By now the jaw-dropping craziness of this story is self-evident, so no need to spend time writing about it here.
Also no real need to engage in the debate that's raging about whether Manti Te'o was in on the mother of all hoaxes.
The part that's consumed me is how in the world the media failed so miserably on this. Eric Crawford, a longtime columnist in Louisville, has the best take I've seen on it.
What makes this different, and what is more important about this story, is that the national sports media picked up this falsehood and ran with it. National outlets may not have given birth to the fictional Miss Kekua, but they helped bring her to life. They gave her emotion and real-life struggles. They painted her with dramatic colors, bathed Te'o's tearful story in soft music and literal sunlight. (The Chicago Sun-Times: "The sunlight touched Lennay Kekua's face for the last time at noon eastern time two Saturdays ago." Sports Illustrated: "Her relatives told [Te'o] that at her lowest points, as she fought to emerge from a coma, her breathing rate would increase at the sound of his voice.")
I don't know who created Lennay Kekua, but the media put flesh on her fictitious bones.
The media always have been suckers for a good story. In this one, we were just suckers. Whether this football player was perpetuating a lie for whatever reason (and there are elements that look damning, like telling a Notre Dame interviewer he'd just received a letter from his girlfriend before this season's Stanford game, 31 days after she supposedly died), or whether that player was duped, it's all the same.
These media outlets with major resources and experienced reporters should not have been duped.
My first reaction yesterday was that the blasting of the media was a bit excessive. Are you supposed to ask Te'o for his girlfriend's death certificate? If the guy tells you the alleged family of an alleged dead girlfriend doesn't wish to talk for a story, how do you press further while being sensitive to an allegedly tragic situation?
The sports editor at the Tallahassee newspaper did some predictable hand-wringing yesterday, saying this is the problem with "new" media and a lot of the old safeguards of traditional media (read: newspapers) have been stripped away in traditional media's attempt to compete with new media.
That's a flimsy case for several reasons: 1) The traditional safeguards haven't been stripped away because of competition; they've been stripped away because of budget cuts fueled by fatally flawed business model; 2) This was a feature story, not a breaking news story in which news outlets didn't have time to vet the details; 3) The story was told by ESPN, the most dominant sports media giant we've seen or will ever see, an entity that has layer upon layer of resources to prevent something like this from happening.
It's hard for me to identify lack of resources or a rush to be first as the culprits here. The real problem is articulated here by Crawford:
The story here isn't that a band of losers tried to punk a football player in a fake online relationship, or even if a college football player pulled one over on the media. The story is that the media -- long trained to have a heightened detector for bull-you-know what -- either lost its sense of smell, or was too eager to make the whole thing smell like roses.
You know, it's really strange: Our sports-following society is as cynical as ever, but we gulped the Te'o story hook, line and sinker. Why is that? Maybe one of our problems is elevating prominent athletes to such a lofty level that we don't question what they say. Maybe another problem is the mistake of thinking we know an athlete or a coach personally by the few snapshots we see in media settings. Or maybe in a world where we hear so much bad news about mass shootings and war and terrorism and fiscal cliffs and a bunch of other bad, depressing and devastating stuff, we reflexively latch on to the uplifting and heartwarming stories and hold them tight because they're evidence that goodness still exists in humanity.
A bunch of news outlets made bad mistakes on this, but ESPN looks awful right now. One of its head honchos acknowledged yesterday that the network had been aware of the hoax story for 10 days. He said they'd been working on it but were beaten to the punch by ... two guys at Deadspin.
One of the reporters, Timothy Burke, explains how the story came about here while mourning the diminished role of investigative journalism.
Deadspin’s widely circulated report on Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s began with a tip. Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey got an anonymous email last week saying: “Hey, you know, something is fishy about the Te’o girlfriend story, you should check it out.”
Burke told Anderson Cooper:
"What do you do when you first want to know something? You Google it. And Google searches for Lennay Kekua only showed up articles about her dying and inspiring Manti Te’o. There was no evidence of her existing in any way, other than after she had allegedly died. We thought that was weird.
"We called in to Stanford. Several articles insisted that she had either been a Stanford student or a Stanford alumna and nothing checked out there. We called all the mortuaries and funeral homes in Carson, California where several sources had reported she had been buried. They had no information on it. …
"When we finally were able to track back to see all these pictures, these pictures that had represented Lennay Kekua and we found the actual alive-doesn’t-have-leukemia-and-has-never-met-Manti Te’o-person that they belong to, that sort of opened everything up."
Maybe the good in this is that the media and everyone will be more skeptical and cynical about feel-good stories. But there's something depressing about that, too.
LW
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