Vakkotaur

* Make your own Penn State/State Pen joke. *

As those who know me know, I am not a sports fan and tend to think of anyone involved with such as more likely of being guilty of something than the averages of probability would indicate. Note that I am not defending what happened. I am explaining how I think the failure mode worked.

Joe Paterno was, from what I can tell, the guy that all the stuff about "good sportsmanship" was about. He didn't jump to the NFL when offered the chance. He didn't use illegal or even questionable recruiting gimmicks. He followed up on the academics of his players. Oh, and he also managed to build teams that tended to win without having used various shady practices. Sounds like a great guy, right? Overall he likely he is. But he made a couple errors, very critical errors, and they really reduce to one.

One error was that when he found out about the abuse (as I understand it, he did not witness it himself, but was told of it) he went to campus authorities rather than the real police. The other was that he didn't follow up on that, as he did with his players, and make sure that those authorities were really doing their jobs and acting on that information rather than ignoring or suppressing it. Those are really one error: He trusted University authorities to act as adults and do their jobs. For all I know, there might have been a mild followup that was met with, "We're still looking into it, don't worry about it." or such. It would not surprise me if something on the order happened - but that is mere speculation on my part.

But money and prestige were involved, and that's when adults are most likely to play childish (not childlike) games and ignore or suppress things they do not wish to deal with. The price is that now there is a Big Scandal of things going on for some time, involving multiple people, rather than a much smaller scandal that Got Fixed. People keep forgetting or missing a lesson of Watergate (besides "Don't do illegal things"...) which is that a coverup makes things worse[1]. But the big lesson that should be taken away from all this? Do not trust an organization to properly investigate itself. To get results, you must go outside the organization that needs investigation. Sadly, I do not expect this to change and in a while another scandal that could have been averted or corrected sooner will blow up.

Fox goofed and put a D behind Foley's name. That has gotten posted and re-posted all over LJ. It reminded me of something. Back in May there was a similar goof regarding Congressman William Jefferson:

Top law enforcement officials at the Justice Department and the FBI indicated to their counterparts at the White House that they could not, and were unwilling to, return documents to the Louisiana Republican which were seized as part of a bribery investigation. -- CBS News

The goof was that Congressman Jefferson was a Democrat, not a Republican. Chances are most folks didn't hear about this. I certainly didn't notice it posted all over LJ.

This does not excuse Fox. Nor CBS, for that matter. Such a flub should not happen, but the real world has flubs. While I find that Fox news can be irritating (Come on, a show called Special Report? When it's always special, it's never special.) I figure this was a "just" a screw up.

"But they did it three times!" And how many times is the text keyed in? Once, I expect. Then you just call it up again later instead of re-keying every time. There's plenty going on in the studio that details, and one letter while an important detail is a detail, can get left behind. There are tapes to cue up, other text to key in and call up, commercials to be ready for, and the like. It's actually pretty amazing that things don't go wrong more often. And really, they do, but few get much notice.

"Anyone who'd paying any attention to the news, even the show itself, should have gotten that right!" Yes, they should have. But you know what? You tend to tune out the show so you can do the job. You can't make the show happen and watch it intently at the same time. And whose to say that whoever was doing the job last night was even interested in the story? It could have been someone not very interested who used a rule of thumb that failed in this case. "Republican scandals are about power or money; Democrat scandals are about sex or drugs." It's not perfect, but it's the way to bet.

Yeah, someone at Fox screwed up. Someone at CBS screwed up. If I am expected to believe that Fox takes marching orders from the RNC, should I not likewise believe that CBS takes marching orders from the DNC? Or I could just believe the more believable: people make mistakes.