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I'm sure that anyone who follows the news knows all about what happened to Richard Jewel, and most are tired of the whole thing by now, but there is something very wrong...

It's not the fact that neither the FBI nor the media has apologized because I don't expect they will. The FBI as an institution is too arrogant; they wouldn't dare give the impression that they could possibly make a mistake, and an apology, especially a public one may tarnish their reputation for being infallible. The media on the other hand is too busy trying to cover their collective ass while waiting to see just who will be seeing Mr. Jewel in court. Besides, an apology now would appear to be, and in my opinion would be insincere anyway.

No, what I am talking about is so obvious to me that I put off writing this piece because I thought someone else would have written it; or what should have happened would have by now. It didn't happen though; if it did, then I missed it. In the November 11, 1996 issue of TIME magazine, James Tierney was quoted as saying "People get chewed up every day. The only difference in this case was that it was on national TV." Is that supposed to be a justification? To me it is a sad commentary on our ability to do the right thing as a society.. People do get chewed up everyday, and it's not right; an investigation is one thing, and a witch hunt is quite another. In my opinion, the FBI was under a lot of pressure to solve the case, and solve it fast; they were interested in making an arrest and it didn't matter if they got the right person(s). Whereas the media cared only about getting the story first; who cares what it does to someone's life -- And they said that Richard Jewel was overzealous!

But all of this has been said before, and we are still missing the point. What I am trying to get at here is the fact that with this "better late than never" attitude toward Mr. Jewel's exoneration, we are ignoring the fact that we are left back where we were 3 days after the blast when he was being called a hero. With his name now cleared, does this not leave us back at that point? Is he not now the hero he was then?

I searched through hundreds of news articles looking for anything close to what I am talking about; the closest I found was written by Bill Rankin in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, but is he being treated like a hero now as he would have if he wasn't dragged through the mud? As far as I can tell, the answer is no. Searching for stories written before he was named a suspect was a much more difficult task than I had anticipated, and when I did find one in USA Today, it was qualified as written prior to the change in his status from hero to villain. Why not run some of the stories that were written about "Richard Jewel the hero"? I'm sure those stories are still on many writers' hard drives, left for dead, unfinished and unpublished when all of the attention given Mr. Jewel did an abrupt about face.

Had Mr. Jewel never been publicly named the prime suspect in the bombing at Centennial Park, what would have happened to him? Would he have been given a medal? Would President Clinton have shaken his hand, or at least given him a call to say "Job well done"? My point here, is that what ever would have been done for and said about him before the very unfortunate circumstances which turned his and his mother's life into a circus, should be done and said now -- If he will even accept it now. But no one as far as I can tell is even trying to put things right. Instead, it is as though the media feels that the ball is in his court and they're waiting for him to make a move, when the mayor of Atlanta should be giving him a key to the city.