Journalists’ Role in Te’o Story
Each week brings a new more bizarre twist to the Manti Te’o hoax story. Who knows if anyone will ever to be able to unravel what really happened. Some aspects may always remain a mystery, but there is no mystery about role journalists played.
You can debate whether Deadspin’s original report was fair or whether ESPN was right to hold the story in hopes of scoring an interview with the Notre Dame football star. But is seems clear that a number of respected sports journalists were at best unwittingly hoodwinked by a sports star or at worse woefully abdicated their responsibility to be skeptical and to check facts.
This scenario of a sports celebrity turning out not to be the saint we thought is becoming all too familiar. In the past year, we have belatedly discovered that some of our biggest sports heroes were not who they seemed to be, and sport journalists unfortunately played a big role in perpetuating the deception. Why did no one question why Jerry Sandusky suddenly left Penn State? Maybe sports reporters were too busy putting the Penn State football program and Joe Paterno on a pedestal. Well- regarded journalists bought into Lance Armstrong’s lies to the bitter end despite the testimony of many people who were in a position to know that Armstrong lied about using performance enhancing drugs. Beating cancer and winning a record number of Tour de France titles was a better story.
And reporters from Sports Illustrated to ESPN to the South Bend Tribune were mesmerized by the feel good story of Manti Te’o. In retrospect, Te’o’s original narrative did not ring true. Wasn’t the fact that his grandmother and girlfriend died within hours of each other a bit too much of a coincidence? In the age of social media, did it really make sense that Te’o never Skyped his girlfriend?
Reporters made no attempt to verify many of the supposed facts, which raises the question of how much checking should reporters do. Is it enough to say I had no reason not to believe what I was told. Or reporters shouldn’t and can’t assume everything they are told is a lie.
Most disturbing is the fact that the red flags did not just appear in retrospect. There were a few attempt to verify some facts and the lack of success the few should have caused pause. Google searches for Lennay Kekua turned up nothing. Stanford officials had no record of her ever being a student there, as Te’o claimed. And efforts to find an obituary for Kekua came up dry, as did any evidence of the severe car accident she supposedly was involved in. The reaction to such gaps was not to question the entire story but to just leave those facts out of the narrative.
Today it seems incredible that Te’o did not suspect he was a victim of a hoax. But what about the journalists? Over the years, some respected news organizations have been the direct victims of a news hoax. There is no specific list of how to spot a hoax. But relying on common sense and asking if something is too good or too unbelievable to be true is a good place to start. It appears that test wasn’t followed in this latest hoax.
We teach our students at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism the importance of accuracy. Fact checking is one way to help assure that. It is an essential part of reporting, yet virtually every aspect of the Manti Te’o story was never checked.
If we learn nothing from the sad realization that Penn State officials, Lance Armstrong, and yes, Manti Te’o all lied to us, let us vow to renew our commitment as journalists to check the accuracy of our reporting. Our listeners, viewers and readers have a right to expect that we are more than just transcribers.
Diana Huffman teaches ethics at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
