<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" I remain fascinated by the unfolding saga of Manti Te&amp;#039;o and the alleged death of his imaginary girlfriend \u2014 Who exactly got the white roses he sent to the funeral anyway? \u2014 partly for the pure schadenfreude of watching the perpetual-motion Notre Dame mythmaking machine sputter and wheeze, leaving gears and tiny springs and pieces of itself all over the landscape as it augers in spectacularly, and in full public view. (And the Gipper was a gambler and a bounder and drank South Bend dry. Pass it on.) Even if you believe Te&amp;#039;o to be a grifter&amp;#039;s mark when the whole thing began, and I am less sure of that almost by the hour, he certainly realized he had a good thing going and kept up his end of the bargain even after he says he&amp;#039;d become aware of the con. This is doubly true for the institution he represented. At a spectacularly ill-advised press conference, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick got all teary-eyed talking about how his dogged team of investigators had proven that Te&amp;#039;o was an innocent victim of the Intertoobz. In addition to infantilizing the player, Swarbrick&amp;#039;s lachrymose maundering served to remind the country that Notre Dame had been a helluva lot less diligent in trying to get to the bottom of a sexual assault allegation made against one of its players by a woman named Lizzie Seeberg, who got threatened over the phone for her trouble and ended up taking her own life. However it all shakes out for Te&amp;#039;o, and he&amp;#039;ll be playing on Sundays no matter what happens, this means that the response of &amp;quot;Fk Notre Dame anyway&amp;quot; is still valid in the context of this story, and that&amp;#039;s all for the good. There also is, or ought to be, a lot of soul-searching going on at the various media outlets that passed along this barrel of bushwah. The fact-checking system at a lot of important places utterly broke down. (Your fact-checker discovers that there&amp;#039;s no record of a person at the college she allegedly attended, and no record at all of the severe automobile accident that is so central to the story, and the response is to &amp;quot;write around&amp;quot; these inconveniences? This is not good.) But, as someone who&amp;#039;s working both sides of the aisle at the moment, there is something up with which I will not put, and that is snarky comments from the elite political press about what suckers the people who write for The Toy Department are. Knock it off, foofs. Careers are made in the courtier press by doing deliberately what probably may have happened by slovenly accident in the case of the sportswriters who passed along this tale of highly marketable pathos. What is the significant difference between the actual reality of Manti Te&amp;#039;o&amp;#039;s dead imaginary girlfriend and the actual reality George W. Bush&amp;#039;s ranch in Crawford? In the elite political press, mythmaking \u2014 which the gang at Politico would call &amp;quot;building the narrative&amp;quot; \u2014 has become so deeply entrenched as a boon to various careers that hardly anyone notices any more. Stephen Glass got away with it for longer than Manti Te&amp;#039;o did, and he did so at several different prestigious publications. Almost nine years ago, Sasha Issenberg pretty much tied David Brooks&amp;#039;s entire reportorial credibility up in a sack and dropped it into the Schuykill, and Brooks nonetheless has continued to thrive and will be teaching Yale undergraduates about humility next fall. So let&amp;#039;s not be doing the Superior Dance too vigorously in the faces of the sportswriters who got played in this case, OK, cool kidz? But it&amp;#039;s not the spectacular cases that are the real problem. It&amp;#039;s the steady, day-to-day mythmaking \u2014 the encasement of grubby political transactions in shiny marble, the draping of togas upon unimaginative hacks, the endless who&amp;#039;s-up-and-who&amp;#039;s-down scoreboard watching that passes for analysis. All of these are just as phony as the ongoing farce in South Bend is. Only within this manufactured world are &amp;quot;the American people&amp;quot; worried right now about The Deficit. The creation of bad vaudeville spectaculars for public consumption is the way to the top of the ladder in political journalism.  Al Gore ran for president and he was beset by a press corps that fashioned its own Al Gore out of nothing more than its own naked animus, and that Al Gore was no more real than Manti Te&amp;#039;o&amp;#039;s dead imaginary girlfriend was. (Alas, Melinda Henneberger, who has dogged the Lizzie Seeberg case, was in the middle of that fiasco back in the day, although she was far from the worst of them.) The grand prize of them all, of course, was the spectacular failure of the political press in the matter of Ronald Reagan, who made up more complete shinola about himself and his life before breakfast than Manti Te&amp;#039;o has in his entire life as a public figure. This particular failure has continued even after Reagan&amp;#039;s death. Manti Te&amp;#039;o met his dead imaginary girlfriend and they &amp;quot;locked eyes&amp;quot; after a game at Stanford? Ronald Reagan knew a welfare queen in Chicago who was driving a Cadillac. Manti Te&amp;#039;o hung out with his dead imaginary girlfriend in Hawaii? Ronald Reagan liberated death camps during World War II. Manti Te&amp;#039;o said that his dead imaginary girlfriend was the love of his life? Ronald Reagan said trees cause air pollution. Manti Te&amp;#039;o said that his dead imaginary girlfriend would have wanted him to play against Michigan State? Ronald Reagan told a story about an act of military heroism that never actually happened, but that he apparently got from a 1944 war movie called, A Wing And A Prayer and when Reagan&amp;#039;s spokesman was asked about this whopper, he replied, &amp;quot;If you tell the same story five times, it&amp;#039;s true.&amp;quot;  So there&amp;#039;s a rough kind of historical symmetry in the fact that Ronald Reagan provided the whitewashed portrayal of the bounder, George Gipp, in the movie that launched the mythology in which the saga of Manti Te&amp;#039;o and his dead imaginary girlfriend found such a proper and profitable home. The failure of sports journalism in this case is huge and spectacular but, in its impact, it is nothing compared to the discreet daily fabulism that attends so much of the coverage of politics in this country. &amp;quot;If you tell the same story five times, it&amp;#039;s true.&amp;quot; As anyone who follows elite political journalism in this country will tell you, this is now axiomatic in the field. It&amp;#039;s the way you get ahead. It&amp;#039;s the way you get on television. It is the crude way of saying that perception is reality, which is the fundamental journalistic heresy through which lies become truth simply if they work, and N. Leroy Gingrich becomes a visionary political leader. At least sportswriters still give you an honest account of what happens in the games. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17210/lessons-of-manti-teo-011813/>