Calling it a riot may be premature, but the events taking place in College Station State College Wednesday night following Joe Paterno’s ouster as Penn State head coach are happening largely in the dark, thanks to some serious news misjudgements by the “worldwide leader in sports,” ESPN.
Though ESPN apparently has a reporter live in the area, for several hours following the Paterno firing ESPN had no video or even still pictures from the scenes of the controversy — the massing crowds of students on College Avenue, or a smaller crowd outside Paterno’s house.
Conversely, on the ground Twitter reports were breaking news left and right, with CBS columnist Gregg Doyal using his @greggdoyelcbs to be among the first to report news trucks being overturned. And the school paper’s blog, @psufootblog, was the first outlet we saw to report Paterno’s brief public statements to the crowd outside his house. Other tweeters posted pictures of the crowd and of the overturned trucks, at least an hour before ESPN got any still images on TV.
ESPN recovered a bit later on, with some taped interviews by reporter Tom Farrey, including one with a brave student who said, on tape, that he supported the decision and that Joe Pa had to go. There was also an interview with another student who seemed a bit possessed with anger; but throughout the crisis, ESPN’s live cameras were nowhere to be found.
ESPN’s Poynter Review team issued a report Wednesday night saying the network missed the boat when the Paterno story broke. It appears that ESPN continued to be unready for more news at Penn State like Wednesday’s firing, which was predicted by many other media types. We’ll leave it to Jason Whitlock to deliver the coda on ESPN’s coverage:
And it looks like CBS Sports was on the scene with more material (HT to Bleacher Report for the heads up)
UPDATE: Here’s the Daily Collegian video from outside Paterno’s house:
