By now you’ve heard that Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o has a fake dead girlfriend. Did he perpetrate a hoax or fall victim to one? Did the media fail to do its job? These are interesting and important questions, but the most troubling revelation may be what the story reveals about ourselves.
The online sports media outlet Deadspin broke the story in a devastatingly thorough expose. Lennay Kekua didn’t die because she didn’t have Leukemia nor was she ever injured in an accident because she didn’t exist. Nearly every detail – including his skipping her funeral to play Michigan State University in his career changing game – was a sham.
Manti Te’o says he was the victim of an elaborate online hoax. Notre Dame is backing him up on the claim. More evidence will surface in the coming weeks about precisely what happened; for now the myriad theories floating around the internet are sheer speculation. Proving his story false doesn’t tell us immediately what’s true.
Journalists did a mediocre job, to be sure. Cancer and death are of course topics of severe sensitivity, but reporters could have verified more about Kekua’s life without demanding her family produce a death certificate. In a world in which Lance Armstrong is doping and coming clean to Oprah Winfrey and one in which it turned out that seemingly devoted family man Tiger Woods was sleeping with, well, everyone, sports journalists should have some healthy skepticism.
But the erosion of journalistic standards and ethics isn’t exactly breaking news. What’s more troubling about this story is first – if it is in fact a hoax – that Manti Te’o thought he could trust someone online he had never met, and that no one in his immediate community seemed to notice or get involved until the media reported the story.
Released in 2010 and frequently linked with Manti Te’o’s story, the documentary “Catfish” follows New York photographer Nev Schulman through an online hoax. Schulman receives a painting in the mail of one of his published photographs and begins a talking to the family, who lives outside of Gladstone, Mich. After he begins an online relationship with who he thinks is one of the family’s daughters, signs start to suggest he’s being misled. He drives to Michigan to discover nearly everything he believed about them to be false. The woman responsible for the hoax, Angela Wesselman, made up numerous online Facebook profiles to fool Schulman as a way of coping with her disappointments in life, calling each fake person a “fragment of herself.”
When the credits roll, a viewer must confront that there’s something wrong with Schulman’s actions as well as Wesselmen’s lies. Schulman believed it acceptable to pour so much of himself into a relationship he could never prove was real while his friends and family watched with curiosity and amusement.
The same applies to Manti Te’o. If it’s a hoax, how did his network, family and college, fail completely to help him realize it? Missing in this story seems to be a younger sister who insists with excitement on meeting her big brother’s girlfriend, his roommate who wants living proof she’s hot, his teammates curious about the woman who inspires him, and even his parents who want to be sure of what their son is up to.
At times it seems our society could hardly be less trusting or cynical, and yet the online world convinces people of total falsehoods. It works in subtle ways, too, convincing us that our friends’ lives are fabulous because of how they market themselves online.
Google helps us access information in a remarkable way, but we still have to discern what’s true. The Manti Te’o hoax and ensuing scandal is just the latest example of our culture’s disinterest in doing so.
