Penn State not covered by state open-records law

If Pennsylvania's open-records law applied to Penn State, the Jerry Sandusky scandal might have been uncovered much earlier, saving some children from abuse, Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute writes after hearing from Sara Ganim, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter who broke the story and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Ganim (CNN image) "told a group of reporters and editors at Poynter that the open record exemption made it much more difficult to investigate the sex abuse story," Tompkins reports, and explains why the law doesn't apply to The Pennsylvania State University and three other "state-related institutions." He says they must file less information than publicly traded companies have to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That is less than politicians have to file when running for state or federal office." Penn State lobbied to keep the exemption when the law was strengthened in 2008.

Tompkins says forner FBI director Louis Freeh, who investigated the university's handling of teh Sandusky matter, should have included making Penn State subject to the open-records law in his recommendations: "The abuse at Penn State is a lesson to us all about what happens when powerful people and public institutions are allowed to operate in the shadows created by what Freeh called a 'closed culture.' It is a culture that protected abusers, failed to protect victims and survived by closing its records to journalists who might have exposed it." (Read more