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

by Ryan Holiday

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.