Sorry Joe, but this isn’t about you.
It took a full week until I actually became aware of what happened at Penn State University. If you’ve somehow miraculously stumbled upon this obscure corner of the internet without coming across mention of the scandal – and I’m pretty sure that’s just not possible – here’s a brief summary: a former defensive coordinator for the school’s football team – a guy who had run an organization designed to help ‘at-risk’ kids – used his position and unimpeachable clout to allegedly rape a number of children inside the sacred Penn State institution. When someone witnessed an incident involving this guy – defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky – and a child in the shower, it was brought to the attention of school personnel, including legendary coach Joe Paterno, who passed on that information to school administrators. And it was left at that. For years. That’s the story.
But not unlike what happened when the Pat Tillman story broke, I became immediately disinterested with the Penn State scandal as it instantly permeated into every form of media. I turned on a television and I’d see stock footage of Joe Paterno getting carried off the field with ‘Breaking News’ and a Penn State Scandal logo already created at the bottom of the screen. Open a newspaper and you’re forced to see players holding hands on the football field, supposedly trying to cope with the shocking news and heal the nation by playing a game. Scan through any website on the internet and the story was front and centre.
In some freakish, 21st Century, extra-sensory, adaptive way, when I see that a story becomes that widespread, my tolerance for all that noise ceases.
It’s the ubiquity of the story that completely turns me off. You can’t escape it. And because I’ve been sucked into so many stories and scandals this way – where the issue at hand is blown up, discussed, moralised, over-analyzed and turned around to the point where columnists start taking ridiculous, impossible stances on the story just so they stand out as original – I just try to remain ignorant.
What I’m trying to say is that there are way too many people out there in the media who do nothing more than distract people from what the real issues are. (This likely isn’t news to anybody.)
But after taking a long plane ride – and reading about a few of the grotesque sexual abuses that allegedly took place at Penn State – I began to sift through a few stories from semi-reputable sites to get a bit more background on what had happened. To no surprise, I was saddened to see that much of the attention was being focused on the 84-year-old Paterno – the winningest coach in college football history – and how his reaction to his former underlings actions will taint his legacy. Red-faced panelists argued that the iconic Paterno was being treated unfairly, especially after he was fired. On another site, a similarly red-faced panelist would state the complete opposite.
The story was no longer the story.
This isn’t my point. (Charles Pierce does a far better job than I ever could in getting to the heart of what this is all about here. Quick summary: this Penn State story is about a sick man abusing children and an institution, which saw itself as too important and sacred, covering it up. That’s it.)
All this reminded me of the Pat Tillman story.
I just recently saw a documentary on what happened to Pat Tillman’s legacy after he died. Tillman, if you’ve forgotten about that media maelstrom, was an NFL player who walked away from his multi-million dollar contract to serve his country. He wound up being killed in Afghanistan, but because the U.S. military knew how wonderful Tillman’s story would be for recruitment purposes – with a good-looking and athletic young man, walking away from fame and fortune to serve his country – officials made up a false scenario for his death and then they continued to run with an even falser version of ‘Tillman the man,’ which they disseminated en masse.
The military initially said Tillman was killed in enemy combat when, in reality, he was shot three times in the head by an American soldier in an embarrassing friendly fire incident. The media were all too eager to go with that story and paint Tillman as a hero, so lies about his life and his reasons for joining the military were spread to the point where his family got tired of their son being used as a martyr that they fought back and eventually found out how Tillman actually died.
But since Tillman’s mug and that military propaganda was everywhere, I made the decision to completely stay away from it. In short, I detected bullshit. And it wasn’t until I saw that documentary that I knew what had really happened. And it validated my position with regard to these types of frantically hyper-reported mega-stories.
I consciously avoided the Tillman story online, on TV and in print because I didn’t like how much attention it was getting and, with so many broadcasters, scribes and bleeding-hearts getting so worked up about Tillman, there was no way anyone could ever really know what the real story was at that time.
It’s something I think about a lot these days. There are too many outlets, too many information sources, too many people being paid way too much to say absolutely nothing. In the rush to gain viewership, readership and hits, pundits are jumping the gun to conclusions far too quickly, meaning their followers are making up their minds way before all the facts are known.
I’m glad I know the full story on Tillman, without having been biased or brainwashed too early. I’m pleased to state my belief that football and legacies are secondary and that the well-being of the kids abused by Sandusky should be foremost on people’s minds.
And if that means being temporarily ignorant of the new can’t-stop-talking-about story until the media storm passes, then I have no problems with that.
Sophisticated Pulp 