Ralph Cipriano in his bigtrial blog does an exemplary job of exposing Susan Snyder of the Inquirer as a shill for Freeh, the OAG, and the old guard BOT in that her reporting on the Penn State fiasco is biased and serves the interests of the OAG, old guard BOT, Corbett, Freeh, and others. Cipriano identifies numerous instances in her recent article in the Inquirer on the leak of the Alumni BOT review of the Freeh Report that were less than objective including treating the Alumni BOT in a condescending manner, giving lots of ink in a flattering way to Freeh and the BOT, and not mentioning key developments in the story such as the findings from NCIS Special Agent John Snedden's federal investigation into key aspects of events. Here is an excerpt from Ralph's latest blog post.
Accomplices In the Media
Finally, to keep up with the unending work of accomplices in the media, we come to one Susan Snyder, staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
I happen to know from my own sources that Snyder, who allegedly covers higher education, has turned a deaf ear for years on requests to look into what really happened at Penn State. Nothing to see here folks. We got it right the first time.
But when I wrote a blog post earlier this week about WJAC-TV having a copy of the trustees report on Freeh, I mentioned that the Inquirer also had the report, but was sitting on it.
Snyder and her newspaper promptly sprang into action. Or should I call it reverse action.
Her story is a textbook example of media bias and slanted news coverage. It's also intellectually dishonest. She and her newspaper should be ashamed of themselves, but I know from long experience that they fancy themselves as above all that.
Snyder begins her "objective" piece by noting in the lead paragraph that the report is the work of "longstanding critics" of Freeh.
Holding her nose, she then prints one paragraph of quotes from the trustees' report that dares to be critical of Freeh.
Then, in paragraph Three, she writes: "The report, signed by seven alumni-elected members of the school's board of trustees, attempts to make its case by highlighting emails and handwritten comments by investigators that seem to question the report's conclusions and Freeh's motivation, evidence that they say was ignored or never shared, a list of key people Freeh's team never interviewed, and questioned the interviewers couldn't answer."
Paragraph Four: "In many ways, it's a summary of claims that Penn State defenders have made in the years since the scandal broke, this time with material from Fresh's investigation that they say bolsters their view. For years, they have challenged prosecutors' suggestions that head football coach Joe Paterno and school administrators may have ignored a serial predator in their midst. They seethed at the NCAA sanctions, fumed at Fresh's report, and ran en masse for alumni seats on the board."
Paragraph Five: "When they got elected, they sued the university and won access to the hundreds of thousands of interviews notes and documents that Freeh, also a former judge, used to prepare his report, then spent hundreds of hours poring over them."
Paragraph Six: Penn State's leadership criticized the release of the report, and Freeh dismissed it as inconsequential, biased and inaccurate, a misguided attempt to turn back the clock and exonerate the university and its former leaders -- since convicted of endangerment -- for not stopping Sandusky years earlier.
Paragraph Seven: "The deniers continue to embarrass the many thousands of outstanding Penn State students, faculty and alumni by blindly disregarding the uncontroverted facts in favor of a misguided agenda," Freeh said in a statement.
Paragraph Eight: "It's release continues what has been an unending battle for those who believe that the former Penn State leaders perhaps made some misjudgments about how to handle Sandusky but did nothing intentionally wrong, and that a vaunted football program was scapegoated."
Again, this is a shining example of outrageously biased and slanted journalism, partisan commentary, reverse spin and damage control dressed up as a news story. By somebody, who, if what the trustees wrote was true, has a conflict of interest because she and her newspaper blew the story.
In the first eight paragraphs of her story, Snyder quotes the critics for precisely one paragraph, while spending a total of six paragraphs impugning the alleged motives of those same critics. Then she spends one paragraph allowing Freeh to defend himself, and another paragraph quoting university "leadership" who were actively engaged in covering up the report.
Instead of reporting the news, she's editorializing. And in classic fashion, she's impugning the motives of the people who wrote the report, rather than deal with the evidence that the report presents.
On twitter, and in an email, I asked Snyder how, as "one reporter to another," she could ignore that the trustees wrote about a contemporaneous but previously unknown federal investigation on the Penn State campus. A federal investigation that concluded that the only witness to the alleged shower rape, Mike McQueary, wasn't credible, and that there was no official cover up at Penn State.
The federal investigation, done in 2012, was disclosed in 2017 after the filing of a Freedom of Information request. The investigation was conducted for six months on the Penn State campus by former NCIS Special Agent and cold case investigator John Snedden, who wrote a 110-page report posted online.
Snedden's report, and many comments he made in two interviews with Big Trial, were quoted extensively by the trustees in their report. But Snyder willfully ignored it. She also did not respond on twitter to my comments, or to an email I sent her.
In her story, Snyder, in full cover up mode, gave Freeh a platform for a couple more paragraphs to take shots at his critics, such as calling them "a gang of deniers" who wrote a "misguided, tilted, dishonest and biased" report.
Of course, she didn't ask Freeh any hard questions, like whether he really did have a conflict of interest, as the trustees asserted in their report. The evidence of this was disclosed in Fresh's own internal emails, published in the trustees report, where he openly stated that he wanted to use the Penn State investigation as a stepping stone to become the "go-to investigator" for the scandal-plagued NCAA.
Snyder also didn't ask Freeh, as I did last year, about the many emails in the so-called Freeh source materials that show that former deputy Attorney General Frank Fina was routinely leaking grand jury secrets, along with grand jury transcripts, to Freeh and his investigators, in blatant and repeated violations of state law.
When I asked Freeh as a private citizen while he was investigating Penn State, to explain how he and his investigators were authorized to have access to grand jury secrets, he declined comment.
But Sue "The Shill" Snyder wasn't going to ask Freeh any hard questions; she's already in the tank. Instead, she published verbatim a four-page statement he put out impugning the messengers.
Why? Because Snyder is no objective journalist on this story. She's a partisan actively involved in carrying water for the prosecutors, Louis Freeh and Penn State trustees, all of whom are still actively engaged in an ongoing cover up of their own collusion, misconduct, and dereliction of duty in the scandal behind the scandal at Penn State.
It's shameful but sadly, it's nothing new for the Inquirer. In the Billy Doe scandal, as I have previously mentioned, after publishing more than 60 news stories and editorials that presented Billy as a legitimate victim of sex abuse, and castigating the church and the accused defendants, the Inquirer has never written one story that tells its readers it was a phony prosecution, and that the accused were innocent. Even after the D.A.'s office let the last innocent guy behind bars -- a Catholic schoolteacher falsely convicted of child rape -- out of jail nearly a dozen years early.
This time, in another sex abuse case that they blew to hell, instead of ignoring the truth, the Inky is actively involved in leading the cover up. They're attacking the messengers and shielding the miscreants, to ensure that the truth never comes out.
Shameful and corrupt.
http://www.bigtrial.net/2019/02/an-unholy-triangle.html
Accomplices In the Media
Finally, to keep up with the unending work of accomplices in the media, we come to one Susan Snyder, staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
I happen to know from my own sources that Snyder, who allegedly covers higher education, has turned a deaf ear for years on requests to look into what really happened at Penn State. Nothing to see here folks. We got it right the first time.
But when I wrote a blog post earlier this week about WJAC-TV having a copy of the trustees report on Freeh, I mentioned that the Inquirer also had the report, but was sitting on it.
Snyder and her newspaper promptly sprang into action. Or should I call it reverse action.
Her story is a textbook example of media bias and slanted news coverage. It's also intellectually dishonest. She and her newspaper should be ashamed of themselves, but I know from long experience that they fancy themselves as above all that.
Snyder begins her "objective" piece by noting in the lead paragraph that the report is the work of "longstanding critics" of Freeh.
Holding her nose, she then prints one paragraph of quotes from the trustees' report that dares to be critical of Freeh.
Then, in paragraph Three, she writes: "The report, signed by seven alumni-elected members of the school's board of trustees, attempts to make its case by highlighting emails and handwritten comments by investigators that seem to question the report's conclusions and Freeh's motivation, evidence that they say was ignored or never shared, a list of key people Freeh's team never interviewed, and questioned the interviewers couldn't answer."
Paragraph Four: "In many ways, it's a summary of claims that Penn State defenders have made in the years since the scandal broke, this time with material from Fresh's investigation that they say bolsters their view. For years, they have challenged prosecutors' suggestions that head football coach Joe Paterno and school administrators may have ignored a serial predator in their midst. They seethed at the NCAA sanctions, fumed at Fresh's report, and ran en masse for alumni seats on the board."
Paragraph Five: "When they got elected, they sued the university and won access to the hundreds of thousands of interviews notes and documents that Freeh, also a former judge, used to prepare his report, then spent hundreds of hours poring over them."
Paragraph Six: Penn State's leadership criticized the release of the report, and Freeh dismissed it as inconsequential, biased and inaccurate, a misguided attempt to turn back the clock and exonerate the university and its former leaders -- since convicted of endangerment -- for not stopping Sandusky years earlier.
Paragraph Seven: "The deniers continue to embarrass the many thousands of outstanding Penn State students, faculty and alumni by blindly disregarding the uncontroverted facts in favor of a misguided agenda," Freeh said in a statement.
Paragraph Eight: "It's release continues what has been an unending battle for those who believe that the former Penn State leaders perhaps made some misjudgments about how to handle Sandusky but did nothing intentionally wrong, and that a vaunted football program was scapegoated."
Again, this is a shining example of outrageously biased and slanted journalism, partisan commentary, reverse spin and damage control dressed up as a news story. By somebody, who, if what the trustees wrote was true, has a conflict of interest because she and her newspaper blew the story.
In the first eight paragraphs of her story, Snyder quotes the critics for precisely one paragraph, while spending a total of six paragraphs impugning the alleged motives of those same critics. Then she spends one paragraph allowing Freeh to defend himself, and another paragraph quoting university "leadership" who were actively engaged in covering up the report.
Instead of reporting the news, she's editorializing. And in classic fashion, she's impugning the motives of the people who wrote the report, rather than deal with the evidence that the report presents.
On twitter, and in an email, I asked Snyder how, as "one reporter to another," she could ignore that the trustees wrote about a contemporaneous but previously unknown federal investigation on the Penn State campus. A federal investigation that concluded that the only witness to the alleged shower rape, Mike McQueary, wasn't credible, and that there was no official cover up at Penn State.
The federal investigation, done in 2012, was disclosed in 2017 after the filing of a Freedom of Information request. The investigation was conducted for six months on the Penn State campus by former NCIS Special Agent and cold case investigator John Snedden, who wrote a 110-page report posted online.
Snedden's report, and many comments he made in two interviews with Big Trial, were quoted extensively by the trustees in their report. But Snyder willfully ignored it. She also did not respond on twitter to my comments, or to an email I sent her.
In her story, Snyder, in full cover up mode, gave Freeh a platform for a couple more paragraphs to take shots at his critics, such as calling them "a gang of deniers" who wrote a "misguided, tilted, dishonest and biased" report.
Of course, she didn't ask Freeh any hard questions, like whether he really did have a conflict of interest, as the trustees asserted in their report. The evidence of this was disclosed in Fresh's own internal emails, published in the trustees report, where he openly stated that he wanted to use the Penn State investigation as a stepping stone to become the "go-to investigator" for the scandal-plagued NCAA.
Snyder also didn't ask Freeh, as I did last year, about the many emails in the so-called Freeh source materials that show that former deputy Attorney General Frank Fina was routinely leaking grand jury secrets, along with grand jury transcripts, to Freeh and his investigators, in blatant and repeated violations of state law.
When I asked Freeh as a private citizen while he was investigating Penn State, to explain how he and his investigators were authorized to have access to grand jury secrets, he declined comment.
But Sue "The Shill" Snyder wasn't going to ask Freeh any hard questions; she's already in the tank. Instead, she published verbatim a four-page statement he put out impugning the messengers.
Why? Because Snyder is no objective journalist on this story. She's a partisan actively involved in carrying water for the prosecutors, Louis Freeh and Penn State trustees, all of whom are still actively engaged in an ongoing cover up of their own collusion, misconduct, and dereliction of duty in the scandal behind the scandal at Penn State.
It's shameful but sadly, it's nothing new for the Inquirer. In the Billy Doe scandal, as I have previously mentioned, after publishing more than 60 news stories and editorials that presented Billy as a legitimate victim of sex abuse, and castigating the church and the accused defendants, the Inquirer has never written one story that tells its readers it was a phony prosecution, and that the accused were innocent. Even after the D.A.'s office let the last innocent guy behind bars -- a Catholic schoolteacher falsely convicted of child rape -- out of jail nearly a dozen years early.
This time, in another sex abuse case that they blew to hell, instead of ignoring the truth, the Inky is actively involved in leading the cover up. They're attacking the messengers and shielding the miscreants, to ensure that the truth never comes out.
Shameful and corrupt.
http://www.bigtrial.net/2019/02/an-unholy-triangle.html
