I hate ESPN. It has completely blown the Penn State story. The New York Times also blew the story. It had four stories about the Penn State scandal on Wednesday and they all avoided the central fact (alleged by the grand jury): that an assistant coach, Mike McQueary, witnessed Jerry Sandusky anally raping a 10-year-old boy in 2002 inside the football fieldhouse and he told Joe Paterno about it and nothing happened, and the boy has never been identified. This is the central issue in the story: the eyewitness to a hideous violent crime does nothing in the moment about the violent crime and neither do those powerful people he tells about it.
Paterno claims to have talked to higher-ups about the incident. But one of them referred to the crime as Sandusky “horsing around” with a youth in the showers. This is shocking, and it is why the media are fastened on this story. But they are most of them sidestepping the facts. This is a story about a corporate culture of corruption more shocking on its face than the Catholic church scandal; this is more American, for one thing, and were there ever eyewitnesses to violent crimes in the RC scandal who did nothing? I think I would have heard about it.
ESPN has run one story after another lamenting Paterno’s fall and talking about what a great guy Paterno is, but I have heard almost no descriptions at all on the station of the central fact. Yes they say it’s a horrifying story, but they don’t tell viewers. This is shameful, repulsive journalism. It gives cover to the idiotic depraved Penn State students who rioted two nights ago. Journalists should inform the public. Even Brian Williams should be ashamed. Samantha Guthrie referred to the incident as one of “intercourse” on the Nightly News last night. She is also shading the truth. The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson was horrified by the grand jury report, but even she held back a little. No one should hold back here. For the sake of the unidentified victim, for the sake of the edifice of corruption in State College that got cover from an old man who the media decided was adorable but was not sentient, and who was in on the whole business.
The best journalism has been on Chris Matthews and on Erin Burnett last night, MSNBC and CNN. Matthews honestly described the rape, so did Buzz Bissinger, who gets to the heart of the case: a big strapping assistant coach does nothing when he witnesses a child being victimized in the showers before his eyes (at 9:30 p.m. on the night before Spring Break, when Sandusky would have thought that no one would come into the fieldhouse) but runs home to his own daddy. Why? Because of a culture of omerta around violence inside a hierarchical big business with an icon attached to it, Paterno. Burnett did journalism showing that child victims must tell 7 adults before they are believed, on average. Well this was a violent crime witnessed by an official, and then covered up for 9 years.
Where is the media to convey the true import of this story? They have been polite, and it is irresponsible. I have to believe they will get on it soon. State College, PA, should be carpetbombed with reporters and investigators and advocates for children. The disgraceful Pennsylvania governor ought to be shaming those Penn State students who are standing up for Paterno, violently. A terrifying culture of patriarchal violence has been enshrined in that place for many years, and the disappearance of the prosecutor several years ago who was on to these crimes should be prompting outside investigation now. Nobody should be spared.
ESPN should be ashamed of itself for treating this as the sad ouster of an icon when it is about thoroughgoing corruption. I hate State College. I wish the NCAA would cancel Saturday’s game, not allow them to attract any respectability, by staging another tight-pants-n-jockstrap circus on the ground where children were damaged for 20 years with the knowing complicity of respectable men. I will be pulling for Nebraska in any case. So will all thinking Americans.
Thanks, Phil, for this article. I’m not very in to football, but I admit I felt a little uncomfortable over the firing of the iconic Paterno (probably more because he was 84 than because he was an icon, truth be told). His only possible excuse would be if he didn’t somehow get all the information and the assistant coach conveyed it to him as less than what it was–which was rape. But that seems unlikely.
You really put the facts out in the right manner. Someone witnessed a rape, did nothing at the time, and then nothing happened later. Shameful.
Fuckin’ A. Phil. Sometimes rage is the only rational response.
How a grown man can “walk in” on another grown man sodomizing a child and not procede to beat that man half to death is well beyond my comprehension.
And, how another grown man and a father can obfuscate what he was told (in this case, that a child was being raped) into “possible sexual misconduct” or whatever he told the grand jury is also beyond my comprehension.
This is about what authoritarian institutions do to PEOPLE. They make people not run to the police, like this assistant coach – they make people, like Paterno only think of saving the institution and with it their own neck – and they make a bunch of moronic kids rally for a guy who covered up the rape of a ten year old boy.
To discuss this case in a vaccuum, without taking into account the institutional, authoritarian aspect I think also misses the point. Football coaches, college presidents and CEO’s are a few examples of the “mini-kings” we allow in our society. The real problem lies beyond “who told who and when?” The problem is us.
“Sometimes rage is the only rational response.”
Absolutely! Righteous rage is the only possible response!
“eyewitness to a hideous violent crime does nothing in the moment about the violent crime”
Anderson Cooper used the correct words “anal rape”, described how the boy was standing with his hands against a wall while he was being raped. Was McQueary thinking “the damage is done, I need to get home”, was he initially numb, completely desensitized?
Children are harmed (legally and criminally) more often than we can know, children with special needs more often than most. They are harmed in their homes, schools, houses of worship, camps, medical settings, foster care, etc. The harm can be considered criminal as in this case; or legal as in corporal punishment and genital mutilation. Too often we know of children being harmed and don’t intervene because the false boundaries of legal/criminal are hindering our commonsense boundaries of safe/harmful. I recently had to contact Alternet over an ad on their website, an American Apparel child porn ad. It took too many emails, facebook comments, and calls to their advertising department to get some change.
I once worked in a group home for children with severe multiple special needs where conditions were not safe. I repeatedly reported unsafe conditions to my supervisors and managers, nothing changed. I called child protective services directly which initiated an investigation, they informed me the group home was one of the most investigated in the state. Unfortunately, some of the conditions I had reported were not sufficiently corrected long term, resulting in the deaths of several residents. I cannot comprehend how children can continue to be most harmed in a country that calls itself the greatest.
We must each be diligent wherever and whenever we are not sure if someone is being harmed, especially our most fragile. Most of us cannot comprehend how someone can see a child being criminally harmed and not stop it; however we must each do our part to not wait till we see it. We must each be proactive, find out what the laws are in your community, in some communities mandated reporters are not allowed to report directly to protective services, they must follow chain of command. In New York, some providers of services for children are not required to do background checks on prospective employees and volunteers, I know of Catholic and Hasidic providers opposing legislation that would require them to do back ground checks.
Given the charges, one can, I suppose, empathize with your zealous scorn for Penn State. However, there are so many errors in this screed, that it’s not much worth responding to, much less reading.
Just to point one basic error that any journalist should have gotten: McQueary was not an assistant coach when he witnessed the assault on the ten-year old. I’ll leave it up to you to find out what his position was, Phil. Maybe your journalistic skills are getting rusty, and you need some practice!