Sports Journalism in the Age of Paterno

Over 60 years, sports journalists transformed college football coach Joe Paterno into an American hero. But the hero became a villain at the end of his life when the world discovered he likely knew his former assistant had sexually assaulted children and remained at-large. Exposed as enablers, sports journalists found themselves forced to reconcile their profession’s behavior— industrial practices that led many to abandon basic journalistic tenets in favor of redundant, hero-making tendencies. This book, the first cradle-to-grave examination of Joe Paterno’s mediated life and the professional habits of the people who covered him, asks the question of whether sports journalism is journalism at all. From uncovering Paterno’s earliest coverage in the 1940s to the digital online firestorm that engulfed him during the 2011 scandal, this book brings together archival research and original interviews to interrogate an industry that spent decades assembling a Frankenstein’s Monster.