EVIDENCE IN SANDUSKY TRIAL: NBC INTERVIEW

NBC has agreed to provide Pennsylvania prosecutors with a complete transcript of Bob Costas’s interview with Jerry Sandusky last November, including portions of the interview that were not broadcast. (Only eight minutes of the 36-minute interview actually aired on NBC’s primetime Rock Center.) Ordinarily it is the policy of news organizations not to provide unaired or unprinted excerpts of interviews to authorities, but in this case the network had already released a transcript, which had been published on a Pennsylvania news website, the Centre Daily Times. NBC has been criticized for not including on the broadcast one seemingly self-incriminating statement by Sandusky: “I didn’t go around seeking out every young person for sexual needs that I’ve helped.” Sandusky had founded The Second Mile charity ostensibly to help troubled young people, but prosecutors have charged that he used it to meet the boys who have now accused him of molesting them.