When I grew up my father and all my brothers watched football on Saturday. Our team was Notre Dame and we pretty much viewed all the other teams (especially Miami) as evil. There were exceptions. The service academies, of course were an exception. And Penn State. My Dad told us that Joe Paterno played by the rules and was a good man. We still wanted Notre Dame to win but it didn’t hurt so bad if we didn’t.

I still believe Joe Paterno is a good man. He’s a good man that deserved to be fired for doing something very wrong. Joe Paterno did inform a university official that a graduate assistant had told him in 2002 about witnessing former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with a young boy in the showers. But that’s all he did. And when Pennsylvania’s Attorney General released the details of alleged sex abuse by a former assistant coach it was clear that Joe didn’t do enough, a fact that he admitted. “This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more,” he said in a statement earlier this week, just days before being fired.

Joe Paterno, who has dedicated his life to helping young people, didn’t do enough when a young person needed someone to do something right by him.

But I’ve come to learn that people aren’t one thing. They can be good and do bad things. Joe Paterno is a good man who did a bad thing.

You wouldn’t know that from the media this past week. Since this story broke, the news media has made this entire story about Joe Paterno. Why? Because he’s famous. And he’s an icon. And there’s nothing the media loves to do more than taking out an icon.

As a former news reporter, what I saw this week wasn’t watching a news story unravel. The media didn’t go after this story like a news story at all. This was celebrity journalism. They treated this like a falling celebrity story. If this were being treated like a news story, this would be about Jerry Sandusky. If this were a news story, names like Mike McQueary would be talked about a lot more than Joe Paterno.

Assistant coach Mike McQueary is the guy who reportedly walked into the Penn State locker room and saw Jerry Sandusky raping a young boy. According to the grand jury report in the Sandusky case, McQueary “left immediately, distraught.”

Left immediately distraught?! What?

But while the media scrutiny has fallen on Joe Paterno, Mike McQueary is still the receivers coach at Penn State.

Look, the children who were victimized by Sandusky needed someone, anyone to stand up and be a hero. At every level, these men at Penn State, instead of becoming the heroes they should’ve been acted like cowards. And they should all be fired.

Joe Paterno likely has no legal culpability in this case. But because he was JOE PATERNO, the most powerful person on that campus, he clearly has increased moral culpability in this case. Joe Paterno did a bad thing. I still think he’s a good man. And I hope that sometime soon people try to remember that.