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

Worse.

It was one of those master's kids they have there. The ones who, after having normal careers, then CHOOSE to move to Indy to study sports journalism. They are hardcore, they are dedicated, they are the new breed of believers in days gone by.

You say "major fuck-up," I say "thing that people latch onto to deflect the fact that the Kekua stories run by mainstream media were the biggest f$#%-up here." Bunch of you act like it was part of the headline, lead, or even prominent in the story. It was a throwaway line, appearing long after it had been established that the whole pack of journalists more than blew this story as badly as they possibly could.

Read right through that quote when I first read the Deadspin piece. And Craggs is right when he says there were 2,000 words of context preceding it.

 

The question of whether Te'o perpetrated the scam is not a throwaway line.

 

An important trait in an interviewer is understanding the perspective of the interviewee. It's not difficult to imagine Tommy Craggs would snap when you start quoting institutions he has no respect for and their flimsy, butt-hurt arguments he (along with his staff) already has had to shoot down.

Many (but not all, by any means) of the masters students at my mostly well-regarded journalism school were awful. They would apply to write for the student paper and had no concept of basic journalistic conventions because they had little to no undergrad training. I'm talking shit like writing 10-inch stories in three paragraphs. We generally did better hiring freshmen because they had no egos about being taught what to do by 20-somethings (not that any of us really knew what we were teaching, but that's the folly of student newspapers).

 

The quoted comment in the Q and A is "f...ing Samoans."

Not Samoas. Which are the cookie.

So there is, in fact, both profanity and a racial epithet in the comment.

 

Its placement indicated that it was. They didn't develop the line; they quoted a source. They didn't give it high prominence. They didn't raise the question in the headline.

The question of how badly Deadspin ate everyone's lunch here is paramount. Anything else is noise from people who are made that Deadspin ate their lunch.

Good thing we never see any of that here.

 

Why would Craggs have no respect for Ed Sherman? And why should Craggs be the sole arbiter of who is respectable enough to form the basis of a question to him?

He can admit that they didn't have that part of the story nailed down and should have done something else with it while still standing by the entirety of the work. That happens all the time. And it's almost certainly the truth of the matter here.

 

Can't have lots of awful journalists without lots of awful journalism students. Gotta grow 'em somehow.

 

Admitting you were wrong is SO 20th century, AMIRIGHT?!?

 

Do you mean Ed Sherman, who quoted one of my anonymous and sarcastic responses as an example of the "forum" we were having about Will Leitch vs. Darren Rovell over at SportsJournalists.com? I'm sure Craggs is a huge fan.

Of course your second point is right. But again, consider the subject and the approach. Anyone with insight into Deadspin and how it has handled past criticisms, particularly over this story, would have known Craggs would come back with this level of assholery. And Craggs made plenty of good points amid the assholery because the writer let him, through a few shitty questions and a lot of shitty sourcing to opinions that didn't need sourcing.

You want to go at Craggs and Deadspin? Get your logical points into line, stand by your convictions and don't even bother bringing up old media.

 

This is a message board.

It wouldn't be worth mentioning except that as is Deadspin's habit, Craggs inaccurately shades the truth to his own advantage:


A: You’re really obsessed with policies, aren’t you? We moderate our comments to the best of our abilities. The commenting system is designed to float the best responses to the top. Bad comments get buried (and occasionally deleted outright).

The comment you cited above does not contain a “racial epithet,” by the way. It’s a joke about Girl Scout cookies. Are there any actual racial epithets you’d like to bring to our attention?

 

Oh, I see. Tommy Craggs sets the rules for all interviews. Sounds awesome.

This is the Cult Of Tommy Craggs I'm talking about. You guys can't admit he made even one mistake in that story or any others. I remember this came up previously when he put the word "n---er" in Colin Cowherd's mouth when Cowherd didn't say it.

 

Is this a line from "The Wire"?