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

by Ryan Holiday

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....