jackie thinks about mis/dis/information for a long hard while

In 2012, Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o announced his grandmother and girlfriend died in the same day dedicating his gameplay that season to their memory. Sports news outlets picked up the story with a storm reporting on both the players' incredible success in the season and the tragic passing of these two women. By the next year, it will be revealed that only one of these women exists. His girlfriend, an online relationship whom Te’o never met, is ultimately a catfish.

While there are layers to this story beyond the slurry of reports as this was revealed to America (ie, the girlfriend profile “Lennay Kekua” was run by a trans woman in her pre-transitioning youth, and Manti’s personal mental health drawing him to social media and thus this relationship), the initial sports news outlets that published on this story fall into categories of misinformation where, as defined in Caroline Jack’s Lexicon of Lies,  “accuracy is unintentional” (2). Articles are revealed in earnest and off the basis that there is an early 2010’s social media footprint enough to reflect a real person. The Deadspin article released to reveal this inaccuracy interestingly roots itself in the righteous need to correct the misinformed trades of Sports Illustrated and ESPN while further establishing Deadspin as a legitimate news site. Yet Deadspin is in the same boat as the misinformed media es emphasized in Marwick and Lewis’ Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online discussion of “the attention economy” and its impact on news outlets transitions into online environments drawing from popular stories on social media (42). Though the catfishing of it all displayed a form of disinformation in Manti’s personal life, when brought to the public sphere the story is rooted in misinformation subject to carnivorous media.

Where this example was so clear to me throughout reading, both Lexicon and Media Manipulation made me repeatedly think of meme cultures and traditionally parody news accounts. The discussion of trolls coupled with definitions and misplacements of satire on this spectrum of false information requires repeated clarification of intent versus public use; if the joke was created to disinform, are consumers at fault for believing it's true? Kuo and Marwick offer a great line to this stating “countering mis- and disinformation goes beyond solutions like “fact checking” or “media literacy” which place responsibility on individuals to become informed media consumers” (5). When considering accounts like Discussing Film that exist across Twitter and Instagram histories there are numerous parody accounts that have come and gone from singular like-styled tweets; I’m referring to accounts like DibussingFilm and DissussingFilm, both of which no longer exist either at all or as a fully run account as the trend is to simply change your profile picture and submit a tweet that is almost perfect.

Jack’s Lexicon of Lies importantly points out that “online content often spreads far beyond its original context, and sometimes it can be difficult to judge whether a piece of content is serious or satirical in nature”, (12) a factor we discussed last week with the Hurricane Hillary “live reports” using images from the Universal Studio Tour to represent flooding. While parody will always require forms of media literacy to combat, this week offered interesting takes and definitions to these forms of comedy moving into the digital and the ethical responsibilities of their comedians not unlike journalists.