‘Three Cups of Tea’ author has been teabagging us all

Have you read “Three Cups of Tea,” Greg Mortenson’s moving best-selling tale of human triumph that has sold millions of copies — it’s even required reading for all American soldiers dispatched to duty in Afghanistan — and inspired countless readers to believe that the human spirit is alive and well and thriving? Well, there’s really no other way to put this — It’s a complete f*cking fraud.

Yes, 60 Minutes, in one of those cringe-worthy exposes that has made the show the standard-bearer for television news magazines, brought down Mortenson’s house of cards last night.

Reports 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft:

Greg Mortenson’s books have made him a publishing phenomenon and sought-after speaker on the lecture circuit, where he has attained a cult-like status. He regularly draws crowds of several thousand people and $30,000 per engagement.

And everywhere Mortenson goes, he brings an inspirational message built around a story that forms the cornerstone of Three Cups of Tea and his various ventures – how, in 1993, he tried and failed to reach the summit of K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, to honor his dead sister, how he got lost and separated from his party on the descent and stumbled into a tiny village called Korphe…It’s a powerful and heart-warming tale that has motivated millions of people to buy his book and contribute nearly $60 million to his charity.

But in the words of bestselling author Jon Krakauer, who is interviewed in the piece, “It’s a beautiful story, and it’s a lie.” Watch Kroft’s report below:

https://cnettv.cnet.com/av/video/cbsnews/atlantis2/cbsnews_player_embed.swf

Perhaps the most heartbreaking thing about Mortenson’s apparent fraud is that it’s the sort of tale that we all so desperately want to believe in, and to see it exposed as yet another fabricated memoir is just plain deflating. Even more so from a writer’s perspective, as Esquire’s Chris Jones points out:

We live in a golden age of journalism and writing. Every day I find a story to read that’s beautiful, inspiring, important, powerful.

But we also live in an age of incredible fabulism. It seems as though every few months, some journalist or author or memoirist is found to have been lying: Jayson Blair, James Frey, Stephen Glass, Misha Defonseca, Margaret B. Jones, Janet Cooke… And now, possibly the biggest of the bunch, Mortenson, whose first book alone has sold more than four million copies and is, as Kroft reported, required reading for troops heading to Afghanistan.

It’s all so much bullshit, in more ways than one. Every time one of these liars and thieves gets pinched—and worse, every time one of them doesn’t—the rest of our reputations take a hit. More than most professions, journalists are viewed by the public as a unified class, almost as a species. Those breathless morons on TV make us look bad; the liars make us look much, much worse.

Because they only confirm the public’s worst suspicions about us: that we’re lazy, that we’re dishonest, that we make stuff up.

And we can say all we want, No! We do the work! We’re telling the truth! But all the cynics have to do is point to Mortenson, is point to Blair and Frey and Cooke, and they will be right in their certainty. Those writers did make stuff up; they did exaggerate; they did invent; they did lie. Those are hard, terrible facts. All the proof in the world is sitting right there, on those empty pages. The non-believers have been given all the evidence they will ever need that they were right not to trust us.

Yes, what he said. However, you never have to worry about anything written on the Uproxx network being bullsh*t. NEVER.

UPDATE: Mortenson responds.

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