Why Bloomberg’s Paterno article is pointless and baseless

How Paterno Put His Penn State Money Above Full Disclosure of Child Abuse

That's the title of the article that Bloomberg published on Tuesday. Think, for a moment, about what information one would expect to find in that article.

There have been plenty of articles written about Paterno and Penn State in the past few weeks that serve no purpose other than to jump on the band-wagon of JoePa haters. Many of these publications, like the Sports Illustrated special edition, don't produce new facts, they just rehash what we already know while waxing poetic about Paterno's legacy. Usually, these are fluff pieces or blog posts written by a bitter CBS Chicago anchor who is just trying to get attention for himself.

But the Bloomberg article wins the award for Ridiculous Paterno Article of the week. Apparently feeling the need to be somehow relevant in the whole Penn State media circus, Bloomberg published "How Paterno Put His Penn State Money Above Full Disclosure of Child Abuse.” One might expect an article with that title to provide eyewitness accounts or a papertrail showing that Paterno purposely covered up the Sandusky sex abuse allegations for monetary reasons.

But that's not what this article is about at all.

The title isn't just misleading, it's factually wrong based on the rest of the article. The only thing the article proves is that there is a lot of money involved in college football. Bloomberg offers no facts to back up their initial claim, instead choosing to pair a traffic-generating headline with a fluff-piece of writing that spends too much time commenting on which sources didn't return their emails. The article is nothing more than a series of dollar signs about football revenue and quotes from people who have nothing to do with Penn State athletics or Joe Paterno.

The only purpose of the article? To drive up traffic on the Bloomberg website and add to the media dog-pile on Joe Paterno.