Through 2 ½ years of journalism school, I’ve been told a phrase that I’ve never really put much stake in: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

I’ve also been taught to recreate scenes by asking detail-oriented questions: What was your reaction to hearing that? What color was the mug of coffee he sipped before he said that? What time of day was it? Was the room hot or cold?

Sources are to be taken, for the most part, at face value. So if your mother says she loves you, isn’t that good enough authority?

Well, thanks for clearing that question up for me, Manti Te’o. Now I totally get it.

In my column last week, I tipped my proverbial hat to Deadspin as a sort of righteous third party in the world of sports news, similar to what Jon Stewart does to the news media with “The Daily Show.” Fewer than 48 hours later, Deadspin breaks its biggest story ever, uncovering Lennay Kekua as a hoax and reminding us that not only does the site analyze the news, it also takes what it can get on the reporting end of things. In this case, it got an overlooked nugget of pure gold.

The drama that ensued took place on two fronts: the Manti Te’o’s actual life, emotional state and public reputation front; and the journalistic front. What makes Deadspin’s story so spectacular is that it was so easy, so in front of everyone’s nose, yet no one had the audacity to question the most basic of accepted truths about whether someone we’ve never interacted with actually exists.

By finding the answer to this question, Deadspin embarrassed Sports Illustrated, The New York Times and the South Bend Tribune, all of which had quoted Te’o’s poetic waxings and settled for no near-contact with a crucial source for what was one of the biggest college football stories this year. ESPN and the rest of the sports media bobbed their heads along the fairy tale’s epic course as the American public dug emotional roots into poor Manti Te’o’s story.

All those who covered Te’o’s journey should feel duped, but should they be blamed for poor reporting? The public is pretty sympathetic in this particular instance — everyone was fooled.

Pete Thamel, who wrote the cover story about Te’o for SI in October (and who used to write for The New York Times), posted a story detailing his conversations with Te’o about Lennay Kekua, and in an interview with Dan Patrick, Thamel recounted the red flags he came across but ended up ignoring.

“I did look for an obituary, I did look for a death notice, I did look on Lexis-Nexis to see if she existed. I didn’t find anything in those,” Thamel said. “And in some sense, I communicated that while we were fact checking to my editors. There were small red flags.”

In his fallout story, Thamel said he also called an assistant athletic director at Stanford, from where Kekua supposedly graduated, to find out what year she graduated in. There was no record of her, and the assistant athletic director commented how strange it was that he had never heard of a student dating Te’o. Thamel admitted this was “the most glaring sign” he overlooked. In the end, however, the word of mouth prevailed over the lack of a paper trail.

“There was a whole level of detail there,” Thamel explained to Patrick. “You were able to write around it because you had a whole football team, university, community and country.”

You also had pictures of Kekua surfacing through various media. CBS in particular used a picture for a television segment they did — once again cutting corners and assuming the pieces fit. In Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey’s famed story for Deadspin, they used these pictures, linked to Kekua’s Twitter account and hammered away at examining what was absolutely a loose end. They did related-images searches and found the Instagram account of a girl who had unknowingly become the face of tragedy for the Notre Dame football faithful. From here, Deadspin tracked down Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the now-known perpetrator of the prank that fooled the nation.

This extra step was the one the major media failed to take. The only reason Deadspin took it was because they have the spare time to couple with the cynical skepticism, unlike the major-market players that can’t chase leads that may go nowhere.

In a YouTube segment for ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” columnist Bill Plaschke made the point that, while you don’t just ponder a person’s existence, you do try and track down that person or sources close to them for your story.

Most of these attempts were walled off by the facade of family privacy, in which case you should ask yourself why her boyfriend is bludgeoning that privacy by sensationalizing her.

The problem was that while the math didn’t add up, no one had the time to figure out why.

Regardless of what this hoax was to Manti Te’o, it was the perfect crime to the journalism industry. It was a victimless crime, one that we can learn a lesson from but not necessarily do anything about.

For Tuiasosopo and his associates, it was just another one of the many unintended side effects of a joke that turned into something larger than life. For journalism, it’s a new rendition of an old adage: “If the whole country says his girlfriend loved him, make sure she actually existed.”

She didn’t.

Eliot is a junior in Media. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @EliotTweet.