Sorry, but I just can't shake this icky feeling I had, listening to Joe Paterno's son Jay on ESPN. He was pretty much there all day, "promoting" the report his family paid for to investigate... what exactly? Oh, the Freeh Report that held Joe responsible for not doing enough to stop Jerry Sandusky.
I'm not going to comment on something I've not read. (If I were in Congress, of course, I would, but that's another story.) My point is that it just felt kind of creepy for ESPN to give so much time to Jay Paterno, whose central claim is that the Freeh Report was a rush to judgment and a slander on his dad. He was given plenty of opportunities to talk to ESPN's tv and radio hosts about what Freeh did and didn't do. (Paterno was fair in this sense: he was aware that some of the key players in the fiasco that was the Sandusky case were still awaiting trial and so could not be interviewed by the former FBI director. But that didn't stop Paterno from insisting that there was no evidence that his father neglected his obligations, or that he knew about Sandusky a lot sooner than the notorious shower incident in 2002.)
I'm just bothered by ESPN. I understand that this is a news story, and you want to cover it. But I don't believe ESPN had the men who actually conducted the investigations for the family on air. That would seem to be more important than having the Paterno family on. But then, having the family on air -- as Katie Couric did -- creates a personal environment, one that people can connect to. You're supposed to come away thinking, well Joe was a nice man and didn't really know the whole deal about a man he worked with for 20 years. He was just plain fooled like the rest of us.
I didn't hear all the interviews, and I'm sure that some of the gang at the network took Paterno to task on some of the points he was trying to make. It just seems, I dunno, a little like getting your hands dirty. What happened at Penn State was awful beyond description. I understand that Paterno family wanting to "clear" the patriarch of any neglect. But that seems to me to be very hard to swallow, especially for a man like Paterno, a well-educated man, someone who seriously considered running for Governor of the commonwealth, a man who built a kingdom in the middle of nowhere. Is it really possible he didn't know anything about Sandusky?
Jay Paterno noted that when Sandusky was under investigation in 1998, state law prohibited disclosure about such investigations concerning child sexual abuse, so anyone who told Joe about the investigation would have been breaking the law. This may be true, but let's be real here. When the president and athletic director of the college went to Joe's home to fire him, Paterno said, you can't fire me, and they said, um, ok. This man had enormous power. To think that he'd not know that his defensive coordinator was under investigation is stretching the truth. Furthermore, given that he'd worked with Sandusky for 20 years (like him or not, and of course the family insists that Paterno didn't really like Sandusky), wouldn't it have made sense for those investigating Sandusky to ask Paterno questions?
I'm gathering that this report is not really gathering much steam. It's being dismissed as PR on Joe Paterno's behalf. Nothing wrong with defending your dad's honor. I'd probably do the same, even regardless of the facts. Maybe it's no big deal, all the attention it got. But still, i wanted to wash my ears after listening to Jay Paterno try to tell me his old man was out of a loop.
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