The Death of Credible Media in the Age of the Internet: Media Standards More Dead Than Non Existent Therefore Not Dead Girlfriend of Football Celebrity
By Nate Thayer
For months, major news outlet once known for being credible, reliable sources of information with rigorous internal standards ensuring accuracy and quality control, from the New York Times to CBS to Sports Illustrated, have all highlighted repeatedly a riveting, wrenching story of a rising American football hero and his inspirational reaction to the tragic death from leukemia of his longtime girlfriend.
The only problem, it was revealed yesterday, it is all a breathtaking lie and hoax, with TV, print, radio and Web media stories reporting for months on someone who never existed and splashing headlines about events that never happened.
Although it's still not clear who created the heroic-sports-star-and-his-tragically-dead-girlfriend hoax, it is exactly clear that the media repeated the fraud, victimizing news consumers, since last September without engaging in even rudimentary inquiries challenging a narrative that, only a few years ago, would have waved so many red flags even Jimmy Olsen, Clark Kent's hapless boy reporter in the Superman comic book series, would have been skeptical.
So a celebrity and sports star lied; no news there. That every major media outlet in the country fell for it, repeatedly and without exception, is a very big story, indeed.
Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o's non-existent dead-from-leukemia girlfriend, whose tragic death he said inspired him to play harder and was the catalyst to his team winning the national college football championship, has some explaining to do.
But much more important than the fact the dead girlfriend of a celebrity sports star was never alive and, by extension, never his girlfriend, was that virtually every respectable trustworthy media outlet in the U.S. wrote repeatedly creating this fictional, evolving narrative for months.
Now scores of reporters, major media outlets, the multi-billion dollar football industry and the universities who profit from them, are going through what would be comical acrobatics trying to point the finger somewhere-anywhere-as long as it away from themselves, if the wholesale indictment of what used to be a reputable free press was not so deeply exposed as the real hoax that in the age of internet news, and is such a sadly false presumption.
Another example of the effect of the absence of journalistic standards that happened at the same time as the non death of the non girlfriend of the sports celebrity almost caused world war three. Details on that story, which falls smack comfortably into the same roots and causes of this football sports embarrassment to journalism but actually was serious as cancer, are further below in this story.
Here is an interactive map that shows the impact last September of the power of the the new news media to throw the world into convulsions within moments:
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