As of a night or two ago, this recent "breaking story on scandal" did cause me to think about the Franklin cover up, but I was not linking the two as you say. At that time two nights ago I was thinking how these two stories are opposites of each other because the Franklin story was a cover up that never got uncovered and the Penn State scandal was seemingly being uncovered... but now that I've had a few more nights to think on this... and in the mean time find a few conspiracy theory angles, I now think that this recent uncovered Penn State story is really just an " uncovered scandal " intended for mass consumption whereby a few public faces - namely Joe - have been scapegoated so that other, bigger players have thus far been left untouched and out of the news...but admittedly this is a theory that needs some more info to become less theory and more reality. It certainly helped that many people had already been aware for years of the Joe-must-go campaign, and his lapse in this case seems to have ultimately played well into that plan as he is now certainly gone done finished over in a big time messy fashion.
The link from the beginning of this thread lead me to this one that includes some interesting revelations in the embedded audio interview with Mark Madden.