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A lot of people hate the media, equating them to soulless ghouls who prey on human misery or to lawyers, who simply profit off human misery. Either way, the once respected craft of journalism has fallen by the wayside in the 24-hour news cycle, which in itself deserves a great share of the blame. When the media beast has to be fed all the time for all those humans needing an extra news or entertainment fix for their HD TV’s, laptops, tablets and smartphones, well, you have to have news happening all the time.

Thus is the case with Notre Dame player Manti T’eo, the good-looking Samoan Mormon football star who is now one of the most decorated college athletes of all time. The 6’2 linebacker has helped Notre Dame to its undefeated regular season, #1 ranking in college football and to the BCS Championship Game. (They lost to eventual champion Alabama.)

By all accounts, T’eo was a success story. To make his tale even more heartfelt, there was his tragic girlfriend, they lyrically named Lennay Kekua, the gorgeous love of T’eo’s life who had leukemia and then got into a horrific car accident that eventually took her life. The Notre Dame faithful mourned with T’eo. Sports reporters from “Sports Illustrated” to ESPN fell all over themselves telling the story of how brave T’eo was to play on through this tragedy because Kekua would have wanted him to.

Problem is, none of it was true. Well, T’eo is a college football star but the rest is murky. Notre Dame says he was the victim of a scam, but wouldn’t someone know whether or not he had a girlfriend? But the bigger problem is that the media never fact-checked this story. And that is as much of a travesty as the fake girlfriend, given the fact that a magazine like “Sports Illustrated” and a network like ESPN who both ran accounts of this story have personnel strictly devoted to research and fact-checking.

How this happens is that in this world of get it fast/get it first news reporting  is that everyone wants to fill up their increasingly endangered newspapers, magazines and TV shows with stories that will reach the most eyeballs. It’s not longer a fabulously written story that gets attention; it’s the ones that make people share and comment, the ones that get “liked” on Facebook and the ones that people talk about over the water cooler at work. A tragic dead girlfriend and a talented football player are one of those kinds of stories.

Journalism Fail: The Manti Te’o Story  was originally published on blackamericaweb.com

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