Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

by Ryan Holiday

“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair once said, “when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

We live in a world of many hustlers, and you are the mark. The con is to build a brand off the backs of others. Your attention and your credulity are being stolen.

There are thousands of content creators scouring the web looking for things to write about. They must write several times each day. This is no easy task, so bloggers search Twitter, Facebook, comments sections, press releases, rival blogs, and other sources to develop their material. Where else are they going to get it? There’s no time for investigative reporting.

Every person in the media ecosystem (with the exception of a few at the top layer) is under immense pressure to produce content under the tightest of deadlines.

Publishers and advertisers can’t differentiate between the types of impressions an ad does on a site. A perusing reader is no better than an accidental reader. An article that provides worthwhile advice is no more valuable than one instantly forgotten. So long as the page loads and the ads are seen, both sides are fulfilling their purpose. A click is a click.

One city. Two possible portrayals. One is a bummer; one looks cool. Only one makes it into the Huffington Post slideshow.

It’s almost as if the insatiable media appetite for stories that will make people angry and outraged has created a market for anger and outrage. It’s almost as if that’s why we’re so divided and upset. Oh wait, that is why!

It’s the extreme stuff that cuts through the noise. It’s the boring information, the secret stuff that people don’t want you to know, that you’ll miss. That’s the stuff you have to subscribe to, that you pay for, that you have to chase.

A 2016 Pew Report found that 62 percent of adults get some of their news from Facebook and 18 percent get it regularly from Facebook.

Pageview journalism treats people by what they appear to want—from data that is unrepresentative to say the least—and gives them this and only this until they have forgotten that there could be anything else.

My point is that the media is now even more dependent on others to do their research and work for them.

Breitbart was the first employee of the Drudge Report and a founding employee of the Huffington Post. He helped build the dominant conservative and liberal blogs.

America spends more than fifty billion minutes a day on Facebook, and nearly a quarter of all internet browsing time is spent on social media sites and blogs.

Everything you consume online has been “optimized” to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found—like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you.

More important, great content publishers are far less likely to need to buy traffic than crappy publishers or scammy salespeople.

A while back, a plane of a major airline experienced potentially catastrophic trouble in the air. Despite a flaming engine and poor odds, the pilot managed to land it safely, saving the lives of four-hundred-plus passengers. Yet, as events transpired, Twitter users went berserk and reported that the plane had tragically crashed. In reality, not only had the plane landed safely, but the pilot acted like a gentleman from another generation, offering the passengers his personal telephone number if they had more questions or wanted someone to talk to. He exuded humble and quiet heroism that should have been recognized. Only nobody knew about it, because the story online was so different. The Harvard Business Review criticized the airline for not responding quickly enough with marketing spin and for not magically stopping the rampant online speculation. They wrote: “What a pity that social media users, in their well-known enthusiasm for being first to share breaking news to their followers, would unwittingly conspire to obscure the big story of a pilot’s life-saving landing” [emphasis mine]. Yes,

Second, and most important, Toyota was largely exonerated after a full investigation by NASA, no less. Many of the cases of computer issues supposedly causing unintended acceleration were disproved entirely, and most were found to be caused by driver error. Drivers had been hammering the accelerator instead of the brakes! And then blaming the car! In other words, the scandal that Toyota was so heavily criticized for not handling right had been baseless. Toyota hadn’t been reckless; the media had. It was sites like the Huffington Post, so quick to judge, that had disregarded their duties to their customers and to the truth. As journalist Ed Wallace wrote for Businessweek in an apology to Toyota, “[A]ll the reasons why the public doesn’t trust the media crystallized in the Toyota fiasco.”

dezinformatsiya—essentially disinformation via trolling.

the people who thrive under snark are exactly those who we wish would go away, and the people we value most as cultural contributors lurk in the back of the room, hoping not to get noticed and hurt.

No wonder only morons and narcissists enter the public sphere.

You cannot have your news instantly and have it done well.