When Tiger Woods and scandal collide, truth becomes the victim

Not all of that can be true, obviously, but who cares?

Truth is one of the many things that gets trampled today when boring facts can't keep up with the media's need to feed instantly and the public's appetite to be fed faster than that. Something else that gets lost in all of the subsequent noise is Tiger Woods' silence. We haven't heard from him yet, which doesn't seem to matter one microscopic fraction of one ounce at all.

We get news faster than we ever have. We just can't trust it to be right. So patience, credibility and fairness are among the casualties here, too, at the intersection of celebrity and scandal -- where voyeuristic rubbernecking is fun and nobody feels the need to tap the brakes, and the result is an international icon bleeding on the street while surrounded by more questions than answers.

I don't pretend to know what is and isn't true here. What I do know is that Woods is too famous to have any kind of accident quietly. Once upon a time, in a black-and-white America that was more romantic and less human, Joe DiMaggio could be an epic sports hero in public despite having secret issues with Marilyn Monroe in private. But that day is as dead as both DiMaggio and Monroe. There are too many lights on you these days for an athlete to be around anything shady.

Too many people are watching. And a cellphone camera is now credential enough to make just about anyone ``media.'' We're all in this together now, linked by things like Twitter and Facebook, the lines blurred between network news and networking, which is how a reporter from Fox News somehow came to be ``reporting'' on this Tiger Woods incident while holding up a copy of the National Enquirer and citing TMZ in a mutated media ménage a` trois that didn't exactly conjure a credibility that seems to have died with Walter Cronkite.

Here's what we kind of know: The National Enquirer reported that Woods was having an affair with a New York party girl named Rachel Uchitel, who is one of the hottest Google trends today and has taken an unusual number of photos in a bikini. This report may or may not be true. That hardly seems to matter. Uchitel is denying any affair. That hardly seems to matter, either. Very soon after this report, Woods was checked into a hospital for facial lacerations and a suspicious car accident that either featured his wife aiding him or possibly beating him, depending on which whispers, outlets and paid-for-information anonymous sources you believe.

All of this, true or untrue, must be mortifying to Woods, the headlines hurting him as much as anything that actually made him bleed. He is as packaged an athlete as we've ever seen. He told a lesbian joke in GQ magazine at the very beginning of his rise, and access to him forever changed after that, publicists and corporate handlers surrounding his image so tightly that they might as well have been accompanied by the sound of jail cells clanging to a close.

In the modern age, there have been very few famous people whose face we know more but whose personalities we know less. That has been by design. Rest assured, you haven't heard from him yet because his handlers are trying to figure out how and what to handle. Forbes magazine reports that Woods is the first-ever billionaire athlete, and that face is too valuable to have scratches from a domestic dispute without explanation.

What may or may not have happened to Woods isn't any kind of new, of course. Promiscuity is older than sports, and falls from grace might be older than both. Kobe Bryant's wife is wearing a $4.5 million apology for this kind of behavior on her finger. But what is new here is how quickly scandalous news spreads in an instant-gratification society that microwaves, TiVos, Google searches and gets its infotainment on demand. The news travels so fast that it is out there before it can be verified and before the participants have even uttered a public word, and the more credible news outlets are forced to follow the flocks toward TMZ and the Enquirer or be left behind.

And here's why that's relevant:

What if it isn't true?

How do we go back and fix that?

And isn't that kind of accident ultimately more damaging than the one involving Tiger Woods?