I know it is difficult keeping up with all the sports child molestation stories. This isn’t the Penn State football program scandal, where university officials carefully looked the other way while football coaching legend Jerry Sandusky apparently was using the campus to trap and abuse kids. This isn’t the Bill Conlin scandal, in which the sports writer just accorded the highest honor from his peers has also been accused of sexually molesting children. The topic is the Syracuse University basketball scandal, where once again an alleged molester was allowed to escape detection and prosecution for years, this time because of a perverted concept of journalistic ethics.

In 2002, ESPN and the Syracuse Post-Standard were given an audiotape on which the wife of Bernie Fine, the Syracuse University assistant basketball coach now accused of serial sex abuse, told one of the alleged victims of molestation that she knew “everything that went on” with her husband’s crimes. Both the paper and the network decided not to run stories based on the tape and the victim’s claims, and never sent it to law enforcement authorities.

They kept the tape in the files, until the step-brother of Bobby Davis, the former ball boy who made the initial recording, came forward to accuse Fine of molesting him, too. Then the tape was released, and Syracuse University fired Fine the day it aired.

The question: why didn’t the Post-Standard or ESPN give the tape to the police? How many children were molested because they didn’t?

The ball boy, who was 30 in 2002, had told police that he had been repeatedly molested by Fine when he was 11-years-old. The police told him that the statute of limitations had run, and that Fine couldn’t be prosecuted. To make sure that Fine’s crimes and proclivities were revealed, Davis made the recording of his conversation with Mrs. Fine, and then gave it to the paper and the sports network. The tape’s contents are certainly provocative.

Davis asked Fine’s wife what she knew about her husband’s abuse of children, and if he was the only victim.  She responded, “No, I think there might have been others, but it was geared to … there was something about you…If it was another girl like I told you, it would be easy to step in because you know what you’re up against … it’s another guy, you can’t compete with that. It’s just wrong, and you were just a kid. You’re a man now, but you were a kid then…You know, he needs … that male companionship that I can’t give him, nor is he interested in me, and vice versa.”

ESPN, the Post-Standard and their defenders in the journalism world argue that keeping the tapes was the ethical choice:

• Post-Standard Executive Editor Michael J. Connor:  “To us, handing over to police materials we didn’t feel confident enough to publish was unimaginable. Look at it another way. When police or the district attorney gather evidence and decide they don’t have enough to charge someone with a crime, do they deliver their evidence to us and say, ‘Here you go, we don’t have enough to prosecute but you might get a heckuva story out of this?’ Of course not. We have separate and independent purposes, and are often locked in an unsteady dance around information that one has and the other wants.”

• Vince Doria, ESPN’s vice president and director of news: “It’s not necessarily the journalist’s role to go to the police with potential evidence that at the time we didn’t believe was strong enough to report ourselves.”
  

• Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review: “The journalist’s role in this case was to investigate and if they came up with solid evidence, to publish a story. It doesn’t make much sense to pass on something that you’re not certain of the strength of to law enforcement officials. It’s also important to remember that journalists, to function properly, need to be independent. They can’t be seen as an arm of the government or people no longer want to be passing information on to them.”

Allow me to retort:

Baloney.

If the journalists didn’t want to use the tapes for a story, that’s their prerogative. The argument, however, that information that (in a journalist’s judgment) doesn’t warrant a news story shouldn’t be passed on to the police even when it raises credible public safety issues is bereft of logic and responsibility. It is not the journalist’s job to assess the strength of information from a law enforcement perspective, any more than it is the job of police to tell editors what stories to write. Send the information to the professionals, and let them decide whether it warrants further investigation or not.

Rieder’s statement is the worst of the three, which is saying something. Passing credible information about an ongoing crime to the police is called good citizenship, not being “an arm of the government.” ESPN wouldn’t have been giving up a source’s identity in this situation, just passing along evidence that suggests that a college basketball coach may have been molesting children. This doesn’t compromise journalistic independence in any way….and it might have saved nearly nine years of children from being sexually abused. This should have been an easy call. Yet the two news media organizations that were faced with it got it horribly, tragically wrong.

The Poynter Institute’s Roy Clark, a journalism ethics specialist, said in connection to the episode, “Journalists don’t have any special exemption from generally accepted ethical and moral responsibilities.”

Give that man a cigar. Also ask him why he is so out of step with the rest of his colleagues. I’m curious now about how many ESPN reporters condemned Mike McQueary as a coward for not physically stopping Sandusky when McQueary caught him in the shower with a child, and which of them self-righteously attacked Paterno for not alerting police. The ethics blindness of many journalists is every bit as insidious as what occurred at Penn State, and it arises from the same warped priority: loyalty to an institution. In the case of journalists, the institution is the news media itself—Freedom of the Press, which imbues its practitioners with a sense of their own virtue and a determination that complete journalistic independence outweighs all else, even an innocent child’s welfare. Journalists are still American citizens and human beings, and their Constitutionally exalted profession doesn’t change their duties in those roles one bit.

If a journalist for a major news organization acquires information pointing to a “dirty bomb” attack on a major metropolitan area, but cannot confirm its details sufficiently to justify publishing a story, should the journalist alert federal authorities?

That’s an easy question. This one is harder: how many prominent journalists would not alert them, citing the same reasoning used to justify allowing a possible child predator to stay on the prowl?

The fact that such a question can be asked at all tells us a great deal about the so-called ethics of the news media and the profession of journalism.