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

by Ryan Holiday

America. One early media critic put it this way: We’re a country governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the press, so isn’t it critical to understand what governs the press?

The fake Favre meme spread almost exactly along the lines of my fake outrage campaign for Tucker’s movie—only there was no me involved! The media is hopelessly interdependent.

Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one.

Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn’t witness it personally. They are “entirely dependent on self-interested ‘sources’” to supply their facts. Every part of the news-making process is defined by this relationship; everything is colored by this reality.

What HARO encourages—and the site is filled with thousands of posts asking for it—is for journalists to look for sources who simply confirm what they were already intending to say. Instead of researching a topic and communicating their findings to the public, journalists simply grab obligatory—but artificial—quotes from “experts” to validate their pageview journalism. To the readers it appears as legitimate news. To the journalist, they were just reverse engineering their story from a search engine–friendly premise.

Blogs aren’t held accountable for being wrong or being played, so why should they avoid it?

“the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes”

I have my own analysis: When you take away the question mark, it usually turns their headline into a lie. The reason bloggers like to use them is because it lets them get away with a false statement that no one can criticize.

Readers might be better served by posts that inform them about things that really matter. But, as you saw in the last chapter, stories with useful information are less likely to be shared virally than other types of content.

Being final, or authoritative, or helpful, or any of these obviously positive attributes is avoided, because they don’t bait user engagement. And engaged users are where the money is.

Orwell reminded us in 1984: “The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”

Richard Greenblatt—maybe the greatest hacker who has ever lived—told Wired in 2010, “There’s a dynamic now that says, let’s format our web page so people have to push the button a lot so that they’ll see lots of ads. Basically, the people who win are those who manage to make things the most inconvenient for you.”

If news doesn’t go viral or get feedback, then the news needs to be changed. If news does go viral, it means the story was a success—whether or not it was accurate, in good taste, or done well.

Marshall McLuhan was right: The medium is the message.

When content is stacked, it sets a very clear emphasis on the present. For the blogger, the time stamp is like an expiration date.

Did you know that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart hates women? And that they have a long history of discriminating against and firing women? Sure, one of its cocreators is female, and one of its best-known and longest-running correspondents is a woman, and there really isn’t any evidence to prove what I just claimed, but I assure you, I’d never lie. This was the manufactured scandal that Jezebel slammed into The Daily Show in June 2010. Irin Carmon’s piece blindsided them just as her Jezebel nail polish story had blindsided us. It began when Carmon posted an article titled, “The Daily Show’s Woman Problem.” 2 Relying on some juicy quotes from people no longer with the show, Carmon claimed that the show had a poor record of finding and developing female comedic talent. She was also determined to make a name for herself. In order to accomplish this, she didn’t actually speak to anyone who still worked for The Daily Show. It was much easier to use a collection of anonymous and off-the-record sources—like an ex-employee who hadn’t worked there for eight years. As you should expect by now, the article was a sensation. The cluster of stories that followed were read more than five hundred thousand times. The story was picked up by ABC News, the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, E!, Salon, and others. In a memo to his staff, Carmon’s boss and the publisher of Gawker, Nick Denton, commended the story for getting the kind of publicity that can’t be bought. Denton wrote, “It ...

Today, I’m not impressed anymore. I am depressed. Because the corrupt system I helped build is no longer in anyone’s control. The manipulators are indistinguishable from the publishers and bloggers—the people we were supposed to be manipulating.

Being caught as a manipulator can only help make you more famous.

“If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.”

Those between the ages of eight and eighteen are online roughly eight hours a day, a figure that does not include texting or television.

That’s what web culture does to you. Psychologists call this the “narcotizing dysfunction,” when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge, and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something.

The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his lofty state of interest and information and neglect to see that he has abstained from decision and action. In short, he takes his secondary contact with the world of political reality, his reading and listening and thinking, as a vicarious performance…. He is concerned. He is informed. And he has all sorts of ideas as to what should be done. But, after he has gotten through his dinner and after he has listened to his favored radio programs and after he has read his second newspaper of the day, it is really time for bed. 5

This is the exact reaction that web content is designed to produce. To keep you so caught up and consumed with the bubble that you don’t even realize you’re in one.

“Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,” Kierkegaard once said.

But there weren’t two sides; there was simply the truth and an untruth.

“delegation of trust.”

The web has its own innovation on the delegation of trust, known as “link economy.”

As media outlets grapple with tighter deadlines and smaller staffs, many of the old standards for verification, confirmation, and fact-checking are becoming impossible to maintain.

Like the time when Crain’s New York e-mailed me to ask if American Apparel would be closing any of its stores in Manhattan because of the financial crisis. No, I replied emphatically. No. So they found a real estate agent who didn’t work for American Apparel to say we might. Headline: “American Apparel likely to shed some NY stores” (even though my quote in the article said we wouldn’t). The Crain’s story was linked to and used as a source by Jezebel, and then by New York magazine’s The Cut blog, then by Racked NY. AOL’s Daily Finance blog turned it into a slideshow: “10 Leading Businesses Shuttering Stores Because of Downturn.” None of those sites needed to ask me any questions, since Crain’s had asked and answered for them—they could just link.*

More than a year later every one of those stores is still open.

May becomes is becomes has, I tell my clients. That is, on the first site the fact that someone “may” be doing something becomes the fact that they “are” doing something by the time it has made the rounds. The next time they mention your name, they look back and add the past tense to their last assertion, whether or not it actually happened.

The news has always been riddled with errors, because it is self-referential instead of self-critical.

Iterative journalism, process journalism, beta journalism—whatever name you use, it’s stupid and dangerous. It calls for bloggers to publish first and then verify what they wrote after they’ve posted it. Publishers actually believe that their writers need to do every part of the newsmaking process, from discovery to fact-checking to writing and editing in real time. It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds why that is a bad thing—but they buy the lie that iterative journalism improves the news.

Erik Wemple, a blogger for the Washington Post, writes: “The imperative is to pounce on news when it happens and, in this case, before it happens. To wait for another source is to set the table for someone who’s going to steal your search traffic.” So by the time I’ve woken up in the morning too much misinformation has been spread around the web to possibly be cleaned up.

Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.”

“Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.” And by extension, since it doesn’t cost him anything to be wrong, he presumably doesn’t bother trying to avoid it. It’s not just less costly; it makes more money, because every time a blog has to correct itself, it gets another post out of it—more pageviews.*

Bloggers don’t fabricate news, but they do suspend their disbelief, common sense, and responsibility in order to get to big stories first. The pressure to “get something up” is inherently at odds with the desire to “get things right.”

A blog practicing iterative journalism would report they are hearing that Google is planning to buy Twitter or Yelp, or break the news of reports that the president has been assassinated (all falsely reported online many times now). The blog would publish the story as it investigates these facts—that is, publish the rumor first while they see if there is anything more to the story.

Even so, no blog wants to be embarrassingly wrong, so instead of standing behind embarrassing stories resulting from their silly approach to journalism, blogs duck behind qualifiers: “We’re hearing …”; “I wonder …”; “Possibly …”; “Lots of buzz that …”; “Sites are reporting …”; “Could…, Would…, Should …”; and so on. In other words, they toss the news narrative into the stream without taking full ownership and pretend to be an impartial observer of a process they began.

After weeks of escalating buzz about a New York Times piece that would reveal a “bombshell” scandal about New York Governor David Paterson, Business Insider is reporting that the story will likely come out tomorrow and will be followed by the governor’s resignation (!!). Though the nature of the revelation is still a mystery, reports are that this story is “much worse” than Paterson’s publicly acknowledged affair with a state employee [emphases mine]. 5 Welcome to Covering Your Ass 101. Nearly every claim is tempered by what might happen or attributed to someone else. It says all it can and nothing at the same time.

There are certainly some advantages to iterative journalism—it’s cheap, it’s fast, it gets people’s attention. Take its most compelling performance: reporting the death of Osama bin Laden. At 10:25 P.M., a user named Keith Urbahn broke the big news on Twitter.

Another way to look at it, though, is that the greatest success of iterative journalism gave us a story twenty minutes earlier than it would have come otherwise. Bravo. A whole twenty fucking minutes. The world is forever in your debt.

Why is that a goal anyway? The twenty minutes is a vapid victory. And yet it is all that iterative journalism brings us when it works well.

What do we get when iterative journalism fails? The answer is: a lot of pain and suffering for innocent people. Like when the blog Eater LA published a report from an anonymous reader stating that a popular Los Angeles wine bar not only had egregious health code violations, but also was advertising gourmet items on its menu while really serving generic substitutes. It was the kind of tip iterative publisher’s love to see, and Eater immediately put the story out there—before verifying it or contacting the restaurant: Besides not adhering to simple food saftey [sic] standards, such as soap, sanitizing, and throwing out chicken salad that’s 2 weeks old, 90% of all “fresh” menu items are cooked days beforehand and sit in the fridge. [emphasis theirs] Like so many iterative reports, it turned out to be wrong. Completely wrong. So Eater added an update that said the proprietors disputed the story. Yet the post—the disgusting hygiene allegations and the headline—remained the same. The post stayed up for people to read and comment on. Only after a second update—prompted by the threat of a lawsuit—did Eater begin to admit any wrongdoing. It said, in part: We ran this tip without contacting the owners of the restaurant, who have since refuted the tip in its entirety. We apologize to the owners of the restaurant, and our readers, for not investigating our source’s claims before airing them on the site. The resulting post didn’t rise to our standards, and we shouldn’t have published it.

And when they inevitably turn out to be wrong (or have less than the whole story), the subjects find themselves asking the same question that wrongly disgraced former United States secretary of labor Ray Donovan asked the court when he was acquitted of false charges that ruined his career: “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”

What Google says when they release a product in beta is that the fundamentals are strong but the superficialities are a work in progress—aesthetics, feature additions, nagging issues. The iterative journalism reporting model suggests the opposite—the structure, the headline, the links, and the picture slideshows are there, but the facts are suspect. What kind of process is that?

Software as beta means the risk of small glitches; the news as beta means the risk of a false reality.

They’re the ones who were wrong—and it was their job to be right, wasn’t it? Nope. Not according to their philosophy.

The human mind “first believes, then evaluates,” as one psychologist put it. To that I’d add, “as long as it doesn’t get distracted first.”

we’re bad at correcting our beliefs when they’re proven wrong.