Penn State Honoring Joe Paterno Is a Reminder of the Dishonor of Everyone Else.

Penn State is going to honor Joe Paterno on Sept 17  commemorating the first game Paterno ever won as Penn State head coach and his career as the winningest coach in the history of college football. He is also scheduled, in October, to be inducted into the Pennsylvania sports Hall of Fame.

But after all the lies told about Paterno, all the media dishonesty,the cowardice and deceit of the Penn State Board of Trustees who fired him because they didn't have the guts or integrity to stand up to a corrupt and dishonest news media, highlighted by Penn State Trustee and former governor of Pennsylvania Tom Corbett who when running for re-election made a too little too late admission that Paterno never should have been fired in the first place, after all the blatant lies and smears designed to appeal to the double digit IQ mob, that Penn State is now going to honor Joe Paterno without first calling a press conference to publicly apologize for all their own cowardice, dishonesty, hypocrisy, incompetence and behavior and act like it never happened is one more disgrace.

They didn't call that press conference or issue a statement apologizing for their crass dishonesty and cowardice at the time because they didn't want to face the cameras or the music. They didn't want to stand there and admit they made a horrendous mistake and discarded every principle of idealism and integrity a university is supposed to stand for,instead caving in to smear merchants like Louis Freeh, hired by certain members of the Board of Trustees to do just what he did --  smear Paterno with a report so absurd, inaccurate and full of intentional untruths only a journalist could believe them.And the remaining idiots in this country who still believe anything journalists write.

The Freeh Report was so corrupt it was anonymously disowned by one of Freeh's own investigators but typically the news media virtually ignored it knowing how badly it would damage their already damaged credibility. Either that or expose their reading comprehension as something on the level of a 3rd grader.

In many ways its as if Penn State is still doing PR wanting to pretend the whole dishonest sordid mud slinging witch hunting smear tactic mess committed by people with no integrity themselves against a man whose integrity was and still is unquestioned, never happened. Except that it did. As was reported here from the beginning.

The NCAA and Mark Emmert have already been exposed as a fraud,some of their internal emails made public as a result of discovery in a law suit filed by the Paterno family that proved it was all about bandwagon jumping PR for the NCAA, as it was for all of the hack journalists trying to pretend they were being noble. The emails showed the NCAA themselves knew  they had no jurisdiction to impose any of the sanctions they did and didn't even believe the allegations against Paterno themselves but saw it as an opportunity to look good and felt they could get away with it.

So before any more of the emails could be made public the NCAA caved in and settled out of court restoring the 111 wins to Paterno's record they tried to steal and made a series of other agreements rescinding almost all their sanctions though there is no undoing the damage they did to the football program, though that is the least of it.

It was also an admission that the NCAA along with most of the mass media were more interested in grandstanding and their own self serving interests at Paterno's expense, than anything resembling the truth.Which is exactly how a mob behaves.

Like Sean Gregory at Time magazine who outright lied in his first article about Paterno and the McQueary suspicions because he was too lazy, too dishonest too lacking in integrity or competence to find out the truth first so instead made things up out of his own head, falsehoods that were so outrageous and blatant that within days of it being written here that he had opened himself and Time Warner up to an open and shut case of libel by Paterno the  blatant falsehoods were scrubbed from the story no doubt at the insistence of Time Warner lawyers because at that point it was about money and millions in an out of court settlement, not a man's reputation. So it was the lawyers who scrubbed it rather than Time editors who allowed the story to be published without vetting or any corroboration.

 Gregory had written that Joe Paterno sat in his office and did nothing while he knew a 10 year old boy was being raped in the Penn State showers by Sandusky only a few feet away. That was Time magazine. Obviously not a word was true. Gregory made it up out of his own head and incompetent surmising without lifting a finger to find out what was true. And neither Sean Gregory nor his editors cared. Only the lawyers did when it became a matter of money. That was the level of journalism being practiced by a major media outlet (and still is by most of them).  But it was enough to get the self righteous bandwagon rolling. And that was just the beginning.

Joining the mindless media mob was almost everyone at ESPN, like Keith Olbermann, Jay Bilas, Jonette Howard and Jemele Hill, and almost every other sports and mainstream media outlet who in their own way were and are no better than Jerry Sandusky himself,  a group of  opportunistic journalistic  predators who without any conscience molested and abused the truth and a man's reputation for their own self serving grandstanding purposes not caring who they hurt in the process as long as they got what they wanted. Just like Sandusky himself.

And of course there was Louis Freeh who as FBI director smeared Richard Jewel as the  1996 Atlanta Olympic bomber without a shred of evidence to get the heat off himself because they had no leads in the highest profile criminal case in the world at the time. The Freeh Report was, to anyone with a high school reading level nothing but trash without a shred of evidence -- not a shred -- to support the conclusions designed to indict Paterno and the idiots in the news media ate it up. Even after former Attorney General Dick Thornberg and a former FBI agent tried to do a "see Dick run" with the media tearing the report to pieces factually, the media ignored it because to admit it would be to admit things about themselves not Paterno, none of them wanted to face. And still don't. 

But it was the throughly and easily discredited Freeh Report,so obviously an intended hatchet job that Freeh refused requests by Paterno himself to be interviewed for the report, that the media used to justify their attacks. 

That Freeh did an "investigation" and refused to interview or even take a statement from those at the center of it all, Paterno, Curly, Schultz and Spanier, should have in the minds of any rational human being, discredited the report before it was even released. But notfor our intrepid, crusading pillars of nobility and truth known as journalists. 

Why did Freeh refuse to interview Paterno for his report? Because every prosecutor or defense lawyer knows you never call a witness who is liable to say things or present facts or evidence you dont want public and that would scuttle your case. And Freeh at the direction of those members of the Board of Trustees who hired him, acted like a corrupt prosecutor (which is what Bloomberg Businessweek accused him of being in 2000 as FBI Director demanding his resignation) not an objective investigator. And that's why Freeh never interviewed Paterno, McQueary, Curly or Schultz. The last thing he wanted was the truth. Just like the news media.

Also ignored by the media to this day is that the much publicized indictments at the time of Gary Schultz, former overseer of Penn State Campus police to whom Paterno first reported McQueary's suspicion which as it turned out, was unfounded,Tim Curley former Penn State AD, and Graham Spanier, Penn State president have all been dropped. The Pennsylvania Attorney General who started the cases which were all PR and no truth to begin with  is long gone and the AG who replaced her has just resigned before she was to be impeached for corruption. There was no trial against Spanier, Curley and Schultz because there was no case to begin with. That fact is being buried by the same media that tried at one time to bury them along with Paterno and Penn State over an abuse that never took place. 

It remains a fact that given  a specious, vague and unproven suspicion of possible child abuse in a Penn State shower which, for all that Jerry Sandusky was eventually convicted of through his charity Second Mile, was the one thing proved to have never happened, Joe Paterno did more within 24 hours of being told about an unfounded vague suspicion of child abuse by reporting it to his superiors including Penn State police than every priest, bishop, cardinal, or Pope in the Catholic church has in the last 1700 years. 

A topic our crusading news media would still rather ignore and do, like the admission by the archbishop of Australia in his recent testimony before their Parliament investigating church abuse, that child sexual abuse at the hands of the church has been going on worldwide for centuries (his word) and the number of children molested and abused by priests and others in the church is in the millions. That testimony never made it to any news outlet in the U.S. though widely reported by the BBC and other outlets in Europe and Australia.

Its called U.S. media cowardice and fear because for them it's about what they think will sell and what won't. Paterno sold. So they sold out.

By contrast, the news media never reported on the documents made public by court order from both the Milwaukee and Los Angeles archdioceses detailing specific (and horrific) incidents of church sexual abuse of children in great details that numbered in the tens of thousands over the last 6 decades and covered up by the church (approximately 8,000 in Milwaukee and 40,000 in Los Angeles). Yet for 3 straight weeks in November of 2011, Joe Paterno (not even Sandusky) was the biggest media story in the country. A media group that tracks these things reported that Paterno's name and picture were used at a ratio of 20-1 compared to Sandusky. And it was Sandusky who was the abuser. 

For the media it was all about self-serving grandstanding and increased revenue in attracting a larger audience and that meant Paterno's name, stature and accomplishment, not Sandusky's.

Joe Paterno deserves his day of recognition. What he didn't deserve was the self serving cash register ringing unfounded attacks by an unprincipled dishonest news media looking to cash in on his accomplishments and reputation and equally dishonest collection of pandering Penn State officials and politicians, some of the pariahs gone and some still with us as is apparent during this election season. 

Honoring Paterno at Penn State and the restoring of his 111 wins dishonestly taken in the first place is the beginning of an attempt to start to return to Paterno some of his due including his reputation smeared by a media mob without a shred of integrity. But while Paterno is starting to get back some of his due,it's still worth remembering there are a lot of devils out there who still need to get theirs.