Penn State Scandal: Storied Program's PR Failures Even Baffle Its Own Staff

The scandal that rocked the once innocent and morally superior Penn State University over the last few days has been the biggest college football has ever seen and maybe the worst in sports history.

You would think that a school with such an illustrious communications program would have a better grasp of a date they knew was coming since the investigation into Jerry Sandusky’s alleged sexual misconduct started.

Penn State couldn’t have handled the situation any worse than it did, and even its own staff has decided to use this public relations disaster to teach its students how not to handle scandals like this.

Senior lecturer of public relations in Penn State's College of Communications department Steve Manuel did a lecture to PR students and the media at PSU to address how the school handled things:

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The golden rule of public relations is you have to get something out in the first 60 minutes. And mentioning the victims always comes first. Bad news doesn't get better with time. When you cede the message to (critics or adversaries), you lose the battle... This was a crisis in the making of at least three years. Penn State knew this shoe was going to drop, and it was not prepared.... All the magnificent things Penn State has done over generations is on one side of the ledger. Jerry Sandusky is on the other. One has nothing to do with the other, and the university needs a massive campaign to emphasize this. But this is going to take a long time to repair...[Joe Paterno] was like a benevolent grandfather, almost like Santa Claus, someone that 30% to 40% of the students had had personal contact with. They saw him at other sporting events, around campus, at the grocery store. He was 'Everyman' to them.

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Where was this guy when Penn State was making all these mistakes? Penn State could have used him.

Everything Manuel says is right, down to the analogy of Joe Paterno to Santa Claus, and it was a shame that a school with such a respect in the media and communications department dropped the ball this bad.

The biggest problem I have with the way it handled everything is how this all seemed to shock everyone in charge of the school and its PR department.

If this Sandusky case was out there for as long as it was, the school should have had a gameplan on how it was going to address the situation when it blew up.

No matter how much they knew or didn’t know, to play ignorant to the matter just to have it blow up in their face seems like a just ending to a horrible PR predicament.

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