The Bodda Getta

After watching the UK vs ND basketball game early in the season and seeing Teo in the crowd more often than the game flexing and all kinds of things for attention, this comes as no surprise.

This whole story is silly but important in the sense it is symtomatic and instructional.

First off, regarding who was behind this hooey, there is a very simple way to find out if Manti was duped or one of the perpetrators of the hoax. The roses - he said he sent white roses to her funeral because they were her favorite flower. The only way he could have done that from South Bend, no matter if he used an internet service or found online or called a local Carson, CA florist, was to order them, giving the company delivery instructions and a message for the card and pay for them with a credit card. It would be a very simple matter for him to print a copy of his credit card statement containing the record of the charge and produce it for the media. If he cannot produce the credit card charge documentation then this is the thread that when pulled on unravels the whole story and proves he was involved in concocting this hoax.

If he produces documentation for the credit card charge, it will list the delivery address, whether it was a church, mortuary or cemetery along with instructions and message. He would have also been contacted very soon after the order was placed notifying him that there was no record of any service for the name indicated on the charge and so his order was undeliverable. Which means that if he was indeed duped by a person or persons and had been strung along for months or years (ridiculous to even consider but whatever) then he definitely knew, at least soon after attempting to send the flowers to her funeral service, that no one by that name had died, ergo, he was being duped. So in either case, at the very least by the time he was interviewed shortly after her "death" he knew the truth, whatever that was.

It really is amazing that supposed "national journalists" working at the highest levels in their field, each with a finely honed individual "BS" detection system developed through years of dealing with news stories and the people connected with those stories either took everything around this story at face value with no questions or decided to totally ignore huge red flags fluttering right in front of their eyes. It's further proof that the field of journalism and the news media has been taken over at all levels, from the field through upper management, by idealogues who write, edit and approve stories as they see them through the prism of their belief system.

And if you were a "crack" journalist working for a national magazine or a national television broadcast network working on this story wouldn't you just love to have a photo or video clip of the newly dug grave site with those white roses sitting on top of the mound of earth as the "cherry on top" of your heart strings tugging story. It would have been a snap to make a phone call and have that done. Carson, CA is a city in LA County 18 miles south of downtown LA. Surely either espn, cbs or si could have easily produced that in a couple of hours. Hell, I could actually call a friend in LA right this minute and have that photo and/or video clip on my computer in an hour. But no one involved would dare do anything which might possibly blemish this perfect little story because they liked it just the way it was. Hard to believe these are the best and brightest news journalists in the country. Woodward and Bernstein? These guys should be writing soap operas for daytime television.