The view from a Penn State sports journalism professor

[pullout_quote credit="Malcolm Moran, Penn State sports journalism professor" align="left"]"There's just been this overwhelming sadness, primarily circling back to people we can't see, the people who were most affected by this.[/pullout_quote]

Jerry Sandusky was arrested and jailed on Wednesday. And things got churned up for the umpteenth time within the last month at Penn State University and across the nation.

Malcolm Moran was a sportswriter for many years. If he wrote about it, chances were pretty good that it meant something to people. Moran has worked for the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and USA Today, among other publications. For a bio on his career and accomplishments, click here.

Six years ago, Moran left that industry to become the Knight Chair of in Sports Journalism and Society at Penn State, and director of the university's John Curley Center for Sports Journalism. While in Indianapolis for the Big Ten football championship last Friday, he generously gave me a half-hour of his time to discuss what he had observed and felt that last month as a member of Penn State's faculty. Here are some of his comments:

"From Saturday the (November) 5th to the Nebraska game on the 12th, it was as if there was this searing heat throughout the place."

"In many cases, students that had been looking forward to being there their whole lives are seeing the foundation of this place crumbling all around them. I had one student in my class who said she was born in the local hospital, and the first thing that happened in her life is she was wrapped in this blue-and-white blanket. She was literally a Penn Stater from birth. To be there observing this thing happening, and institutions that people had believed in for years all of a sudden were under siege and the allegations that were beyond horrific ... It was just one blur the whole week."

"For me, the scariest moment was (the) Wednesday night (when Penn State's Board of Trustees fired school president Graham Spanier and football coach Joe Paterno). ... I was scared for students that I knew that were likely to be covering the riot. ... As soon as I saw the TV truck turned over, now I'm thinking about bottles to the head, rocks to the eye ... I started sending out mass e-mails reminding students that police had established a dispersal order so if you were covering this event, you have to be mindful of the instructions of law-enforcement and you've got to be safe. ... You just felt so helpless."

"The odd thing is, I teach a news media ethics class in the spring, and for the last four or five years I would talk about the Duke lacrosse scenario, which was 5 1/2 years ago. I would describe things that happened on that campus that were told to me by friends that worked there, and I would tell the students 'Imagine what it would be like here to have every network and multiple cable outlets having people doing their stand-ups in front of Old Main morning after morning after morning, satellite trucks everywhere you looked, and try to imagine what that would feel like.'  Well, I don't have to say that now because that's what it's been like."

"The way one student described it to me, he was trying to wrap his arms around the concept of wrapping his arms around it. That's how far-removed he was from what was happening. This is a very sharp senior who is going to be very successful as a photographer."

"It was just hard to process this because it was sensory overload. Everywhere you looked. You turned on NPR, it would be the first story on the national news, then it would obviously dominate the local news. Then you turned on any network, any news outfit, it was everywhere you looked. You couldn't escape it."

"Between the riot, which was that Wednesday night, and the candlelight vigil, which was Friday night, students started expressing to me either in e-mails or conversations that there was this overwhelming conflict between their journalism instincts telling them to push, push, push, fight through fatigue and all that, and that they were Penn Staters. I had some students tell me that they felt as if their work was contributing to the demise of this place that they cared about. So we had a town hall meeting for the students from the Center for Sports Journalism which was the week of the 14th. We had about 75 students just describing that conflict and how hard it was to deal with it, describing the fact their student peers -- not all of them, but a vocal minority -- had decided the media was this evil thing that was to blame for all of this. And here they are, doing this work. So they had become the target of their peers. That was something that they struggled with."

"We had a panel discussion last Tuesday night. It lasted about an hour-fifty, which is really long for those kinds of things. About two-thirds of the way into it, Jerry Micco, who is the AME (associate managing editor) for sports from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was talking about the victims and he stopped and paused for a moment. I was moderating the session. I thought he was just kind of taking a breath. He leaned forward and he just started weeping in this auditorium."

"There's just been this overwhelming sadness, primarily circling back to people we can't see, the people who were most affected by this. The idea that we really don't know how many they are. ... I don't know that we fully know the depth and the scope of this. There's the possibility that the more we know through the legal process that this could get a lot worse before it ever gets better. It's been really difficult."

"Students talked about how they would go home for break and they were traveling, they're in an airport, in a public place, and people would make remarks about (them wearing Penn State garb). Students have been dealing with that."

"What do you do if you're 20 years old and you're covering the story of your life. One friend of mine said 'I've been doing this 40 years and I've never seen anything like this.' "

"It's hard to imagine how long it's going to take. One of the people we had on the panel discussion on the 29th was Sara Ganim, the writer from Harrisburg (the Patriot-News) who was right out front on this from the original grand jury story back in March. I asked her how long she envisioned this playing out. She said 'Twenty-five years.'  What if she's wrong by one-third? We're still talking about a decade-and-a-half or more. I think we're just beginning to get to the depth of this."

"There isn't an emotion that you would omit. The stages that people describe in the grieving process -- that's really what it's been like. It's been this ongoing communal grieving process."

"It can't be the same. But what does that mean? What is it going to feel like? ... The most special part of that whole thing is because of what it felt like. It wasn't -- at least we didn't think -- a football factory. The premise was football was this vehicle to accomplish all these other things. Because it's such a remote place ... one of the things I came to appreciate from living there is realizing how many events that are completely divorced from football are organized around the game so that they take advantage of all these people who find their way there six or seven times a fall. That's how the place became what it became."

"People that have been on the faculty much longer than me have been telling me tell me why being part of that academic consortium (by joining the Big Ten) made the place a far-greater academic institution. It used football to become a better place. Now in hindsight, I think a lot of people are realizing that maybe that reality blinded us to how big football was becoming. ... We didn't realize how big it was becoming, maybe because it seemed to be this noble enterprise with an English major from an Ivy League institution (Joe Paterno) that only went there because he was going to save some money to become a lawyer, and decided to stick around a while."

"I think now people are starting to question the whole enterprise."