Role of blog in Te’o hoax reflects shift in reporting
The biggest sports story of the new year broke in the middle of yesterday afternoon on the sports gossip blog Deadspin. Notre Dame Linebacker Manti Te’o was either the victim or perpetrator of a hoax revolving around his dead girlfriend who never actually existed. The Heisman runner up, whose hopes were helped immensely by the captivating narrative of his performance against Michigan State shortly after losing his grandmother and his girlfriend, did actually suffer the loss of his grandmother that fateful weekend. However, Deadspin was unable to find any evidence that his girlfriend ever existed, besides a Twitter page featuring a picture of a completely different girl who was oblivious to the entire ordeal.
The story is convoluted and confusing, and it will take a while to sort out the full details. But what we do know is that the story was broken by the website and thrust into the public consciousness for hosting photos of a certain athletes’ member back in 2009. This is just more confirmation that with the rise of the internet and blogs, conventional media is often beaten at its own game, and non-traditional outlets are changing the way we get news.
Though the Brett Favre incident is fairly indicative of some of the content that you will find on the site, the Manti Te’o story and others alike have also begun to make routine appearances. ESPN also had the Te’o story but sat on it until they could get an interview with him. Since Deadspin isn’t a huge corporation, there were less considerations to be made, and they were able to go ahead and publish their story. That type of freedom is why blogs often scoop the traditional media on all different kinds of stories.
Given the instantaneousness of news on Twitter or on a blog, it is hard for a writer of a newspaper or magazine to get something through an editor and in print before someone else has already run away with the story. This leads to news that has not been thoroughly vetted and taken as truth. A great example of this is the aftermath of the Newtown Elementary School shooting, which featured a myriad of reports that would later be found untrue. Ryan Lanza was not the killer, his mother did not work at the school and there was no second gunman. However, all those were reported as fact at one time or another by many normally reputable sources.
Without a doubt, the single most important advancement that the world has seen over the past 50 years is the Internet. It connects billions of people across the world and has changed the way we do everything. Media is no exception — in fact, it has adapted fairly well to the Internet age. For better or worse, it will continue to be a huge part of the age.