And Kekua wasn't even a real person ― just an online persona. Through investigations by Deadspin, it turned that wasn't true. Stanford student Lennay Kekua, Te'o's alleged girlfriend at the time, had reportedly died from leukemia in September of 2012. (Or, in Te'o's case, on the Internet.In 2012 former Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o was in the midst of a Heisman Trophy caliber season when he found himself in the middle of a catfishing scandal that shocked the college football world. No matter how it ends up-if Te'o is the victim or the mastermind of a dastardly plot to use someone's death for his own public relations gain-the immediate lesson is that everyone needs to start paying a lot more attention to what's right in front of them. Nobody took the time to cross-reference the truth because the story we were being fed was too damn good. If you are the fourth person to write a story about a linebacker whose grandmother and girlfriend died in the same few days, isn't it your responsibility to notice the three previous reports had different specifics? Wouldn't it then be your edict as a journalist to find the truth? Others who don't know or don't like Swarbrick think the exact opposite, pointing out the obvious question of why Notre Dame sat on this information for weeks and allowed members of the media to continue to tell the story when they knew it to be a lie.Īs much as a story about Te'o, Deadspin's wonderful reporting showed the great lengths we, as a reporting populous, will go to ignore glaring facts. Writers who like Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick believe he was telling the absolute truth about Te'o being the victim. (Full disclosure: I am not an investigative journalist, but I do dabble in plenty of human interest.)Įven more than that, we all have biases based on whom we like in the industry. Who really cares if the stories are real? Athletes are just the actors we sports writers get to talk about.įor better or worse (read: worse), investigative journalism took a back seat to human interest a long time ago. We wanted the story to be true because we thrive on adding context to the lives of those we cover. In some ways, the fact Te'o's tragic story was always told within a football context made Lennay Kekua even less of a person than she eventually turned out to be. Mike Greenberg of ESPN's Mike & Mike in the Morning said on his radio show Thursday (and I'm paraphrasing) that before news of the hoax came out, this was the feel-good story of the year in sports.Ī woman supposedly died of cancer that doctors found in her body after a horrible car accident, but the grief and pain through which Te'o played a football game, to some in our industry, is a heart-warming allegory. Moreover, we wanted to believe this was true because the story is so good. We want to believe gut-wrenching stories are true because it's not in our nature to question whether something as horrific as a loved one dying would be faked for amusement or, worse, career advancement. That's the thing with human interest it's interesting. But many others, such as the media who covered Te'o during his Heisman Trophy runner-up season, can get too busy celebrating the story to actually uncover the truth. What we do know: Someone eventually questions the details. The biggest question is still out there: How much did Manti Te'o know about the hoax and when?
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