Reporting (so to speak) from the Toy Department

Lots of people are doing the obvious jokes, but Matt Bors is covering the real issue.

For those living under a rock, Notre Dame's premier player, linebacker Manti T'eo, was the subject this past season of several stories and interviews about a girlfriend who died of leukemia. Then, last week, the sports website Deadspin revealed that his "girlfriend" was a fictional on-line character and it looked like T'eo had been the victim of an elaborate prank.

Disclosure #1: I'm a Notre Dame alum. (I've said this before. No secret.)

Disclosure #2: I'm a very alienated Notre Dame alum. (I've also said this before. Also no secret.)

Excellent graduation rate notwithstanding, the football program is no longer the model it was 30 years ago, and it really doesn't matter whether that stems from the nearly simultaneous retirement of University President Father Theodore Hesburgh and arrival of Coach Lou Holtz, or is simply a matter of adjusting to the times.

What I do know is that it was no accident when the sports information department changed the pronunciation of (classmate) Joe Theismann's name from "theez-min" to "thighs-man" in order to rhyme with "Heisman," or when they made the campus available to the production company of the self-promoting, hugely fictionalized story of "Rudy."

I believe that was the first time they'd allowed Hollywood on campus since  "Knute Rockne, All-American," which also was not a documentary -- even Irish diehards admit that the famous "win one for the Gipper" speech was something Rockne delivered at more than one half-time, and was based on a scene he most likely fabricated in the first place.

But, the school does object when they feel a film hasn't met the proper level of truthiness and is not above attempting to quash that which they suspect has "knowingly and illegally misappropriated, diluted and commercially exploited for their private profit the names, symbols, football team, prestige, high reputation and goodwill" of the university.

Which brings us back to Matt's cartoon.

Here's how I see the situation:

Manti T'eo strikes up an online relationship that turns out to be phony, and, as part of the prank, this fictional girl dies of leukemia. There are enough of these sorts of stories going around that MTV has based a reality show, "Catfish," on the phenomenon.

It is not a particularly compelling TV show. They find somebody who is in love with an unseen, on-line suitor, they investigate and the bogus lover's story quickly falls apart, they arrange a meeting and the two people kind of stand there awkwardly. After you've seen two episodes, you should pretty much know what the wet paint is going to look like after it dries.

But it seems that Notre Dame's sports information machine got hold of this story and saw an emotional hook. So they fed the story to the press, which promptly put it out on the air.

There is a reason why, in most newsrooms, sports is referred to as "the toy department."

It's not that they should have thought the story was a hoax. But wouldn't somebody want to know a little more about this poor deceased Stanford student? 

Despite the way it's spelled, "jock-sniffing" is not on the same page of the dictionary as "journalism."

If nothing else (and we're not just setting the bar low here, but laying it in a shallow trench), wouldn't you want to know if her friends in Palo Alto were going to root for Notre Dame in the Big Game?

Apparently not.

Consider now the position of Manti T'eo. Unlike the people on "Catfish," who volunteer to look like gullible, socially-maladept fools in return for the chance to be on television, he's already on television.

But now his story has gone from being his own deal to something that his non-paying employer, the university, wants to feature.

Not only has he been a team-player all his life, but they are working to make him a full-fledged ESPN star, which will enhance his visibility not just to the public at large but to the various brain-trusts in the NFL who decide which college stars will get the enormous contracts.

So he plays it up a bit, and his family plays it up, and his teammates and his classmates kind of sense that there's something bogus about it, but he's a good guy and what the hell. Let him get a better shot at grabbing the brass ring.

And then it all falls apart and here we are.

The sports information department is scrambling for a cover story, his family is tryng to say whatever it is they think they should probably say, and it's his ass hanging out there, twisting in the wind.

When a kid is in free-fall, I'm not gonna criticize him for not sticking the landing. 

Meanwhile, as Matt points out, nobody over in the toy department was interested in a story about a young female student who killed herself in the (apparent) wake of a sexual assault by a football player, one of two such incidents in which the women were reportedly intimidated into silence by their assailants' friends.

How could you possibly report such a story? Can't be done! The sports information department did not issue a press release or arrange to make anyone available for a sound bite on the practice field!

During the OJ trial, there were sports departments that objected to the story being taken away from them, but there were reasons for that:

1. Besides being a (retired) football player, Simpson was also a movie star, an advertising icon and a frequent talk show guest.

2. As one editor explained, "If Julia Child murdered someone, we would not run the story in the food section."

3. The toy department would have screwed it up.

Proof of which is their unwillingness, disinterest or inability to find out what happened to those young women.

For anyone contemplating a career in journalism, here's a pretty good rule: Don't expect public relations people to volunteer the bad news, and don't blame them for lying to you.

That's their job.

Do yours.

Comments

[Dick Dragovich]

Thanks for the clarity. I listen to sports talk radio and all week they were giddy like schoolgirls every time a new detail came out. I could never cypher who would gain from the goings on. Now I see it's the school and sports talk. We are in love with celebrity and sports puts people out for display in their rawest unfiltered form. It does appear Manti has been duped and is having trouble spinning a response. I am imagining him reporting to training camp and being the butt of locker room comedians.

[Jack Curtin]

I generally agree with you, Mike, but I think your "toy department" concept is dependent on an illusion, said illusion being that there is some "serious" segment of the press that does not buy into myths nor embrace fabricated tales told them by the people they cover. Paul Pierce had some things to say about that this week here. Keep up the great work; I start off every morning with a visit to your site.

[Mike Peterson]

Great link, Jack. I've got to put Charlie Pierce (I can call him "Charlie" because I listen to "Wait Wait") on my regular diet. And it makes sense, in this context: "The creation of bad vaudeville spectaculars for public consumption is the way to the top of the ladder in political journalism."

I was not thinking of the political jocksniffers who attend the White House Correspondents Dinner so much as the lunch pail level folks at your daily paper, who, if the mayor says it is raining, look out the window and expect sunshine simply because they don't believe anything they are told by anyone who owns two suits. That is also a fault, but one that keeps everybody honest, so long as they then follow the famous dictum of "if your mother says she loves you, check it out" and write their stories based on what they find out, rather than what they tend to believe.

There is a notable exception on the "real news" side of the newsroom, and that is the reporters who cover the cop shop and who tend to believe that all police are righteous and anybody arrested, or even questioned, probably did it.

One way I got cred with the cops in Maine was in stonewalling a subpoena for my notes on an interview with a suspected murderer. The other came after the subpoena was dropped but while he was still walking around, when the lead investigator, in a very much off the record conversation, asked if I thought he was guilty and I said I'd known cons who scared the hell out of me and cons I'd invite to my kid's birthday party and it had nothing to do with their guilt or innocence.

The cops like working with reporters who act as stenographers rather than investigators, but they certainly snicker at them behind their backs. I can't help but think politicians on the national stage feel the same way.

But it's the great storytellers who make it to the national stage, and Pierce is right that there are credulous simpletons galore among the headliners in this industry.