The question is whether Te'o was scammer or scammed.Schulman, who tried to contact Te'o over Twitter but has not heard from him, says he believes Te'o's story — up to a point. "Joseph, the TV co-host, says the idea of an Internet scammer telling his or her prey that they've been in a car accident or have a fatal disease is consistent with how many of these stories play out. "We both receive hundreds and hundreds of e-mails a week from people desperate to find out if this person they're talking to is real or not and whether or not we can help them. NFL player Manti Te'o appears to have a real girlfriend after being hoaxed in an elaborate catfish scheme in 2012. Circulations faltered and then plummeted. A full-page New York Times Magazine article in 1910 told of “poor George Osborne,” a Connecticut bachelor who had been deceived for many years into thinking that he was writing love letters to his sweetheart, when in fact it was an elaborate ploy by his neighbor to bilk him.The headline of the article, “Wooed a ‘Marjorie Daw’ for Fourteen Long Years,” alluded to an 1869 short story by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in which an exchange of letters between two friends leads to one of them inventing the titular character. "If it happened, if it was real in terms of him not being a part of it, then you feel sorry for him that he was scammed. I've heard his answers. The movie title inspired a new verbal noun, “gaslighting,” defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the action or process of manipulating a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity.”Why do we keep returning to dramatic touchstones to label such real-world double-dealing? Some of it still takes months and, like the Perhaps Wojciechowski was, like others, swept up by the heartbreaking and yet uplifting story of a football player who conquered, even after the death of his grandmother and girlfriend. Lies don't last long when they're online. If he created the whole thing, you have to feel sorry for him that he needed to do that. I believe he's guilty of being naïve and of embellishing to hide his embarrassment over a girlfriend he had never met. But when the story sort of turned into what it is, he may have become aware of certain things. Verizon doesn't erase its information. If a 2010 documentary is to believed, the catfish of the human world keep the rest of us "fresh." Manti Te'o, 'Catfish,' Katie Couric, Oprah and the Sports World: Paging Dr. Phil! "Deadspin.com broke the story Wednesday, and Notre Dame confirmed it hours later. And why he didn't try to discourage the idea of hiring a P.I. It makes sense, then, that we fall back on the language of storytellers to describe these true-life dramas of Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com. And there are those people who are catfish in life. In the case of “catfishing,” it’s a narrative tailor-made for the age of Twitter and Facebook.After the sports blog Deadspin revealed that the supposed girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was a hoax, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick attempted to explain Te’o’s victimization by pointing to the documentary and MTV series “and the sort of associated things you’ll find online and otherwise about ‘catfish’ or ‘catfishing.’” He described “catfishing” as a scam “perpetrated with shocking frequency,” admitting that he had learned the term from a recent episode of “Dr. She thinks the mystery will be solved in time. The Manti Te'o hoax: What is 'catfishing'? "I do believe him," that person told USA TODAY Sports. James Montgomery 01/16/2013 "Before this week, Te'o was famous as a football star from Notre Dame with a heart-tugging tale backlit by the tragic death of his girlfriend.But he's infamous now: Tens of thousands of Americans who pay no attention to college football and had never heard of him before Wednesday's bombshell want to know what in the world is going on.This much is certain: Lennay Kekua is not dead because she is not real. "Te'o's teammates reacted with disbelief when they heard about the hoax, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who did not want to be named because he was not authorized to speak. "The evidence can be tracked and traced.
It's the foundation of journalism. In George Cukor’s 1944 mystery thriller “Gaslight” (which followed a play and an earlier film adaptation), a man (Charles Boyer) tries to convince his new wife (Ingrid Bergman) that she is going insane, in order to steal her fortune. The Manti Te'o story appears more of a catfish story. They'd keep them in vats in the ship. Piltdown Man, alien autopsy, real fairies in England, all happened well before the age of the Internet and social media. As So we have two opposing forces here: The growing issue of online fakery and the media's inability to police the veracity of its own content. It's done all the time. To do so might have put one or more reporters' stories second or last.We cannot go back to the old days of huge, expensive fact-checking departments, but clearly something needs to change.