Monday, November 7

5 Years On - Can We Influence the Media to Finally Get This Right?

SORRY - I FORGOT THIS WAS SCHEDULED - IT WAS AN IDEA FROM A FEW WEEKS AGO PRIOR TO THE McQueary Verdict   - this was an idea in progress that was not positively affected by the McQueary trial and verdict as I had hoped.  

Something else needs to be done to mark the 5 year anniversary - so my apologies to everyone -  

5 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEFAMATION OF JOE PATERNO & PSU

Five years of SMSS posting on this travesty - Time to Call for Action 

Media Naivety, Complicity, and Stupidity.  

Please revisit this post: ANATOMY OF A MEDIA FRENZY  from Jan. 7, 2011

Saving those links to all those media accounts - that frenzy of condemnation by an almost unanimous media that rushed to condemn Joe Paterno and PSU for enabling the continued crimes of Jerry Sandusky based on the Victim 2 portion of Attorney General Linda Kelly's Presentment could now come in handy. 

Those are the people complicit in the crime of defamation who should forever be tarnished with their feckless irresponsible journalism. Did they not know what a Presentment is? 

A Presentment is supposed to be an accurate synopsis of Grand Jury testimony given under oath but without the benefit of cross-examination, without the introduction of exculpatory evidence, without providing full quotes in context by the witness, and without the presence of counsel outside the Office of the Attorney General. 

The Presentment is typically the case against the defendant stated in the most damning terms alleging the "facts" in the case as seen by the prosecution alone. 

Yet the media treated this Presentment as unassailable FACT and used it to condemn Joe Paterno as the man who heard about a 10-year-old boy being raped by a Penn State Coach from Mike McQueary and chose only to report this to Athletic Director Tim Curley. 

THIS IS WHAT WE KNOW FOR CERTAIN: 

The Victim 2 Presentment by AG Linda Kelly was a BALD FACED LIE. In short this:
(McQueary) saw a naked boy, victim 2, whose age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky. ....(McQueary) reported what he had seen to Joe Paterno.
was a complete misrepresentation of the testimony before the Grand Jury.
We know this for certain because McQueary says it was: 

McQueary wrote the OAG telling them he was never certain of  "intercourse" He never saw "penetration" and he certainly never told Joe Paterno that. 

THAT ALONE SHOULD MERIT MEDIA RETRACTIONS.

We also know that the jury in the Jerry Sandusky Trial returned very few "NOT GUILTY" verdicts on Sandusky. One of those few NOT GUILTY verdicts was Victim 2  Involuntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse. 

So the person who's testimony is the basis for the Presentment by Linda Kelly told her office that the presentment was wrong - a lie - and the jury that heard testimony on that charge ruled NOT GUILTY.

WHERE IS THE MEDIA RETRACTION? 

Many in the Media said - 85-year-old Joe Paterno admitted his culpability when he said: "I wish I had done more". That is also a misrepresentation. Joe Paterno said, "With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more."  

Well don't we all? All of us have said at one time we wish we could have foreseen a future where an event in our past came close to offering a chance to do something that may have avoided a consequence we could not see at the time.  

Of course, anyone who has followed the Second Mile Sandusky Scandal on this website knows far more about this fake media produced disaster known as "The Penn State Child Abuse Scandal". But for the moment could we focus on this simple set of FACTS. 

UNTIL I'VE HAD TIME TO REASSESS THIS IDEA IN THE WAKE OF THE McQUEARY VERDICT I AM WITHDRAWING THE ACTIONS IDEA FOR NOW - MY APOLOGIES - I WAS NOT PAYING ATTENTION -- MEA CULPA 

11 comments:

  1. Barry,

    While I agree that the media got the narrative wrong from the start and the presentment was the culprit, the constant drumbeat of false reporting and other factors have made your desire to swing these reporters a near impossibility. Regardless of accuracy they will point to the Freeh Report, the money paid to alleged victims, the Testimony in the PSU insurance suit, the Cleary Act fines. These people are so deeply invested in the false narrative. The puzzle is way too complex for their quick click gone media ways that they won't do what's right.

    Until the Curley, Shultz and Spanier cases are heard there will be no movement in the eyes of the media. And even after it will be an uphill climb.

    That reality sucks.

    D.

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  2. They only report what sells truth or fiction! To take someone like JoePa and sell him down the river is the way to make headlines. Most of the writers have know idea what the real Joe Paterno is really like and could care less. Even the reporters on ESPN, who I thought would have a better idea of what he is like, stroke out. Many of his past players, not all, know exactly what he was like and know the whole story was just a way to take down Penn State. The Freeh Report was useless but the few on the Board had their own agenta and did all they could to try and take down Penn State without a though evaluation of the story. Now they are all trying to hide from the truth and have nothing to say. Hidden agendas, really? Is that the way Penn State is to be run, by hiding behind closed doors? Who has appointed these losers? Penn State is a great University and always will be, even these LEADERS continue to make up reason to hide in their own little closet!!!

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  3. "The media" in America today is engaging in a groupthink mentality that reflects the death of individualism in reporting. Dark money that we have all read about, Koch, Rothschild, Rove etc., is buying out the individual in MSM and forcing a collective false narrative that serves a warped ideology. In a sense, it is a war on democracy. But more specifically, it's a war on intellectualism. And our once-trusted MSM and the corrupt dark money groups funding them, are fighting intellectualism by attempting to label it pejoratively as "liberalism". Intellectualism or progressive thinking rooted in academia, is the ultimate enemy of corruption. People that are thinkers now know we can no longer just accept headlines as a reflection of the truth. Our headlines are now falsehoods designed to hide the corruption that has become our government and MSM.

    As I've said before, these false stories such as the UVA gang rape lie and the PSU shower rape lie and any number of other university sports/sex scandals are all being created to influence our perception of so-called secular education. The separation of church and state allows for free thinking in academia that isn't confined by a specific religious belief system.

    So the ultimate goal in all this corruption is to combine church and state. This will take away so-called secular education and limit our thought processes. If we are given just simple black and white scenarios (Islam bad, Christian good) we don't look for corruption within the Christian façade. I won't go into it any further, but it starts at the top with the state-sponsored terror of 9/11. Our MSM is hopelessly compromised since then and it is now obliged to continue on with more lies that demonize our universities and our good leaders within them.

    Obama is a creation of this corrupt dark government corruption. He is the "quasi-Muslim", the "reckless liberal", he's "indifferent to Christianity", "soft on immigration", "won't acknowledge terror as Islamic", "doesn't support or respect our men and women in the armed forces", etc, etc. He's playing a part supported and presented to us by MSM. And now we're supposed to find relief in Hillary or Trump? These two serve the same puppet masters that Obama serves.

    We need to just start thinking again and see the falseness that is our government and THEIR MSM.

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  4. While I like the idea of hammering the media outlets, I suspect they'll just say it's coming from a small group of football nuts or Paterno apologists. Unfortunately, unless someone comes along like a Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal, who helped break open the Amirault and McMartin preschool cases, the truth in the Second Mile case will never be known.

    Short of all the really big bucks Penn State donors withholding their donations until the University does a full fledged, real investigation of the Second Mile case, I think the truth will never be known.

    I love what Ray and you are doing here and follow closely but am not convinced anyone in a well known media entity will ever take this case on.

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    1. Yes, someone like Rabinowitz would be ideal. Her writing about the travails of the Amirault family was extensive and courageous. Courage is needed by anyone who takes on the injustice done to PSU and Paterno. A writer up to to the task may be an independent author who has written books about miscarriages of justice related to child abuse, in particular the feverish mindset that overtakes prosecutors (actual and self-appointed) of the suspects. Before she wrote about the Amirault case for the WSJ, she wrote an article about the Kelly Michaels case (Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, NJ) that was published by Harper's in 1990 and led to her job at the WSJ. Consider this passage from the 1990 article:

      "Our society, at the moment, is quick to condemn anybody and everybody charged, on the flimsiest of evidence, with the crimes of abusing or molesting children. In the interest of a higher virtue (i.e., protecting the children), a credulous public and a sensationalist press stand willing to cast aside whatever civil liberties or constitutional rights obstruct the judgment of heaven."

      The "moment" has been a long one. Some 25 years later, the sensationalist press and a credulous public rose again to do heaven's work and smite Paterno, Curley, Schultz, Spanier, and PSU on the flimsiest of evidence.

      Rabinowitz is too old to take on the scapegoating of Paterno et alia and PSU in the Sandusky Scandal, but I believe there are authors like her out there. For instance, one of the books I'm reading now is "We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s" by Richard Beck (PublicAffairs, 2015). It focuses on the McMartin case (about which Rabinowitz never wrote, except in passing, to the best of my knowledge), and he says it took him about 4 years to complete. A similar book about the misdirection of attention toward PSU in the Sandusky case would take at least as long. So it's not too soon to seek out an able and ambitious author.

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  5. I agree with D. Pressive. There is no point in raining emails upon sports scribblers who, back in 2011, demonstrated why they are mere sports scribblers (lack of curiosity, gullibility, laziness, timidity, general incompetence). At this point, they don't care and they are too proud to apologize. They won't even open the emails, let only read them and click on the links. That's because they already know the truth -- they printed it in 2011. After all, if you can't trust a former FBI director...

    I suspect many of them were delighted to participate in the toppling of Paterno and PSU. Since then, they have been happy to wallow in their self-righteousness and to have reinforced the (uninformed) opinion of their readers that Paterno and PSU both were too good to be true, when it came to the football program.

    A more fruitful approach may be to identify a couple of actual reporters, whether on the sports beat or elsewhere, and see if they'd be receptive to learning the intricacies of the whole sad saga, using the information available on this website. This could be someone who wrote an intelligent article about the Duke lacrosse team fiasco or the allegations of gang rape at the University of Virginia that led to so much embarrassment for Rolling Stone. In each of these cases, lots of people were absolutely certain that students at Duke and Virginia were guilty of heinous crimes. In the end, lots of people were absolutely wrong. The case of the Central Park Five also could yield a reporter with a brain and an open mind (for example, someone who doesn't regard Freeh as a minor god and who can entertain the notion that some members of a board of trustees may not act in the best interests of the institution they supposedly serve). As D. Pressive said, there is no point in trying to get something in print until the CSS cases are heard, but now would be a good time for some smart (and courageous) writer to grapple with the complexities of the mess. Doing justice to the topic would require a lengthy magazine article or even a book, and hence a substantial investment of time and energy.

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  6. I doubt the lies and distortions by the media will change.

    The Clery Act fine headlines continue the lies when many of them said that Penn State was fined $2.4 million because of Sandusky. In truth, only one violation $27,500 was related to the Sandusky case.

    When reader comments pointed out such inaccurate online headlines, some actually were changed. Most were not.

    Among the inaccurate Clery headlines are the following:

    "Penn State Fined $2.4 Million Over Handling of Sandusky Case" (Wall Street Journal)

    "Feds seek record $2.4 million fine against Penn State in Sandusky scandal" (Washington Post)

    "Penn State fined record $2.4 million for handling of Sandusky abuse claims" (Christian Science Monitor)

    "Penn State fined record $2.4M for handling of Jerry Sandusky case" (ESPN)

    "Penn State fined $2.4 million for its response to Jerry Sandusky case" (USA Today)

    "Penn State faces $2.4M fine for violations related to Sandusky case" (UPI.com)

    "Penn State Fined Record $2.4 Million Over Sandusky Case" (Huffington Post)

    "Education Department fines Penn State $2.4M for Sandusky cover-up" (Politico)

    "Penn State facing record $2.4 million fine from US Department of Education after investigation into Sandusky complaints" (Daily Collegian)

    "Penn State faces $2.4M fine for violating federal law in Jerry Sandusky case" (PennLive)

    "Penn State faces $2.4 million fine for mishandling Sandusky abuse case" (Wilkes Barre Times-Leader)

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  7. The judge (Gavin) in MM's case screwed the pooch big time, in fact enough to get removed from the bench. He totally prejudiced the jury. He disallowed "outside" evidence such as the clip of ex governor Corbett calling MM a "moral failure" on national TV, the ESPN magazine article on MM's illegal gambling problems, and evidence of MM's sexting. He also gave the jury instructions that were legally incorrect. I see Gavin being excoriated by the appeals court.

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  8. I agree about Judge Gavin prejudicing the jury with wrong instructions. Telling the jury that Curley and Schultz exercising their 5th amendment rights could be taken as a negative against the defendant was totally improper because Curley and Schultz were not the defendants.

    The Centre County Court website has the appeals motion and some of the trial transcripts online. Not all of them worked for me so I don't know if the transcript with jury instructions is available.

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  9. Barry,
    The 2016 election shows us again why the media cannot be trusted to report the FACTS rather than their preferred narrative.

    Advocacy journalism is the rule -- not the exception anymore.

    Fortunately, Donald Trump -- not the media -- may be our best hope at getting to the truth.

    Developing....

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    1. Ray, How can Donald Trump be our best hope at getting at the truth of any sort? Don't get me wrong, Hillary is just as bad of an actor as Trump. They are both dirty elitists that know nothing of the real life struggles of average Americans. Do you really think that an oligarch like Trump would undermine himself by giving us the truth? Trump IS the media.

      The media has been grooming us for Trump for over 30 years. They gave him heavy coverage during the 9-11 attacks for some reason. And his best buddy Giuliani was made out to be "America's Mayor". They're both partners in that crime and our "trusted media" made them both out to be hero figures. Trump has been used by the media as a cheesy guest actor in the WWF. And not to mention his bad acting on The Apprentice. We think we know who he is because the media has been systematically packaging him for us for decades. And we've been fooled again, he's now the president.

      Hillary and Trump have gotten where they are by NOT telling the truth. Because the truth would give us a peaceful country and a peaceful world. But in America's dysfunctional capitalism there is no money in peace and diplomacy.

      It's very sad to think that most Americans still have hopes for two soulless media products like Hillary and Trump to give us peace and prosperity through the truth. The truth would shatter their media-created image and expose them as oligarchs that protect the interests of the global elite while short-changing us.

      If we are honest with ourselves, we all know someone that is genuine and far more intelligent than the "only two choices" the media and our oligarchy limits us to for the presidential election. Let's face it, the average college sociology or philosophy professor would make a far better president than any television president we've been given thus far.

      The media is not our American reality. Their presidential candidates are only corrupt players that have agreed not to expose the grand lie of how most of America has been severely misled and cheated since the murder of JFK on our national television. The murder was an unspoken message to us all: Don't be too idealistic and hopeful for America. And above all, don't speak the truth.

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