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

by Ryan Holiday

As I mentioned in the preface, there is a site called HARO (Help a Reporter Out), founded by PR man Peter Shankman, that connects hundreds of “self-interested sources” to willing reporters every day. It is the de facto sourcing and lead factory for journalists and publicists. According to the site, nearly thirty thousand members of the media have used HARO sources, including the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Huffington Post, and everyone in between.

Far too many stories are created with this deliberately manipulative mind-set. Marketing shills masquerade as legitimate experts, giving advice and commenting on issues in ways that benefit their clients and trick people into buying their products. I constantly receive e-mails from bloggers and journalists asking me to provide “a response” to some absurd rumor or speculative analysis. They just need a quote from me denying the rumor (which most people will skip over) to justify publishing it. The agenda has already been set, and the reader is being set up to be fooled.

I like to point out a Gizmodo story where the site fell for a hoax and got thirty thousand pageviews for its poorly researched story headlined MALFUNCTIONING CAKE RUINS PARTY AND SPEWS LIQUOR ALL OVER OIL TYCOONS.3 They then followed up after the prank was revealed with a story titled VIRAL VIDEO OF SHELL OIL PARTY DISASTER IS FAKE, UNFORTUNATELY and got ninety thousand pageviews out of it.4 That’s two stories instead of zero—so do you see why they don’t question sources?

As Jonah Peretti, the virality expert behind both the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, believes, “if something is a total bummer, people don’t share it.” And since people wouldn’t share it, blogs won’t publish it. Seeing the homeless and drug addicts and starving, dying animals would take away all the fun.* It’d make the viewers feel uncomfortable, and unsettling images are not conducive to sharing. Why, Peretti asks, would anyone—bloggers or readers—want to pass along bad feelings?3

This is something I have to explain to clients in crisis PR situations all the time. I say, “Look, if your response isn’t more interesting than the allegations, no one is going to care. You might as well not bother.”

The press, Martin Amis once noted, “is more vicious than the populace.” It’s also more positive and gushy—as Upworthy is—than normal people. Why? Because it’s paid to be.

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

Is it any surprise that there is so much anger-provoking content online, then?

Sadness depresses our impulse for social sharing. It’s why nobody wanted to share the Magnum photos but everybody gladly shared the ones on the Huffington Post. The HuffPo photos were awe-some; they made us angry, or they surprised us. Such emotions trigger a desire to act—they are arousing—and that is exactly the reaction a publisher hopes to exploit. “People get viral content wrong,” Eli Pariser, the founder of Upworthy, told Businessweek. “They imagine that the reason people share stuff is to have a laugh. But a huge part of sharing is being passionate about something, about shedding light on what really matters.”

A powerful predictor of whether content will spread online is valence, or the degree of positive or negative emotion a person is made to feel. Both extremes are more desirable than anything in the middle. Regardless of the topic, the more an article makes someone feel good or bad, the more likely it is to make the Most E-mailed list. I want to take things that people are passionate about and connect them to my products or clients—to get people worked about them, to get them talking. No smart marketer is ever going to push a story with the stink of reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions.

The problem is that facts are rarely clearly good or bad. They just are. The truth is often boring and complicated. Navigating this quandary forces marketers and publishers to conspire to distort this information into something that will register on the emotional spectrum of the audience. To turn it into something that spreads and to drive clicks.

For instance, in studies where subjects are shown negative video footage (war, an airplane crash, an execution, a natural disaster), they become more aroused, can better recall what happened, pay more attention, and engage more cognitive resources to consume the media than nonnegative footage.5 That’s the kind of stuff that will make you hit “share this.” They push your buttons so you’ll press theirs.

Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair—these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy—those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, laughter, and outrage—these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation.

Online games and apps operate on the same principles and exploit the same impulses: Be consuming without frustrating, manipul...

This was, as Rob Walker wrote for the Atlantic in an analysis of the event, a core principle of our new viral culture: “Humiliation should not be suppressed. It should be monetized.” Instead of being ashamed of its crappy television journalism, CNBC was able to make extra money from the millions of views it generated.

Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.”

Are loaded-question headlines popular? You bet. As Brian Moylan, a former Gawker writer, once bragged, the key is to “get the whole story into the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click.”

Nick Denton knows that being evasive and misleading is one of the best ways to get traffic and increase the bottom line.

When examining a claim, even a dubious claim, don’t dismiss with a skeptical headline before getting to your main argument. Because nobody will get to your main argument. You might as well not bother. . . . You set up a mystery—and explain it after the link. Some analysis shows a good question brings twice the response of an emphatic exclamation point.

When you take away the question mark, it usually turns their headline into a lie. The reason bloggers like to use it is because it lets them get away with a false statement that no one can criticize. After the reader clicks, they soon discover that the answer to the “question” in their headline is obviously “No, of course not.” But since it was posed as a question, the blogger wasn’t wrong—they were only asking.

Manipulators trick the bloggers, and they trick their readers. We both want the clicks and so we get them together. This arrangement is great for the traffic-hungry bloggers, for people like me, and my attention-seeking clients.

Blogs don’t care about the issues they are provoking outrage about, and social networks don’t care what people are being social about—they care about what it means for them, how much traffic and time on site it generates.

So goes the art of the online publisher: To string the customer along as long as possible, to deliberately not be helpful, is to turn simple readers into pageview-generating machines. Publishers know they have to make each new headline even more irresistible than the last, the next article even more inflammatory or less practical to keep getting clicks. It’s a vicious cycle in which, by screwing the reader and getting screwed by me, they must screw the reader harder next time to top what they did before.

There are three distinct phases of the newspaper (which have been synonymous with “the news” for most of history). It begins with the party press, moves to the infamous yellow press, and ends finally with the stable period of the modern press (or press by subscription). These phases contain surprising parallels to where we are today with blogs—old mistakes made once more, manipulations made possible again for the first time in decades.

Newspapers changed the moment that Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun in 1833. It was not so much his paper that changed everything but his way of selling it: on the street, one copy at a time.

There is this naive belief that readers have: If news is important, I’ll hear about it. I would argue the opposite—it’s mostly the least important news that will find you. It’s the extreme stuff that cuts through the noise. It’s the boring information, the secret stuff that people don’t want you to know, that you’ll miss. That’s the stuff you have to subscribe to, that you pay for, that you have to chase.

By “best” Huffington does not mean the one that represents the story better. The question is not “Was this headline accurate?” but “Was it clicked more than the others?” The headlines must work for the publisher, not the reader. Yahoo!’s homepage, for example, tests more than 45,000 unique combinations of story headlines and photos every five minutes.6 They too pride themselves on how they display the best four main stories they can, but I don’t think their complicated, four-years-in-the-making algorithm shares any human’s definition of that word.

It would be alarming to know that McDonald’s judged its managers based on how many calories they were able to shove down the gullet of their customers. Or to hear the CEO brag about how they squeezed an extra 200 calories into a Big Mac at little to no cost to the company. Well, that is precisely the kind of thinking that publishers do today—the exact same publishers who would jump to criticize similar corruptive metrics if used by other metrics.

Jakob Nielsen, the reigning guru of web usability, according to Fortune magazine, and the author of twelve books on the subject, advises sites to follow a simple rule: 40 percent of every article must be cut.4 But despair not, because according to his calculations, when chopped thus, the average article loses only 30 percent of its value. Oh, only 30 percent! It’s the kind of math publishers go through every day. As long as the equation works out in their favor, it’s worth doing. What does it matter if the readers get stuck with the losses?

The world is boring, but the news is exciting. It’s a paradox of modern life. Journalists and bloggers are not magicians, but if you consider the material they’ve got to work with and the final product they crank out day in and day out, you must give them some credit. Shit becomes sugar.

If there is one special skill that journalists can claim, it is the ability to find the angle on any story. That the news is ever chosen over entertainment in the fight for attention is a testament to their skill. High-profile

As Drew Curtis of Fark.com says, “Problems occur when the journalist has to find an angle on a story that doesn’t have one.”

A writer for the Mediabistro blog 10,000 Words once advised new bloggers that they could find good material by scanning community bulletin boards on craigslist for “what people are complaining about these days.”2 I’m not a sociologist, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t qualify as representative news. Considering that anyone can post anything on craigslist, this gives me a pretty good idea of how to create some fake local news. If they don’t mind seeing what isn’t there, marketers are happy to help.

Blogs will publish anything if you manufacture urgency around it. Give a blogger an illusory twenty-minute head start over other media sources, and they’ll write whatever you want, however you want it. Publicists love to promise blogs the exclusive on an announcement.

Throw in an arbitrary deadline, like “We’re going live with this on our website first thing in the morning,” and even the biggest blogs will forget fact-checking and make bold pronouncements on your behalf.

The blogs that covered the story were fine with blurring the line between what happened and what almost happened or what could have happened, because it was better for business.

Nowhere is this sad state of affairs more obvious than in current science reporting. Although scientific journals remain restrained by the practices and ethics of science, university websites and publicists are not. Nearly every day some minor finding is touted as an enormous breakthrough in a press release that goes out to reporters. These bloggers simply looking for traffic are never going to question the headline; they’re not even going to read the paper—they’re just in it for the headlines. I mean, can you beat this one from the Huffington Post?: BEARDS ARE COVERED IN POOP: STUDY

Of course you can’t seriously lose weight that way. The institute didn’t exist. The science was junk. The whole thing was a prank. Yet millions of people were given this fake news. If the journalist hadn’t revealed himself, there might be a lot of people out there justifying that extra chocolate bar as part of their diet.

I had used my tactics to sell T-shirts and books, but others, I found, used them more expertly and to more ominous ends. They sold everything from presidential candidates to distractions they hoped would placate the public—and made (or destroyed) millions of dollars in the process.

This is how it works online. A writer finds a narrative to advance that is profitable to them, or perhaps that they are personally or ideologically motivated to advance, and are able to thrust it into the national consciousness before anyone has a chance to bother checking if it’s true or not.

Breitbart was the master of making people scramble. Whenever I need to understand the mind of blogging, I try to picture Andrew Breitbart sitting down at his computer to edit and publish that video. Because he was not a racist either. Nor was he the partisan kook the Left mistook him for. He was a media manipulator just like me. He understood and embodied the economics of the web better than anyone. And in some ways I envy him, because he was able to do it without the guilt that drove me to write this book.

Breitbart was the first employee of the Drudge Report and a founding employee of the Huffington Post. He helped build the dominant conservative and liberal blogs. He wasn’t simply an ideologue; he was an expert on what spreads—a provocateur.

Better than anyone, Breitbart understood that the media doesn’t mind being played, because they get something out of it—namely, pageviews, ratings, and readers.

Breitbart, who died suddenly of heart failure in early 2012, might not be with us any longer, but it hardly matters. As he once said, “Feeding the media is like training a dog. You can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns.” Breitbart did plenty of training in his short time on the scene. Today one of the dog’s masters is gone, sure, but the dog still responds to the same commands.

O’Keefe learned from Breitbart that in the blogging market there is a profound shortage of investigative material or original reporting. It’s just too expensive to produce. So rather than bear those costs, O’Keefe’s stories are hollow shells—an edited clip, a faux investigation—that blogs can use as a substitute for the real thing.

Short, shocking narratives with a reusable sound bite are all it takes.

This is what opponents of the alt-right seem to miss. They are trying to make you upset. They want you to be irrationally angry—it’s how they win. Most brands and personalities try to appeal to a wide swath of the population. Niche players and polarizing personalities are only ever going to be interesting to a small subgroup. While this might seem like a disadvantage, it’s actually a huge opportunity, because it allows them to leverage the dismissals, anger, mockery, and contempt of the population at large as proof of their credibility. Someone like Andrew Breitbart or Milo Yiannopoulos or Charles Johnson doesn’t care that you hate them—they like it.

The only way to beat them is by controlling your reaction and letting them embarrass themselves, as they inevitably will.

If you can put aside your anger, if you can put aside the unfortunate fate that befell Sherrod, you can see what masterful music Breitbart and O’Keefe are able to play on the instruments of online media. When they sit down to publish on their blogs, they are not simply political extremists but ruthless seekers of attention. From this attention comes fame and profit—a platform for bestselling books, lucrative speaking and consulting gigs, donations, and millions of dollars in online advertising revenue.

Their subtle felonies against the truth are deliberate and premeditated. The way to beat them is not by freaking out. It’s by beating them at their own game. And sooner is better—because every day we wait there is more collateral damage.