Why do we keep getting suckered by stories like Manti Te’o?

On the heels of the Notre Dame scandal, a few guidelines for journalists reporting on inspirational stories

By Paul Campos
 

(Credit: AP/Darron Cummings)

When lawyers try cases, they have to deal with burdens of persuasion and standards of proof.  For example, when the prosecution attempts to convict someone of a crime, it has the burden of persuasion — before hearing any evidence the jury is supposed to presume the defendant is innocent — and the jury is not supposed to convict the defendant unless the prosecution demonstrates the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

I would like to propose the following rule for journalists: When presented with a feel-good story on a sports-related subject, you should presume the story is fabricated, unless persuaded by clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.

This is just one of the many lessons to be extracted from the increasingly bizarre story of Manti Te’o, the star football player whose heart-rending narrative about the simultaneous death of his grandmother and his girlfriend turned out to have been invented out of whole cyber-cloth.

(Another lesson is that administrators at Notre Dame are far more likely to weep over the imaginary death of a nonexistent girl than they are to shed tears for a real girl who actually committed suicide, after allegedly being sexually assaulted by one of Teo’s teammates.)
Rather than follow such a rule, powerful and research-rich media outlets such as Sports Illustrated, NBC and ESPN swallowed the fantasy of the dying girlfriend whole, without bothering to do the cursory fact-checking (a couple of hours on Google and Lexis would have sufficed) that would have destroyed this, in retrospect, all too obviously pat tale.
The Te’o saga is just the weirdest version of a story that gets played out again and again, because of our culture’s puerile obsession with athletes as role models. Here’s another straightforward rule: That people are very good at winning football games, or bicycle races, or golf tournaments, doesn’t tell you anything about those people, other than that they’re good at those activities.
Being good at sports doesn’t say anything about their “character.” It doesn’t make them people to emulate in any way (unless you’re trying to win football games, etc.). It doesn’t make them otherwise interesting, or noteworthy, or admirable, and to assume it does is lazy and stupid and unprofessional, and will eventually get you in trouble when your Lifetime movie of the week turns out to be a bunch of bullshit that the editor of a high school newspaper could have discovered easily enough.

Speaking of bullshit, professional liar Lance Armstrong has gone on professional tear-jerker Oprah Winfrey’s network to tell everyone something that everybody who hadn’t willfully blinded themselves to the facts figured out long ago, which is that Lance Armstrong cheated his way to a bunch of Tour de France titles. MORE