Wednesday, March 28, 2018

What Kind of Guy is John Ziegler? Ask OJ

On the theme of canned facts (facts that are not reported), there are various reasons why relevant facts are canned, which include, being ignored, being suppressed or simply not being believed. Another reason is that they may have been forgotten. Since I've (to use the pejorative vernacular) bought into John Ziegler's narrative of the Penn State scandal, I thought I'd look into some of the other stuff that Ziegler's done in his journalistic career.

For a number of years, he did a radio talk show with a co-host named Leah Brandon. There's an archive here, where the episodes are easily downloadable (I like to listen to such things on an ipod). I've found a few of his shows, where he could be said to have achieved a bit of infamy. He was a very avid follower of the OJ Simpson case. He had dated Kim Goldman, sister of OJ victim, Ron Goldman. He interviews her here, in the second hour of his show. In the next hour, here, he gives a very entertaining description of how he disrupted a sports memorabilia event attended by OJ. The Goldmans won a civil judgment against OJ and these autograph signing events offered a way for OJ to get around paying cash to the Goldmans. Ziegler found out that there was going to be one of these things very close to where he was living, so he went and told the promoter, "over my dead body!" He successfully managed to prevent OJ from participating in this event and arguable forced him to have to deal with less reputable, sleazy characters, which eventually got him arrested and incarcerated for kidnapping. I highly recommend listening to these episodes.

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Institutional Fact Canning at Penn State

Penn State has examples of the institutional ignoring of facts (or at least sources of facts) in both the Paterno/Sandusky scandal and their investigation of Michael Mann.

Now what most people would think of as ignoring facts in the Paterno/Sandusky case would be coach Joe Paterno, president Graham Spanier, vice president Gary Schultz, and athletic director Tim Curley ignoring sex crimes by Jerry Sandusky and trying to keep them under wraps. But Sandusky got indicted and convicted, Paterno got fired, and Spanier, Schultz and Curley  each got convicted of child endangerment. Then Penn State hired a former FBI director, Louis Freeh, to write a report to explain it all (for $8 million). For the public, the monster was caught and the institutional miscreants were punished. It all looks pretty tidy, unless you've been reading John Ziegler's site, Framing Paterno, or Mark Pendergrast's book, The Most Hated Man in America.