Media: Penn Live's David Jones, Others, Duped by Rumors, Dubious Reports

On Sunday, January 4th, 2013, David Jones hinted at structural changes that could be forthcoming in the football program.  The source of his information -- football message boards via Facebook.  Other journalists guilty of using rumors as facts.

By
Ray Blehar

On the night of January 3rd, I had a discussion with a person who is a substantial donor to Penn State athletics.  The donor told me that they had heard O'Brien was staying but, despite the good news,  they were shutting off their donations to PSU Athletics until Dave Joyner was removed as AD. 

Then the donor wished that someone would make Joyner's life miserable, just like he was doing to the fine people who worked for him on the AD staff.

I was still on the phone with the donor and said, "You're not going to believe this, but a rumor about Joyner leaving is already on the message boards.  Someone just posted a link on Facebook  to a post on BWI and I checked it out.  There is a lot of chatter and a lot of people happy about the prospect of Joyner no longer being AD."

The donor laughed and said, "Good, I hope the rumor comes true."

O'Brien Staying

At 9:55PM, the Patriot News' David Jones had released an article about O'Brien being retained as PSU's coach (see below)

Bill O'Brien tells PennLive he is staying at Penn State

By David Jones | djones@pennlive.com The Patriot-News
on January 03, 2013 at 9:55 PM, updated January 04, 2013 at 8:45 AM

Penn State's long holiday nightmare is over. Bill O'Brien is staying at Penn State.
In an exclusive conversation, the second-year head coach confirmed that he was contacted by and entertained overtures from multiple NFL clubs through his agent Joe Linta. But he has decided to remain at PSU for at least the 2013 season.

Numerous media were on the story of O'Brien after Jones....

• Dan Wetzel, at Yahoo sports at 10:28 PM
• The Pittsburgh Post Gazette chimed in at 11:13 PM
• Statecollege.com followed at 2:09AM on the 4th, linking to Jones' article

Structural Changes

However, it wasn't until the Sunday morning update that came out that Jones reported about "structural changes" in the Athletic Department.....

In addition to a clear testing of the pro head coaching waters, this was a strategic mission of sorts by O'Brien. By having Linta throw his name open to NFL openings and having the agent field offers, he was able to gain additional leverage that allowed him a chance to accomplish structural and personnel changes in the Penn State athletic department that may be forthcoming. O'Brien declined to be specific about those changes when asked but he did not deny those aims.

Jones' column on Sunday morning lead to more writers picking up the structural change idea....specifically, that there was a strained relationship between Joyner and O'Brien.

• The Post Gazette mentioned that "Joyner and O'Brien's relationship was called into question." 
• The Collegian questioned Joyner about the relationship.
• PennLive's Audrey Snyder also pushed Joyner about the relationship (there was a survey attached about Joyner's performance - the vote was 80% no confidence)
• Mark Brennan of Scout.com questioned Joyner about the relationship.  

To Brennan's credit he mentioned that rumors were rampant, but most others didn't mention where they heard of this "relationship" issue.

Most of us have been disgusted by the media's performance in the Sandusky scandal.  It's a fact that the media will jump onto a story with no factual basis and repeat it over and  over again.

Facts Don't Matter When You Have Rumors

However, when it came to tearing down a icon like Paterno, the media used a dubious account to paint Paterno as a liar just a week before the release of the Freeh Report.

Many stories  ran on July 6th, trumpeting the headlines "Joe Paterno used e-mail."  The real story was that Joe's assistant, Sandy Segursky, typed out the e-mail on Joe's behalf in 2007 - after the Meridian fight.  But the article reads:

 "Paterno wrote to Spanier and Curley using an email account used by the coach’s assistant, Sandi Segursky."

The assumption made was absolutely ludicrous.  Joe Paterno, who doesn't want people to know that he uses e-mail, typed an e-mail on his assistant's computer?    

The source of this trash was Vicky Triponey, who also accused Paterno of sending text messages.  Septaugenerian Paterno texting?  As Joe once said, "I can't download a jar of peanut butter."

At one point, Triponey says, witnesses—most of whom were footballers—were ordered to appear at a judicial hearing, as was school policy. But Paterno sent a text message to the whole team, saying, “If you show up for this, you’re off.”

However, as crazy as these allegations were, the media had a new heroine in Vicky Triponey.  

Did Tripony ever produce this text message?  Not that I've ever seen.

But she was lauded in the press as the woman who exposed Joe Paterno as a fraud.  And although not named in the Freeh Report, there is little doubt that she was the source for the unsubstantiated finding of "a culture of reverence to the football program" at Penn State.

Repeating A Story Appears to Make It True

Apparently, using message boards to get the latest news is standard practice among today's "journalists."

Here's Glamour magazine on Sara Ganim:

Ganim, a Penn State grad and a football fan herself, knew her way around the university's online message boards. There she quickly found gossip about Sandusky getting too friendly with young boys. So she started asking around. "I'd say, 'Hey, have you heard anything strange about Jerry Sandusky?'" And though people knew about the rumors, Ganim says, "almost no one believed they were true."

Here's The New York Times' Jo Becker:

Wild rumors, of course, get thrown around on college sports message boards all the time. (We would know; we’re on them constantly. We can’t get enough of them.) More often than not, there’s nothing to them. Clearly, though, that wasn’t the case this time. And while we would stop short of saying this is an endorsement for throwing every crazy thing you’ve heard up on the internet and seeing if it leads anywhere, when something of this magnitude turns out to be on point…well, it goes a long way toward justifying the sea of inanity.

Of course, that a message board "tip" or anonymous e-mail tip helped break the Sandusky case is anything but a fact.  Like many of the so-called facts in the case, it provides an explanation of how something might have occurred, but for all we know, it too could be a fabrication to cover up how the McQueary incident was really discovered. 

It very well could be that at an early stage of the investigation, the OAG investigators asked CYS to check their logs and they found the PSU complaint.  Rather than admitting that CYS had this complaint in its records, the AG simply concocted a story that they knew an uniformed hoard would buy.  

And in the Sandusky case, the public and the media bought into every story that Nils Frederickson threw out there.  

• That McQueary witnessed a rape and told PSU officials all the details.
• That Ray Gricar and the police let Sandusky off the hook in 1998 (hardly a mention of the CYS/DPW investigation)
• That Central Mountain HS did everything right in reporting Sandusky (it was Mike Gillum at Clinton County CYS that told the school they had to ban Sandusky)
• That the investigators, despite obstruction by PSU officials, linked the abuse to Sandusky's relationship to The Second Mile (I'm speechless) 

Once these fabrications were made public, the story was seemingly set.  The phenomenon is called "anchoring" in psychological terms (some SSMSS contributors will write more about this soon).  Once people's beliefs are anchored, it's very difficult to change their minds, no matter how much evidence is presented that refutes the story.

We saw this with the Duke Lacrossse Case (privileged white students raped a black woman), the Exxon Valdez (the captain was drunk), George W. Bush National Guard service (Bush was AWOL), and with the Olympic Park bombing (Richard Jewell was the bomber - according to then FBI Director Freeh and the media).

Unchaining the Anchor

Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to "unchain the anchor."  In the cases above, all were eventually refuted when new facts surfaced.

• Duke Lacrosse - the DA Nifong hid exculpatory DNA evidence
• Exxon Valdez - the NTSB found it was faulty navigation equipment
• Bush - the Thornburg Commission confirmed CBS was overzealous 
• Jewell - Eric Robert Rudolph was the bomber

And so, it will be the same in the Sandusky case and the alleged cover-up by PSU officials.  

New evidence will surface that will prove that the entire narrative of a PSU cover-up was false.  Whether that comes from information surfacing from AG Kane's investigation or other sources remains to be seen.

But it's coming. 

And that's not a rumor.