Category: Media

Way back in the dark ages, I originally wrote this piece on LiveJournal, and updated it again in 2011 when people started going berserk about Miss USA proclaiming herself a “geek”. There’s a reason I’m dredging it up again now, which we’ll get to in a bit, but first the original piece, slightly updated once again.
Continue reading “Get Over Yourself, Radio Guy.”

As we all know now, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o had a girlfriend who died, but it turns out she never existed. It’s a ridiculous story, and a lot of people are casting ideas on the water, but oddly I haven’t seen what I think is the most logical explanation of all this mess come from anywhere. This is not reporting; it’s definitely all supposition, and is not based on anything other than what’s already come out. It’s just an attempt to piece this together in the most logical fashion; in short, applying Occam’s Razor to the whole deal.

Imagine that Te’o met a girl online, and things clicked. He’s excited, he’s into it. It’s important to remember that even badass football players can suffer from self-esteem issues, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that football players known for humility and soft-spoken natures might fit into this category. So maybe Manti hasn’t been, shall we say, overly active with the ladies to this point. Guys his age in that situation… well, they tend to fall in love at the drop of a hat. Even with girls they’ve never met in person who talk to them nicely enough.

(Alternatively, maybe he’s a love addict, which is a thing; the reaction is similar.)

Either way, let’s assume that Te’o is devoted to his internet girlfriend even if he hasn’t met her yet. This isn’t unheard of, and if you’ve had any kind of long-term high-profile internet presence you know someone who’s been in the exact same boat. So his real-life buddies try to get him to hook up with, you know, real-life girls… and he declines. He has to explain why. And eventually, in order to duck away from the jibes of his buddies… at some point, he’s going to have to claim he’s met her. Think about it, and you know that’s the case.

So now, we have a guy who’s starting to build a lie for reasons which are pretty innocuous. Doesn’t make it right, but under the pressure of putting up with college-age friends who can be aggressive with their needling, it’s understandable. You say you’ve met the girl, everything changes. And at this point, Manti still believes it’s real; he’s just fibbed about one little detail.

And then, blam. The internet girlfriend dies. Now, we can argue that he should have seen the signs beforehand. The actual failures to meet when they’d arranged things. The convenient car accident which apparently cut off one scheduled attempt to meet. But is he naive? Well, he’s naive enough to form an attachment to a girl he hasn’t met, so… yes. So when she “dies”… it affects him in a very real way. He legitimately is mourning. Now, bear in mind, he’d lost his grandmother too. The timeline is sketchy, but most versions of it make it clear that he lost his grandmother first, and really that would be enough to get lots of sympathetic media coverage if he was trying to pull one over on everyone for nefarious reasons. So I think it’s reasonable to accept that the week of the Michigan State game, Manti Te’o really felt like he was playing for the memory of two people.

Then things started to unravel. Maybe he never noticed his dead girlfriend retweeting his tweet, but by December the game was lost. He knew. That brings up the final question: why didn’t he come clean then?

Embarrassment. Simple as that. If this had happened to you, would you be jumping at the chance to clear the matter up? Honestly? I’m not saying you wouldn’t, but you can sure understand the incentive. Or lack thereof, more accurately. Ultimately, having perpetrated an innocent lie, I think I would probably be motivated to come clean and explain things; doing so right then and there would have at least left my situation as merely the victim of a con rather than the potential party to one. But I’m not Manti Te’o, and if something like that happened to me it wouldn’t overwhelm Twitter and the media for an entire day (and likely much longer).

The only real hitch in the entire chain here is that Te’o is allegedly close to the guy who, allegedly, set all this in motion. That’s suspicious, but it also doesn’t mean anything. Maybe this dude — whose football career crapped out, remember — didn’t much like Manti. Jealousy, a grudge of some sort, whatever. That’s as reasonable an explanation as a conspiracy.

I could be completely wrong about this. Manti Te’o could be a cynical manipulator of the media. But I think it’s far more likely that he’s a human being who felt shame about having an internet girlfriend (the Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club jokes are devastatingly on-point here), told a little white lie to relieve the pressure, and then discovered that he was in a situation he couldn’t get himself out of without humiliating himself before an audience of millions.

I’ve been reading through this paper (it’s a PDF, FYI) on the use of social media by journalists during the Penn State scandal.  There’s one thing in here that jumped out at me, though, and it needs addressing.

There’s a section in which the authors discuss the phenomenon of journalists promoting others’ work and expressing surprise that they’d do this.  Their premise is that they can’t understand why one journalist would promote another when they’re in competition.

The thing is, with two exceptions (trying to get scoops on immediately breaking news, and potential competition for the same job), they aren’t.  Journalists aren’t academics; it’s not a vital journalistic impulse to be the first one to present an idea the way it is in the academic world.  For years, journalists — in print as well as online — have nodded to their colleagues’ work.  Further, while the market is not infinite, there’s very little concern regarding scarcity, especially in a niche field (albeit a very, very large niche) like sports journalism.  If I read a piece by Sara Ganim on the Sandusky investigation, it’s not going to prevent me from reading a piece by Gregg Doyel.  We read multiple journalists’ work on the same story for a reason; we want to get multiple viewpoints on a subject.  As such, journalists themselves are not in competition with one another on a personal level… and, in fact, quite frequently the act of promoting another journalists’ work is in and of itself a means of promoting the content of one’s own.  (By which I mean the journalist promoting the work is often saying either “See, this person agrees with me” or “This person doesn’t agree with me, but our differences generate a valid discussion”.)

Now, news outlets are in competition, which brings up a separate beef I have with the conclusions of this segment of the study.  Completely missed in the study is the fact that many of the references to “promoting the competition” the authors refer to are in fact colleagues at the same outlet promoting one another.  (For example, during that time frame you might see Brett McMurphy linking to a story by Gregg Doyel; they both worked for CBS at the time.)  The study failed to take affiliation into account, and thus assumed all journalists were individual actors when they aren’t.

It’s an interesting piece of research, but hampered both by an inexplicable lack of understanding of the field and by a mistaken belief that journalists behave the same way academics do.  Academics are generally a suspicious and paranoid lot, and outside of a given research team are prone to avoid collaboration for fear of having their work co-opted; journalists, on the other hand, are largely a fraternity (especially given their propensity to switch employers), and feed off one another in a symbiotic relationship.

Edit: I forgot another thing here.  A lot of the promotion of one journalist by another involved, and involves, columnists directing readers to the reporting of another journalist.  Columnists and reporters are two entirely different species, and in fact a columnist directing the reader to initial reporting is, ah, no different than an academic directing readers to previous studies.  I’m amazed that connection wasn’t made by this paper’s authors.

Also, I forgot to link the paper in question; that’s now fixed.

Once upon a time, in a faraway land glistening with guard rails and street lights and the whirligig of police lights a young journalist fresh out of Northwestern University came to find himself tasked with the duty of reporting on sports business for a large and quite possibly evil media conglomerate.  Darren Rovell was actually decent at his job then, much to the surprise of many of you reading right now.  His byline didn’t appear multiple times a day, and his articles were in-depth and well-researched.  These two details, for those who may not make the connection, are not coincidental.  Indeed, they represent a serious problem with journalism as an institution, which is the actual point of this post.  Before we get there, though, I have to show how we get there.  So yes, this probably qualifies as a hit piece on Darren Rovell, but it’s not the point of the thing.

Continue reading “The Decline and Fall of the Rovellan Empire.”