Deadspin: Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend story was a hoax

Craggs and Scocca both sound insufferable here. In service of . . . just what, exactly?

 

As Craggs explains it in that interview, ridding sports journalism of the type of myth-making reach in which Manti Te'o uses two coffins as a launching pad for being awesome and rad at football.

I think that's an honorable cause.

 

I very much disagree with the idea that he handed it to his interviewer. He was completely wrong in characterizing Te'o's involvement, and he just doesn't seem to care whether he is right or wrong about what he puts out there. Not much different from Daulerio in that regard. But regarding the Cult, there seems to be a core out there that just gobbles up everything he does.

 

I enjoyed his answer to the last question.

I think Craggs is whip smart.

I also think this is a fine example of what I said one the rambling NCAA thread. The professional critics get super butthurt when they're criticized back.

 

Deadspin has yet to prove that Te'o was behind any of this or that a single sports journalist knowingly piped bad information into a story. So I'm not sure they've rid sports journalism of anything. Or even addressed satisfactorily how this specific story might have happened. They're not much for follow-up.

As it was the day it broke, it's an incomplete Deadspin gotcha.

 

You asked what their work was in service of.

That's what it was in service of.

Have they succeeded? On the strength of one story? No.

Was that one story more memorable than every piece Rick Reilly has penned for ESPN.com, cumulatively? Yes.

The cause was honorable. I stand by that.

 

He also earned by respect a few weeks ago when he said that Deadspin's darkest hour was the blowout coverage of two ESPN middle managers meeting at work and getting married.

 

No. I asked what their insufferability was in service of.

It's not as if they broke the Pentagon Papers here.

That Craggs and Scocca are so smart in service of so little may be what fuels their anger and perpetual condescension.

 

Seriously?

How about, "In service of letting that snot-nosed, wet-behind-the-ears rookie know that spouting his old-school professors' pretty rantings about journalistic STANDARDS!!!!!!! and those blamed INTERTUBES!!!!! doesn't amount to whole hill of anything in 2013."

This kid tried to badger Craggs with all the same BS platitudes about how they should have gotten "both" sides (forgetting that we KNOW Te'o's side: that he had a girl and she died), and all that old claptrap that applied to the dying media world.

Their "insufferability" was an appropriate response to the nature of the questions, which seemed to seek to condemn these guys for embarrassing the old media.

As for the "Pentagon Papers": They broke a story that no one else did. Now people want to know about their process.

It's rather disingenuous (and a bit laughable) that sports jockeys would ever presume to point the finger at another media practitioner - even one of their own - and say "THAT story, the one YOU produced, is simply not important!!!"

 

Because they weren't famous enough, or because it wasn't a big enough scandal?

I know you pooh-poohed this thing at the time, but they were more than middle-managers, and they were engaging in conduct that would have gotten lesser employees fired.

Katie Lacey was one of the top names in sports marketing, having previously run it at Pepsi, and David Berson was a V.P. of Programming.

They expensed the hotel rooms they rented for their hook-ups for goodness sake. That gets you fired from any job.

That they ended up getting married doesn't change the circumstances. I mean, it's a nice ending to the story, but he was still a married guy engaging in an extramarital affair with a colleague, at one of the biggest media companies in the world.

And, ESPN had recently dealt with the Steve Phillips affair.

Firing Phillips, while allowing Lacey and Berson to carry on was hypocrisy.

I still don't see the problem with Deadspin calling them (ESPN) out for it.

 

I said it wasn't important enough to merit the condescension they deal out in its defense. And it's not.

And picking on a student for asking questions - however clayfooted or conventional - about their process hardly seems sporting.

 

Then you start to find out a little more about a guy like Magary.
When the miserable slug says he didn't have a friend in the world in college.
Well gee whiz, Wally - I wonder why.
And it all starts to make sense.