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

by Ryan Holiday

Think about television. We’re all tired of the superficiality of cable news and its insistence on reducing important political issues into needless conflict between two annoying talking heads. But there’s a simple reason for this, as media critic Eric Alterman explained in Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy. TV is a visual medium, he said, so to ask the audience to think about something it cannot see would be suicide. If it were possible to put an abstract idea to film, producers would happily show that instead of pithy sound bites. But it isn’t, so conflict, talking heads, and B-roll footage are all you’ll get. The values of television, Alterman realized, behave like a dictator, exerting their rule over the kind of information that can be transmitted across the channels. Blogs aren’t any different. The way the medium works essentially predetermines what bloggers can publish and how exactly they must do it.