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.
David Schwartz, PhD, is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, USA. He is the author of Modern Sports Around the World: History, Geography, and Sociology (2021), of numerous journal articles on the production of journalism, and more than 2000 journalistic articles. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Huffington Post, The Sporting News magazine, Arizona Republic, Street & Smith Sports, and other publications. A journal article he co-authored in 2016 that focused on fake news and parody has been cited more than 200 times. His teaching focuses on multimedia journalism and mass communication, specifically written and digital skills courses, communication law, and strategic communication.
