Book Review: Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday
I came across this book while searching for practical guidebooks on how to improve my website/blog. This is not that sort of book. It is, however, a fascinating look at the mindsets of people such as politicians and advertisers who seek to exploit the internet’s countless vulnerabilities to their own advantage. Holiday claims that for a long time he was as corrupt as anyone, an eager media manipulator out to make as much money as possible.
According to Holiday, there are very few people you can trust online. Almost everyone is out for themselves. News blogs are primarily after page views and clicks, and their writers care very little whether the sensational stories they upload are true or not. Better, they think, to go ahead and publish them and then – maybe – post an update if the so-called facts turn out to be untruths. The pattern is to post something, have it picked up by other news sources, and then use those sources that republish your story for verification that your story checks out. A wild sort of loop that feeds on itself. This all sounds too insane to be real, and yet Holiday, who has been deep in the trenches himself, gives multiple examples for every point he makes.
If we go by the title of the book, of course, we might conclude that we can’t trust anything Holiday says, and in fact that’s a valid argument. However, the book has intense verisimilitude. Anyone who spends any amount of time online can attest to what he writes. He claims to have written this book when he came to realize that the things he had been doing – and also witnessed many others doing – were too sordid for him to stomach. He wrote the book as an expose, and it is a much needed one.
He emphasizes that more than anything, news blog writers want their pieces to spread. That’s how they get paid. Hopelessness, despair, pity, and empathy are unhelpful in this context. What drives spreading are emotions such as “anger, fear, excitement, laughter, and outrage.” Provocation is the key, and it comes at the price of a blatant disregard for truth. This attitude not only drives sensational pseudo-news, but it also adds fuel to the present social and political polarities.
In the first half of the book, Holiday confesses his deep complicity in all this evil. The second half, he claims, which is more in the nature of a condemnation of it all, was written because his conscience bothered him too much. In a lengthy appendix added to this edition of the book, there are interviews with various other successful media manipulators. Although Holiday claims he wrote Trust Me, I’m Lying as an expose, several of the high-profile interviewees attest that they came up with some of their best and most successful ideas after reading the first edition of his book. Weird. It’s like a criminal’s confession leading to a whole swarm of copycat criminals.
As for me, the book has the opposite effect. I have no desire to emulate any of Holiday’s unscrupulous tactics. To the opposite: reading this has inspired me to be even more honest in my own essays and blogs, even if I never go viral and have only a few sincere, discerning readers. It reminds me of what Henry Miller once said, that he writes for “one true reader.” I looked up the extended quote and it goes like this: “The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.”
I think that the greatest flaw in Trust Me, I’m Lying is that Holiday implies that everyone is dishonest, everyone is out for the money and for themselves, and there is no real truth to be found online. In this I think he is mistaken, and as you read, you should be on guard against this cynicism and despair. Yes, the internet is like a Wild West of mudslinging half-truths and downright lies, and it’s hard to find the gold amidst all the flung dung. But there are honest people out there sharing the truth as best they can. To find them you need discernment, wisdom, and persistence, but the search is well worth it.
