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

by Ryan Holiday

There is no other definition for the modern media system. Its very business model rests on exploiting the difference between perception and reality—pretending that it produces the “quality” news we once classified as journalism without adhering to any of the standards or practices that define

It was revealed that many of the “fake news” sites that dominate Facebook with preposterous left-wing and right-wing propaganda are owned by the same parent company.

There’s nothing fun about being right if what you’re right about is the triumph, or the temporary triumph, of the inevitably bad.

By the time you are reading this, the launch of the book will seem far away. But when it came out, the book was controversial, on purpose. I knew that to cut through the noise, everything about it had to be different and prove the ideas in the book. I won’t say I was an angel about it—but I definitely made my point. I leaked that the book was a celebrity tell-all, which blogs picked up without verifying. I doubled the size of my advance in the announcement and nobody fact-checked it. I got popular media folks to denounce the book and used their outrage to sell more copies.

I applied all the tactics of media manipulation described in the book in order to propagate my warnings about the dangers and prevalence of media manipulation. I also “traded up the chain” to reach as many people as possible. Coverage about the book started online with small blogs and ultimately reverberated across the globe, from radio shows in Malaysia to the pages of Le Monde. From NPR to the “Editor’s Notes” section of the New York Times (which retracted a quote from me after I exposed a problem in its sourcing methods)2 to a Forbes.com megastory (which did 165,000 views), TMIL was everywhere. The point of all this wasn’t simply self-promotion. I wanted to prove I was as good as I said I was—and I wanted to prove that the system is so vulnerable that even a transparent media manipulator could make it do what he wanted.

There is one obvious mistake in my approach that I will admit right now: For all my cynicism, I was far too bullish about the system’s capacity or desire to actually hear my message. Many media outlets were glad to report on the book initially and gobble up the pageviews I could create for them, but actually doing something about the charges turned out to be far more challenging. “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair once said, “when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Even though everything I wrote in Trust Me, I’m Lying was based on my personal experience, somewhere in the back of my head I always worried that my colleagues might say, “Ryan, c’mon, it’s not that bad.” Maybe they would say I was cherry-picking or being cynical. In fact, no one said that. The overwhelming reaction from people in the business was “Ryan, it’s even worse than what you say.” Except for one thing. They would only say this in private. They would e-mail it to me or pull me aside at parties to tell me, but in public many of these same people criticized the book. Or called me names. Or, as I had feared most of all, ignored the book altogether—depriving it of the oxygen it needed to spread.

My job is to lie to the media so they can lie to you. I cheat, bribe, and connive for bestselling authors and billion-dollar brands and abuse my understanding of the internet to do it. I am most certainly not the only one. People like me funnel millions of dollars to online publications to fuel their enormous appetite for pageviews. We control the scoops and breaking news that fill your Facebook feed, that get your coworkers chattering. I have flown bloggers across the country, boosted their revenue by buying fake traffic, written their stories for them, fabricated elaborate ruses to capture their attention, and even hired their family members. I’ve probably sent enough gift cards and T-shirts to fashion bloggers to clothe a small country. Why did I do all this? Because it was the best way to get what I wanted for my clients: attention.

But it illustrates a part of the media system that is hidden from your view: how the news is created and driven by marketers, and that no one does anything to stop it.

I guess it is safe to admit now that the entire firestorm was, essentially, fake. I designed the advertisements, which I bought and placed around the country, and then promptly called and left anonymous complaints about them (and leaked copies of my complaints to blogs for support). I alerted college LGBT and women’s rights groups to screenings in their area and baited them to protest our offensive movie at the theater, knowing that the nightly news would cover it. I started a boycott group on Facebook. I orchestrated fake tweets and posted fake comments to articles online. I even won a contest for being the first one to send in a picture of a defaced ad in Chicago. (Thanks for the free T-shirt, Chicago RedEye. Oh, also, that photo was from New York.) I manufactured preposterous stories about Tucker’s behavior on and off the movie set and reported them to gossip websites, which gleefully repeated them. I paid for anti-woman ads on feminist websites and anti-religion ads on Christian websites, knowing each would write about it. Sometimes I just Photoshopped ads onto screenshots of websites and got coverage for controversial ads that never actually ran. The loop became final when, for the first time in history, I put out a press release to answer my own manufactured criticism: TUCKER MAX RESPONDS TO CTA DECISION: “BLOW ME,” the headline read. Hello, shitstorm of press. Hello, number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

I pulled this off with no connections, no money, and no footsteps to follow. But because of the way that blogging is structured—from the way bloggers are paid by the pageview to the way blog posts must be written to catch the reader’s attention—this was all very easy to do. The system eats up the kind of material I produce. So as the manufactured storm I created played itself out in the press, real people started believing it, and it became true.

Usually, it is a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain—from a tiny blog to a website of a local news network to Reddit to the Huffington Post to the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real.* Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I “leak” a document. Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that. Really, it can be anything, from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video. However the play starts, the end is the same: The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception—and sell product.

I thought the web was a meritocracy, and that the good stuff generally rose to the top. But spending serious time in the media underworld, watching as the same outlets who fell for easy marketing stunts seriously report on matters of policy or culture will disabuse you of that naïveté. It will turn that hope into cynicism.

Radio DJs and news anchors once filled their broadcasts with newspaper headlines; today they repeat what they read online—certain blogs more than others. Stories from blogs also filter into real conversations and rumors that spread from person to person through word of mouth. In short, blogs are vehicles from which mass media reporters—and your most chatty and “informed” friends—discover and borrow the news. This hidden cycle gives birth to the memes that become our cultural references, the budding stars who become our celebrities, the thinkers who become our gurus, and the news that becomes our news.

When I figured this out early in my career in public relations, I had a thought that only a naive and destructively ambitious twentysomething would have: If I master the rules that govern blogs, I can be the master of all they determine. It was, essentially, access to a fiat over culture.

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 constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events.

The economics of the internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth.

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. Above them are hundreds of midlevel online and offline journalists at websites and blogs and in magazines and newspapers who use those bloggers below them as sources and filters. They also have to write constantly—and engage in the same search for buzz, only a little more developed. Above them are the major national websites, publications, and television stations. They in turn browse the scourers below them for their material, grabbing their leads and turning them into truly national conversations. These are the most influential bunch—the New York Times, The Today Show, Fox News, and CNN—and dwindling revenues or not, they have massive reach. Finally, between, above, and throughout these concentric levels is the largest group: us, the audience. We scan the web for material that we can watch, comment on, or share with our friends and followers.

It’s a simple illusion: Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter (or the music supervisor or celebrity stylist) is doing is popularizing it. They rarely bother to look past the first impressions.

Remember: 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.

‘Controversy Is Good for Ratings’”

Perhaps you remember Terry Jones, the idiotic pastor whose burning of the Koran led to riots that killed nearly thirty people in Afghanistan. Jones’s bigotry happened to trade up the chain perfectly, and the media unwittingly allowed it. Jones first made a name for himself in the local Florida press by running offensive billboards in front of his church. Then he stepped it up, announcing that he planned to stage a burning of the Koran. This story was picked up by a small website called Religion News Service. Yahoo! linked to their short article, and dozens of blogs followed, which led CNN to invite Jones to appear on the network. He was now a national story. Yet the media and the public, aware of the potential implications of airing video of his act, began to push back. Many decided they would not air such a video. Some five hundred people attended a protest in Kabul where they burned Jones in effigy. At the last second Jones, under pressure, backed down, and the crisis was averted.

But Terry Jones was back a few months later, announcing for the second time that he planned to burn the Koran. Each blog and outlet that covered the lead-up to the burning made the story—and the media monster that was Terry Jones—that much bolder and bigger. Reporters asked if a direct request from President Obama would stop him, which of course meant that the president of the United States of America would have to negotiate with a homegrown terrorist (he traded up the chain to the most powerful man in the world). This circus was what finally pushed Jones over the edge. In March 2011, he went through with the burning, despite the threatened media blackout. He called their bluff and it worked. The blackout fell apart when a college student named Andrew Ford, freelancing for the wire service Agence France-Presse, took advantage of a story too dirty and dangerous for many journalists to touch in good conscience.* Agence France-Presse, Ford’s publisher, is syndicated on Google and Yahoo! News. They immediately republished his article. The story began to go up the chain, getting bigger and bigger. Roughly thirty larger blogs and online news services had picked up Ford’s piece or linked to it in the first day. It made the story too big for the rest of the media—including the foreign press—to continue to resist. So the news of Jones’s Koran burning, a calculated stunt to extract attention from a system that could not prevent itself from being exploited, became known to the world....

Within days, twenty-seven people were killed during riots in Afghanistan, including seven UN workers; forty more were injured. Christians were specifically targeted, and Taliban flags were flown in the streets of Kabul. “It took just one college student to defeat a media blackout and move a story halfway around the globe within twenty-four hours,” the Poynter Institute wrote in an analysis of the reportin...

Knowing this, blogs do everything they can to increase the latter variable in the equation (traffic, pageviews). It’s how you must understand them as a business. Every decision a publisher makes is ruled by one dictum: Traffic by any means.

When all it takes is one story to propel a blog from the dredges of the internet to mainstream notoriety, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that sites will do anything to get their shot, even if it means manufacturing or stealing scoops (and deceiving readers and advertisers in the process).

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

Blogs are built and run with an exit in mind. This is really why they need scoops and acquire marquee bloggers—to build up their names for investors and to show a trend of rapidly increasing traffic.

There are many ways to give someone a bribe. Very rarely does it mean handing them a stack of bills. The criteria that bloggers’ employers use to determine the size of their paychecks—the stuff bloggers are paid for—can be co-opted and turned into an indirect bribe.

Ben Parr, editor at large at the popular technology blog Mashable, was once asked what he looked for when he hired writers for his blogs. His answer was one word: quickness. “Online journalism is fast-paced,” he explained. “We need people that can get the story out in minutes and can compose the bigger opinion pieces in a couple hours, not a couple of days.” As to any actual experience in journalism, that would be considered only “a definite plus.”1

Gawker set the curve for the industry again when they left the pay-per-post model and switched to a pageview-based compensation system that gave bonuses to writers based on their monthly traffic figures. These bonuses came on top of a set monthly pay, meaning that bloggers were eligible for payments that could effectively double their salary once they hit their monthly quota. You can imagine what kind of results this led to.

To give you a sense of the numbers, Henry Blodget, the founder of Business Insider, once explained that his writers need to generate three times the number of pageviews required to pay for their own salary and benefits, as well as a share of the overhead, sales, hosting, and Blodget’s cut, to be worth hiring. In other words, an employee making sixty thousand dollars a year would need to produce upward of 1.8 million pageviews a month, every month, or they’re out.4 This is no easy task. I’d argue it’s getting harder over time as people get better at getting traffic and flood the market with inventory.

Social media influencers are straight-up mercenary. Through various ad networks you can actually pay influential accounts to post prewritten messages or endorse products.

It occurs to me now that sponsored tweets (and Instagram posts and Snapchat stories) would be a very easy way to propagate conspiracy theories or fringe ideas.*

When I promoted movies, tours of the set or invitations to the premiere worked wonders in getting blog coverage. When I worked with bands, concert tickets, or even just an e-mail from the artist, could make most bloggers starstruck enough to give me what I needed.

The easiest way for bloggers to make real money is to transition to a job with an old media company or a tech company. They can build a name and sell it to a sucker, just like their owners and investors are trying to do. Once a blogger builds a personal brand—through scoops or controversy or major stories—they can expect a cushy job at a magazine or start-up desperate for the credibility and buzz that these attributes offer. These lagging companies can then tell shareholders, “See, we’re current!” or “We’re turning things around!”

This revolving door has a peculiar influence on coverage, as is to be expected. What blogger is going to do real reporting on companies like Google, Facebook, or Twitter when there is the potential for a lucrative job down the road? What writer is going to burn a source if they view their job as a networking play?

For my part, I’ve lost track of the bloggers whose names I have helped make by giving them big stories (favorable and to my liking) and watched transition into bigger gigs at magazines, newspapers, and editorships at major blogs. In fact, the other day I was driving in Los Angeles and noticed a billboard on La Cienega Boulevard with nothing but a large face on it: the face of a video blogger who I’d started giving free clothes to back when his videos did a few thousand views apiece. Now his v...

“There’s no difference,” philosopher and provocateur Nassim Taleb said, “between a journalist at The Guardian and the restaurant owner in Milan, who, when you ask for a taxi, calls his cousin who does a tour of the city to inflate the meter before showing up. Or the doctor who willfully misdiagnoses you to sell you a drug in which he has a vested interest.” Most corruption is not obvious. The incentive for bloggers to write bigger, to write simpler, to write more controversially or, conversely, more favorably, to not waste time or resources on research or fact-checking, to write more often than is warranted because it will get them the traffic they need, is hard to spot, but it is there. And it is warping what you see and hear—and what is written about you and your friends when they find themselves in the spotlight.

Writing online is often called a “digital sweatshop” for good reason.* “Ceaseless fight for table scraps” might be another phrase for it. Or in the immortal words of Henry Kissinger: The reason the knives are so sharp online is because the pie is so small.

The problem of journalism, says Edward Jay Epstein in his book Between Fact and Fiction, is simple. 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.

Who are these self-interested sources? Well, anyone selling a product, a message, or an agenda. People like me.

When the New York Times publishes leaked documents, there is an implicit understanding that they have at least attempted to verify their validity. The same goes for the identity of the source who gave it to them. Online, “anonymous” means something else entirely. Quotes and tips are drawn from unsolicited, untraced e-mails or angry comments pulled from comments sections, or sent in by people who have something to gain from it. I know, because I have been this kind of source dozens of times, and it was never for anything important. My identity is never verified. Today, the online-driven news cycle is going a million miles a minute in a million directions. The New York Times may still try to verify their sources, but it hardly matters, because no one else does. This creates endless opportunities for people like me to slip in and twist things to my lik...

They could tell my side of the story because I told it to them in words they wanted to hear.

I once had a client who had been subjected to a complete hit job of a piece by a major newspaper. The writer of the article had actually been running their own hater blog about the company they then “objectively” reported on. When the client complained to the writer’s editor, the editor shrugged it off. To reply, I simply had the client write a long e-mail to his staff explaining what happened and laying out the complete (and embarrassing) case against the article. Then we forwarded that e-mail to a media reporter at a different outlet, who published it in full. The e-mail read well and was quite damning—because it had been written for the express purpose of being made public. The original outlet had no choice but to respond and will hopefully think twice about a hatchet job like that in the future.

Another time I had some promotional images for a Halloween campaign I also couldn’t use, because of copyright concerns. I still wanted them seen, so I had one of my employees e-mail them to Jezebel and Gawker and write, “I shouldn’t be doing this but I found some secret images on the American Apparel server and here they are.” The post based on this lie did ninety thousand views. The writer wrote back a helpful tip: No need to leak me info from your company e-mail address; you might get caught. I thought, But how else could she be sure they were real?

Before long I came to see the truth: Blogs love press releases. It does every part of their job for them: The material is already written; the angle laid out; the subject newsworthy; and, since it comes from an official newswire, they can blame someone else if the story turns out to be wrong.

In my experience, bloggers operate by some general rules of thumb: If a source can’t be contacted by e-mail, they probably can’t be a source. I’ve talked to bloggers on the phone only a few times, ever—but thousands of times over e-mail. If background information isn’t publicly or easily available, it probably can’t be included. Writers are at the mercy of official sources, such as press releases, spokesmen, government officials, and media kits. And these are for the instances when they even bother to check anything.

You change the descriptors on Wikipedia, and reporters and readers change their descriptors down the road.