The Associated Press issued a correction late last week to address reporting that cited Manti Te’o's fake girlfriend as real. As reported in Mike Allen’s Playbook at Politico, here’s the correction:

In a Sept. 15, 2012, story about Notre Dame’s

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The Los Angeles Times | Daily Download
Diane O'Meara has closed her social media accounts, she writes in the Los Angeles Times. A hoaxter told former Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o that O'Meara's face was Lennay Kekua, a woman he believed to be a girlfriend he never met. O'Meara realizes getting off the grid is "not a long-term solution":

Eventually, I'll go back to using social media. But I'll take an even more cautious approach. I'll have a new definition of who I agree to "friend," and it will be much closer to the old definition of friendship. My friends will be those I actually know and trust. If someone sends me a "friend" request, I will be as discerning as I am in choosing who I include in my off-line life.

(more...)

CBS New York | BuzzFeed
“What am I going to do, strap a lie detector on this guy?” Katie Couric said to WFAN hosts Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton Friday, while recapping her exclusive interview with former Notre Dame football player Manti Te'o.

“I mean, I think he was really telling the truth about most of the things we discussed," she said.

I think that there was a lot of embarrassment and shame. I think he knows that he behaved in a way that raises a lot of questions. But I really don’t think he concocted this as a way to enhance his profile or make him look like a sympathetic, almost mythic character.

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"Good Morning America" | Yahoo | Poynter | Deadspin
Did Manti Te'o make a good damage-control decision when he decided to give his first big post-non-dead-girlfriend interview to Katie Couric? Far from it.



Christina Ng writes that Couric (who shares the same spokeperson as Te'o) found parts of Te'o's story a little hard to swallow. (more...)

The New York Times | Sports Illustrated
The New York Times' account of how ESPN frittered away a tip about Manti Te'o's imaginary girlfriend has everything you'd want from a story-behind-the-story. It sports a marvelous headline ("As ESPN Debated, Manti Te’o Story Slipped Away"), and is a fascinating account of how Te'o's reps muscled ESPN after the story broke.

And, in a bizarre echo of the story it tells, it arrives after Sports Illustrated's account of the same events.

Both news organizations speak with ESPN News Chief Vince Doria, who tells the Times "We were very close," and tells SI "We felt we were close to reporting it." Richard Sandomir and James Andrew Miller report ESPN's tip came from Te'o's agent Tom Condon. Doria told Deitsch that ESPN's "interest in the story was Te'o, and he has now told his story." Three unnamed ESPN executives told the Times "they should have published on Jan. 16." (more...)

Sports Illustrated | Journo2Go
It was a story of two tips.

The first, as Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch reports, came to ESPN late on Jan. 10. The second came to Deadspin on Jan. 11. Both were similar: Something seems fishy about this Manti Te'o girlfriend story, you should check it out.

What happened after? (more...)

Of all the questions arising from Deadspin's Manti Te'o story, maybe the biggest is: Why didn't other journalists uncover the hoax sooner? The story broke Wednesday night, and news geeks are still trying to put the pieces back together.

• What did Manti Te'o know, and when did he know it? Both he and Notre Dame said he learned his dead girlfriend Lennay Kekua wasn't dead, because she never existed, on Dec. 6. And yet he referred to her on Dec. 8 and 9, Associated Press reporter Tom Coyne writes:

Te'o was in New York for the Heisman presentation on Dec. 8 and, during an interview before the ceremony that ran on the WSBT.com, the website for a South Bend TV station, Te'o said: "I mean, I don't like cancer at all. I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer. So I've really tried to go to children's hospitals and see, you know, children."

It happened again in a Bill Dwyre column that ran in the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 10. Dwyre wrote: "He said girlfriend Lennay Kekau 'made me promise, when it happened, that I would stay and play,' Te'o said Sunday night." (more...)

• The original bizarre story of the football player's nonexistent dead girlfriend on Deadspin by Jack Dickey and Timothy Burke.

• "I can tell you we’re as baffled as anybody,” said a South Bend Tribune staffer when Poynter phoned Wednesday evening. “If this story was a cruel hoax, as the University of Notre Dame has now indicated, we indeed were taken in, as were many others, including officials of the Notre Dame football program," Tribune Executive Editor Tim Harman said in a statement.

• "You can learn a lot about what happened by looking at the contradictions between other journalists’ stories," Burke tells Poynter's Mallary Tenore. "That was what really tipped us off, after all, that something was weird here. Major news organizations disagreed on the date of a person’s death by up to four days."

• The South Bend Tribune didn't delete its old Te'o stories: It yanked reporter Eric Hansen's Oct. 12 article from the paid archives so that it could be more readily accesible, and it collected its other previously published content on the hoax here. (more...)