When Penn State fired head coach Joe Paterno on Wednesday, it was the culmination of a scandal more than 15 years in the making.
So what took the media so long?
The lapse can’t be attributed merely to star-struck local newspapers or lazy national sportswriters, though that's part of the equation.
Jerry 
Sandusky, a long-time assistant to the winningest coach in college football history, allegedly abused at least half a dozen young boys over more than a decade. Penn State administrators knew about it and law enforcement was investigating him.
But a combination of other factors converged to keep the accusations under wraps, including:
>> Shrinking news budgets that have undermined investigative journalism
>> A press-wary football program in a remote location
>> Police who reportedly dissuaded victims from talking to journalists
>> A lackluster response by Penn State that some have likened to a cover-up
>> A reticence to brand Sandusky as a pedophile without definitive evidence
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In an op-ed about his paper's response to the saga on Thursday, David Newhouse, the editor of the Harrisburg Patriot-News, which broke the story back in March, wrote:
“The national media ignored it. Locally, we mainly received anger from some readers,” he wrote.
Even now, the outrage resonating across Happy Valley is as much about why Paterno cannot finish out the season as the alleged abuse itself.
The shock of Paterno's firing erupted in a student insurrection Wednesday night that grabbed the country's attention and left many wondering how the sad state of affairs had devolved into chaos.
As was true on a much larger scale with the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, this case demonstrates the difficulty accusing a venerated institution of despicable actions.
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For central Pennsylvania, Paterno and his Nittany Lions are divine in their own right.
This is what one reader wrote in response to the Patriot-News' coverage of the story: “Shame on those who have tried to defile the legacy that Jerry Sandusky has worked so hard to build.”
Newhouse justified his paper’s decision to aggressively pursue the Sandusky allegations before most major news outlets had even arrived on the scene. At the same time, he offered a tortured explanation as to why reporters were not able to break the story earlier.
Although there is no concrete evidence that beat reporters knew of Sandusky’s allegedly illicit relationship with young boys, which may date back to the mid-'90s, reporters and analysts indicate that the explosive nature of the crimes would have made any newspaper or broadcaster gun-shy.
“You can have you requisite two or three sources and the story may be solid, but that won’t hold up in a libel suit,” said Bill Nemitz, a former sports editor and now columnist who covered sexual abuse scandals at the Portland Press Herald in Maine told TheWrap.
