CNN just got played

This Manti Te'o story is crazy. It’ll be very interesting to see what really happened. In the meantime, the media, who has already been completely embarrassed, just got played. CNN’s version of the story included the following:

Then later Wednesday night came a tweet from @LennayKay – a Twitter handle that once was associated with Kekua.

“It isn’t fair to drag Reagan and Troy into this.. a lot of truths and myths need to be addressed here, and they will be at noon PST tomorrow,” the tweet said.

The other two tweets on the page were retweets from the verified account of Te'o.

Clearly, someone at CNN thought the account was something notable and worthy of including in the report. Instead, the account was just another hoaxer. The original @LennaKay account was deactivated, and after the Deadspin story broke, someone reactivated the account, retweeted some of Te'o’s earlier tweets, and set up a Twitter press conference today. The result was hilarious:

My statement: This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but I have been told by Alabama’s offense that Manti Te'o is not real.

CNN fell for a hoax from a fake account impersonating a fake person. When will the media learn their lesson?