Deadspin has revealed that an important storyline from this year's college football season is a hoax (since I don't care about college football, the first I read of it was on G+). To me, the real story here is the list of media outlets that didn't bother to fact check the girlfriend's existence, including (taken from the Deadspin post):
South Bend Tribune
Sports Illustrated
New York Times
Fox Sports
New York Post
ESPN
CBS (CBS This Morning)
College GameDay
Los Angeles Times
The crux of the matter here is "storyline". This was a story that Manti Te'o could sell to media outlets because it was a story that the media outlets could sell to their consumers. And, because it was profitable to tell this story, one wonders if that had any bearing in the gross negligence (bordering on complicity in the hoax) shown by the media outlets.
Continuing to shoot their credibility in the foot, ESPN's report on the Deadspin post glosses over the possibility that Manti Te'o was in on the hoax, spending a single sentence on it, and instead devote four paragraphs to Reagan Mauia's mistaken belief that the fake girlfriend actually existed.
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