It's still a developing story, and there's a strong stench of BS about it. But, for me, the most fascinating aspect of the story about Notre Dame football player Manti Te'o and the tragic loss of his girlfriend (who turned out not to be real) is that there's no way it would've gone as far if the press who cover college sports hadn't played along.
Deadspin, who broke the story yesterday, has a rundown of all the ways the traditional media should've caught on.
As my journalism professors always said, a news story is the first draft of history. Reporters and editors get things wrong out of haste or misunderstanding, and journalism has mechanisms for correcting prior bad reports. But it always seemed to me that sports journalists were more susceptible to falling for a convenient narrative than, say, the guy assigned to cover Federal Reserve policy. They cover entertainment, for one thing. For another, sports fans tend to be sports fans because we like epic tales of triumph over adversity and all that, and so we eat up those stories about athletes playing games just hours after a death in the family, for instance. (No, I'm still not ready to talk about Lance Armstrong.)
Personally, I fall in the "the sport itself is interesting enough already" camp. We're watching people push themselves to the physical and mental limits of human possibility, after all. Why do I need to know about anything else?
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