Here we are. A Heisman Trophy finalist, a player who led Notre Dame to the BCS championship game, and supposedly did it all while dealing with the grief of having his girlfriend die during the season, was at best a victim of a bizarre and inexplicable hoax, and at worst spun a vast and multifaceted web of lies to uncertain and improbable ends.
Why did it take four months for anyone to realize that Lennay Marie Kekua did not exist? Why did none of the major journalistic entities that cover college football bother to check even the most basic facts in her case? Why did no one at ESPN, or NBC, or CBS, or FOX, wonder why we’d never heard anything from her family, even as she was supposedly dying a tragic and romantic death? There were no interviews of grieving parents regretting a life cut short, no siblings who remembered the time she helped them with their homework, no friends or classmates, not even a photo of her with Te’o.
Even if you accept Te’o’s claim that he was a victim of a hoax, that doesn’t excuse his behavior. At the least, he grossly misrepresented his relationship with the fictional Ms. Kekua by claiming he’d met her after a Notre Dame-Stanford football game, by claiming (or allowing his parents to claim) that they’d spent time together in Hawai’i, and most of all by not coming clean about this “hoax”. It took Deadspin putting the story out there for the world to see to get an admission from the Te’os that they had been lying to us all, which becomes all the more galling when it was revealed that they’d told Notre Dame almost three weeks ago.
Still though, we ought to reserve most of our wrath for the people and entities who cover college football. They blindly accepted a story that, in hindsight, is comically melodramatic. No one asked why there were no photos or videos of the two together. On ESPN, Gene Wojciechowski revealed that he’d been unable to find an obituary for Kekua in preparation for an interview with Te’o in October, yet that apparently didn’t raise any red flags in Bristol. How they rationalized moving forward with the story remains a mystery, but allow me to offer a simple explanation.
All the entities that cover college football had a vested interest in pushing this story. Notre Dame’s return to prominence was already good for ratings, and when you throw in the tragic circumstances surrounding their best player, they had a ratings bonanza. What’s good for the networks’ bottom lines is good for the reporters, since they reach more eyeballs and raise their own profiles with proximity to such a huge story. Therefore, even if someone like Wojciechowski might consciously act in total deference to truth, on other levels he probably wanted to believe the Kekua story was true, and didn’t pursue it further when he noticed inconvenient untruths.
Specifically, ESPN seems to have lost the ability to ask questions of the sports it covers. The huge contracts it signs to broadcast collegiate and professional sports mean the network has no interest in investigating and publishing stories which cast those sports or entities in a less-than-favorable light, so it falls to sites like Deadspin to pick up the pieces.
In that sense, the story of Lennay Marie Kekua is not a story about the dangers of the Internet, the follies of youth, or even the potentially fraudulent claims made by a prominent athlete. Instead, it’s a story about how mixing journalism and profit motive inexorably leads to the death of journalism as an avenue to truth. This is far from the first story to illustrate the phenomenon, but the brutal incompetence and negligence displayed by so many news organizations for so long serves to hammer that point home again.
(Image cc-licensed: "Manti Te’o Senior Day Moment" by JamesChicago)
No comments:
Post a Comment