"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."- Warren Buffet
"The purest treasure mortal times afford, is spotless reputation; that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay." – William Shakespeare
If the Penn State football scandal has taught us anything, it is that one’s reputation, no matter how illustrious, can be shattered completely. The first of the two quotes by Warren Buffet shows to us that even though Joe Paterno’s built up a literal lifetime enjoying a reputation, it all came down with one single bad decision. The second quote by Shakespeare shows how polarized one’s reputation can be. In a sense, there is no middle ground. One is either a saint or a demon. When it comes to this scandal, the one entity that was able to change such a lauded person’s reputation so quickly and so violently opposite was the emergence of social media. From following the news and various social media resources, I have come up with three main themes from this story. 1. This time, public opinion won. 2. The media was able to rise above the trivial issue of sport and focused on more important things. 3. Even with the many media sources available to us today, there is still very much a veil of secrecy regarding top college athletics.
Public opinion is an important thing but many believed that it might not matter in this circumstance because of the great reputation and tradition that Paterno held at Penn State. All, of course, believed that Sandusky was an evil person and deserved immediate and harsh punishment but I do not think, at first, that this situation would lead to a full blown crisis leading to the dismissal of many of the university’s top officials including Paterno. The reason that public opinion won though was because it was so accessible to all. It not as though Penn State assumed that America demanded something done…they knew what America wanted thanks to social media (primarily Twitter). Of course there were other media sources, but I was personally amazed to see how fast news spread via tweets. Furthermore, the fate of Mike McQueary was almost entirely decided by social media. He started off as a valiant whistle-blower, but once people started to question how as a human being, he could remain silent, his reputation was destroyed along with the others. This was not like the OJ Simpson trial where everyone knew he was guilty but the verdict was otherwise. Everyone knew who was guilty and the decision makers in charge of the situation took public opinion into account.
What amazed me the most was how all media sources resisted to talk about sports in this story, but rather the victims and the horrible nature of the crimes. Not only was the majority of sports media coverage about the incident, but there was a running theme which was basically that there are more important things here than sport and we should focus on those. Listening to the radio, watching ESPN or time spent on Twitter proved to me that people simply did not care about Penn State FOOTBALL, but rather those involved the scandal. In fact, I did not see or hear even one story about the upcoming game Penn State had against Nebraska until the Friday before.
I am interested to see how this story will develop further. I cannot believe that we have heard it all. Even with all of the shocking details mentioned in the 23 page Grand Jury Report (http://www.myfoxla.com/dpp/news/national/penn-state-sex-scandal-sandusky-grand-jury-report-20111108) there has to be so much more untold…especially with McQueary’s story. Either he or Paterno is telling a lie but we will have to see who is closer to the truth. I use the term ‘closer to the truth’ because a massive scandal such as this could not have gone on for 9 years + without a massive conspiracy involving so many. Unfortunately, what it has turned into now, is a massive case of CYA (‘Cover your ass’) with all of those who might be involved. The fact that so many people must have covered up such a heinous crime is almost impossible to imagine. How did so many people choose to do the wrong thing? And finally, the truly sad thing is that the report describes 8 victims, but the actual number must have been much higher. All in all, college athletics in general operates in a culture of secrecy and misinformation.
To wrap this post up, I would just reiterate the importance of social media. It was because of outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, that the public was informed of the crimes in such detail. As future sport managers, we need to consider the firestorm that social media can create. It teaches us to protect our organizations and ourselves because social media can so drastically and completely sway public opinion. Penn State students may have rioted in person but the virtual riot across social media was much more substantial and influential.
--Justin Luthey
Kin 577
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