By now, pretty much everybody has heard about—and possibly taken the time to mock—Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s imaginary deceased girlfriend and the media denizens who enthusiastically devoured the lie.
For those who don’t make it a habit to pay attention to such things, Manti Te’o, a promising young football player, apparently created—in collusion with a friend—a fictional girlfriend, giving her a fictional death, which was then crafted by a credulous media into a host of articles and pre-game vignettes, designed to reference the endurance of the human spirit in the face of loss and how football is a powerful prism for such aspects of life and existence.
It’s all very strong stuff, nearly literary in quality, with the sole quibble that it’s completely based on a lie—and not an especially well crafted one, at that.
It took the sports blog Deadspin mere days of cursory investigation to discover that there was no record of Te’o’s alleged girlfriend’s death, no record of her having been at any of the places Te’o claimed, and, ultimately, no record of her existence save for a Twitter account sporting a photo that turned out to be stolen from someone else as the profile picture.
So why did the whole of sports media fall for something so easily disproved by a handful of sports bloggers in such a short time?
Easy. Because they wanted to.
The sports media—really all media—is mostly in the business of selling narratives. The days of hard-nosed, “just-the-facts” journalism has long faded into the mythology of America’s past. Nowadays, the organizations that publish media—printed or televised—have determined that people will more readily consume stories that fit a larger, prefabricated story or idea, and will outright reject work that doesn’t meet this criteria, sometimes even from well-established journalists and reporters.
The presidential election of 2000 presents a notable example of narrative in action, as the media collectively decided to portray Al Gore as awkward and distant, with a tendency to take credit for the accomplishments of others. Never mind that he never actually claimed to have invented the internet. Never mind that George W. Bush’s gregarious everyman contrast was complete bullshit.
The narrative was set, and today, even people who voted for Gore find themselves remembering things as the media said they were—regardless of whether that’s actually how they were.
Aspiring journalists can hardly be blamed for feeding the beast. Writing within the narrative means getting published (which means getting paid). It means getting on the good side of the upstairs office, and, maybe one day, getting to actually perform the kind of journalism that no doubt inspired them to get into the field in the first place.
The dilemma, of course, is that once someone has paid enough dues to write what they want, chances are they’ve spent so long immersed in the world of the hack that they continue to serve the narrative god, not really knowing how to do otherwise. They say when you dance with the devil, it’s not the devil that changes.
The situation with Manti Te’o is harmless enough. Perhaps it’s such a popular story specifically because it doesn’t involve any of the oppressively weighty topics that crowd the plate of our national consciousness. No arguments over Byzantine fiscal regulations and procedures. No complex questions regarding the intersection of healthcare and morality. No dead schoolchildren.
But the journalism—or lack thereof—on display in the media’s acceptance and subsequent amplification of Te’o’s deception is the exact same journalism that is all too often applied regarding those other, more consequential, topics. And the self-examination on the part of the media in response to this story is roughly the same as in response to the Jayson Blair scandal or the run-up to the Iraq War.
In other words, virtually non-existent. Instead, they focus on the mechanics of the initial deception and public reaction to it, or they focus on Te’o, already building a new narrative of the young man as a compulsive (possibly sociopathic) liar. Te’o and his family are themselves attempting to build their own narrative wherein he is a victim of the hoax, rather than a participant, however, the fact that every new revelation contradicts their constantly evolving story tends to undermine this effort.
All the while, the media continues business as usual, crafting reality to fit the narrative, as opposed to the other way around. Never acknowledging—out loud, at least—that their desperation for readily marketed narratives causes them to be easy targets for deceptive attention seekers. Never questioning the harm that their lazy journalism does to the public mind.
Just giving the people what they want, whether or not it’s what they need.
