Reading through former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s deep report into the culture and decision-making at Penn State that allowed former football coach Jerry Sandusky to go unpunished for so long, I was struck by the way the report was framed. “The most saddening finding by the Special Investigative Counsel,” the report says, “is the total and consistent disregard by the most sernior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims.” There’s no question that compliance with the law and with Penn State regulations were major issues in Sandusky’s case, but there’s something powerful about framing the problem in terms of empathy. There’s an extent to which empathy requires more, both emotionally and morally, than mere compliance. And throughout the report, there are small details that illustrate how empathy flowed up the hierarchy at Penn State, while it was consistently denied to people who were less powerful.

When Joe Paterno, Sandusky’s superior and mentor, was fired from his position as Penn State’s head football coach, there were major protests at Penn State on the grounds that Paterno, a Penn State legend, had been treated callously and unfairly. So it’s interesting to see little incidencies of Paterno’s own lack of empathy in the report. When Mike McQueary, who witnessed Sandusky raping a child in the Penn State locker room, called Paterno to see if he could speak with him about what he’d seen, “McQueary recalled Paterno said he did not have a job for McQueary so ‘if that’s what it’s about, don’t bother coming over,’” an unpleasant little aside. In the timeline of Sandusky’s tenure at Penn State, the one item notes that “Paterno reports the incident to [then-Athletic Director Timothy] Curley and [then-Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary] Schultz on Sunday, February 11 as Paterno did not ‘want to interfere with their weekends.’”

Even though Sandusky was the subject of serious accusations, the report documents many cases where authorities appear invested less in determining his guilt or innocence than in his comfort. When John Seasock, a counselor who met with one of Sandusky’s victims, made his report, he suggested a conversation with Sandusky but noted that “The intent of the conversation with Mr. Sandusky is not to cast dispersion (sic) upon his actions but to help him stay out of such gray area situations in the future.” A detective, Ron Schreffler “recalled that the interview was conducted in an office in the Lasch Building so as not to put Sandusky on the defensive.” Curley, in an email discussing how to handle Sandusky, proposed a less aggressive approach because “I am having trouble with going to everyone, but the person involved…I would indicate we feel there is a problem and we want to assist the individual to get professional help.”
Read more

It’s sort of hard to believe that folks could have behaved even more poorly in the events surrounding the coverup of former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky’s alleged sexual abuse and assault of children he met through his Second Mile charity. But as his trial is underway, it appears my beliefs have been confounded: Pennsylvania’s attorney general is now suggesting that former Penn State vice president Gary Schultz kept a file on Sandusky, and that in emails between him and former Penn State president Graham Spanier suggest that university officials thought it would be more “humane” not to report Sandusky than to report him. The full report from a local CBS station is here:

There’s a debate to be had about whether it makes sense for universities to build enormous sports edifices in their midst and to become reliant on the revenue they provide. But if they’re going to make that decision, I think we can all agree that for those institutions to survive, university administrators need to distinguish between athletic programs and the people who run them. And while I want to see the full text of the emails, the idea that not reporting Sandusky would have been the “humane” thing seems grotesque in a way that would be almost impossible to justify even in context, and reflects a profound failure of judgement.

The idea that Sandusky deserved consideration more than the victims’ families deserved justice or that the community deserved a chance to have him go through a fair trial is humane only in a system that values the powerful over the powerless, or the few among the many. Even if your values are so distorted as to put concern for Sandusky before other considerations, wouldn’t the humane thing to do to be to separate him from his capacity to do harm to others, and if he’s mentally ill, to get him treated? Someone who concludes that not reporting Sandusky is the humane things to do seems to lack the moral credentials to effectively administer a large organization, particularly one tasked with preparing young people to become solid citizens. And making the decision not to report Sandusky reveals a bizarre lack of business sense: silence is not the same thing as containing rot.

After a swift decline in his health, former Penn State coach Joe Paterno passed away this morning at 85. I’ll be thinking of his family, but his death is a tragedy in that it cuts short what could have been a process of education and seeking forgiveness. If Paterno had lived, and had been lucid enough to come to terms with his abdication of responsibility; if he had sought forgiveness for it and worked to help other programs become safer, more responsible and responsive organizations, he could have made a contribution to coaching far beyond his work elevating the Nittany Lions into a nationally competitive program.

Maybe he would have done none of those things had he lived, out of denial or a lack of capability. But his death forecloses an opportunity, however slight, to make recompense, and to remind the students who still saw him as a deity that there are more important things than football.

I watched both Bob Costas’ interview with Jerry Sandusky on Rock Center and 20/20′s feature on Gabrielle Giffords last night. I imagine I’m not alone in doing that, and feeling stunned by the juxtaposition, but it’s worth pointing out the phenomenal journalism on display in both pieces last night.

I think there’s often a sense that toughness and an adversarial approach are signs of principled journalism, and Costas’ questions to Sandusky certainly illustrated why, in certain cases, that can be the only route to integrity. To hear Costas ask Sandusky about reports that he showered with a particular boy and conceded to his mother that his genitals may have touched the boy, and to hear Sandusky pause (as he did often), and say, “I can’t exactly recall what was said there. In terms of what I did say was that if he felt that way then I was wrong,” is immensely revealing, even if it doesn’t elicit specific information. Even if you’re Costas, even if you’re in a position of power, even if you’ve landed an interview that a sensible lawyer would have declined, even if your audience is sympathetic, it’s not exactly easy to ask someone if they’re a pedophile point-blank, but Costas did it. “You feel horrible,” Costas asked at one point. “Do you feel culpable?” “I’m not sure what you mean,” Sandusky told him. I imagine he’ll want to rehearse his answers better before he goes on trial.

By contrast, Diane Sawyer’s approach to Gabrielle Giffords was significantly gentler, listening patiently, helping her through answers and working with Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly, to help her make herself understood. As a piece of explanatory journalism, the segment was, for me at least, an extremely useful look at the therapy that can help someone recover from brain injury, and the extent of the uncertainty involved. But the show also made clear that even if Giffords’ is still intellectually capable and curious, her ability to communicate remains significantly compromised. Sawyer could have asked directly — and she did ask Kelly if, given the brutality of the attack, he was reluctant to see his wife run again — but she didn’t necessarily have to in order to get the point across:

Both approaches were perfect for their story, and both pieces were examples of the kind of thing that television journalism does best. We got to see Giffords rebuilding her body and her brain, and then the results of that work in front of us. And Jerry Sandusky was a ghost, a man who can’t bring himself to show his face even as he ventured out in an astonishingly ill-conceived attempt to defend his reputation.