtain justice. But I still think Penn State was wrong to fire Joe Paterno and that they were wrong to refuse to permit him to speak, if he so chose to do so. Perhaps Paterno should have been fired, but not based on the scant information I’ve seen, blaming him for not going to the police, when he did report it to a superior. Of what I know of Paterno to this point, unless any kind of credible information comes out later to change my mind that I haven’t seen thus far, I’ll always regard Joe Paterno as a great coach who got shafted by a publicity-hungry media anxious for ratings, and a university who disregarded his otherwise distinguished service for so many years.