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

by Ryan Holiday

The key, as megawatt liberal blogger Matt Yglesias advised when interviewed for the book Making It in the Political Blogosphere, is to keep readers addicted: “The idea is to discourage people from drifting away. If you give them a break, they might find that there’s something else that’s just as good, and they might go away.”

Tyranny is an understatement for the media today. Those between the ages of eight and eighteen are online roughly eight hours a day, a figure that does not include texting or television. America spends more than fifty billion minutes a day on Facebook, and nearly a quarter of all internet browsing time is spent on social media sites and blogs. In a given month, blogs stream something like 150 million videos to their users. So of course there is mass submission and apathy—everyone is distracted, deliberately so.

The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. Everything you consume online has been “optimized” to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found—like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you. Blogs are out to game you—to steal your time from you and sell it to advertisers—and they do this every day.

are not real publications and the claims in those headlines are not true. But that’s precisely the point. They feel true.

They confirm what you want to be true and what you want to reflect your identity.

It’s probably not a coincidence that a good many of those links have bikini-photo thumbnails, weight-loss “success” stories, or celebrity names in the headline. Sites get paid by the click and users can’t unclick, so tactics that encourage that action are all that matter at the end of the day. More important, great content publishers are far less likely to need to buy traffic than crappy publishers or scammy salespeople. It’s just people selling credit cards and mindless gossip at high margins’ need to chase the idiots who click those things.

In the 1990s political scientists began to speak about what they called the CNN effect. The basic premise was that a world of twenty-four-hour media coverage would have considerable impact on foreign and domestic policy. When world leaders, generals, and politicians watch their actions—and the actions of their counterparts—dissected, analyzed, and speculated about in real time, the argument goes, it changes what they do and how they do it . . . much for the worse.

When they came up with this theory, CNN was mostly a niche channel. The idea that it would soon be only a part of a vast attention-sucking ecosystem that went far beyond broadcasting twenty-four hours a day was inconceivable. Today the news machine includes not only dozens of cable channels but also millions of blogs and hundreds of millions of social media accounts—all of which operate in real time, creating billions of bits of content a second.

I marked the day after the election by doing the following: I deleted Twitter from my phone. I deleted Facebook from my phone. I deleted the Google News app from my phone. I figured out how to remove Apple News from Siri. I removed CNN from my nightly scan of the television channels. I wasn’t interested in being jerked around anymore. I didn’t need to follow every meaningless update or fall for every outrageous headline. It was preventing me from seeing the bigger pictures. Now, if only politicians and leaders could do the same. The world would be a better place.

In the link economy, the blue stamp of an html link seems like it will support weight. (As had the links to the Guardian story containing the false quote.) If I write in an article that “Thomas Jefferson, by his own remarks, admitted to committing acts considered felonious in the State of Virginia,” you’d want to see some evidence before you were convinced. Now imagine that I added a link to the words “acts considered felonious.” This link could go to anything—it could go to a dictionary definition of “felonious acts,” or it could go to a pdf of the entire penal code for the state of Virginia, or it could just go to a gif that when you click it says, “Ha! You shouldn’t have trusted me!” But by linking to something, I have vaguely complied with the standards of the link economy. I have rested my authority on a source and linked to it, and now the burden is on the reader to disprove the validity of that link. Bloggers know this and abuse it.

Afghan warlords have a name for this strategy: ghabban, which means to demand protection from a threat that you create. Many blogs employ it subtly, extorting through a combination of a sense of entitlement and laziness.

Corrections online are a joke. All of the justifications for iterative journalism are not only false—they are literally the opposite of how it works in practice.

Bloggers are no more eager to seek out feedback that shows they were wrong than anyone else is. And they are understandably reluctant to admit their mistakes publicly, as bloggers must do. The bigger the fuckup, the less likely people are to want to cop to it. It’s called “cognitive dissonance.” We’ve known about it for a while.

If you want to get a blogger to correct something—which sensitive clients painfully insist upon—be prepared to have to be an obsequious douche. You’ve got to flatter bloggers into thinking that somehow the mistake wasn’t their fault. Or be prepared to be an asshole.

The original story almost always spreads faster than the correction. Even if it didn’t, the very fact that you are trying to get a correction shows that the incorrect version already has a big head start.

Sociologist Gerald Cromer once noted that the decline of public executions coincided almost exactly with the rise of the mass newspaper. Oscar Wilde said it best: “In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.”

DISAGREE WITH SOMETHING? JUST MAKE FUN OF IT

Snark is an incredibly effective weapon in enforcing norms and dismissing ideas you don’t like. Just make fun of someone until they can’t be taken seriously anymore. That’s the ethos of much of today’s media.

I try to stop clients from doing this. I tell them, “I know this must hurt, but there’s nothing you can do. It’s like jujitsu: The energy you’d exert in your defense will be used against you to make the embarrassment worse.”

Why do bloggers say things like these? Lines such as these are intended not so much to wound as to prick. Not to humiliate but to befuddle. Not to make people laugh but to make them smirk or chuckle. To annihilate without effort.

Because you know who doesn’t mind snark or mockery? Who likes it? The answer is obvious: People with nothing to lose.

People who need to be talked about, like attention-hungry reality stars. There is nothing that you could say that would hurt the cast of Jersey Shore or DJ Khaled or the Cash Me Outside girl. They need you to talk about them, to insult them, and to make fun of them or turn them into memes is to do that. They have no reputation to ruin, only notoriety to gain.

It used to be that someone had to be a national hero before you got the privilege of the media and the public turning on you. You had to be a president or a millionaire or an artist. Now we tear people down just as we’ve begun to build them up. We do this to our fameballs. Our viral video stars. Our favorite new companies. Even random citizens who pop into the news because they did something interesting, unusual, or stupid. First we celebrate them; then we turn to snark, and then, finally, to merciless decimation. No wonder only morons and narcissists enter the public sphere.

Nick Denton told his writers the same thing nearly one hundred years later: “The job of journalism is to provide surprise.”* News is only news if it departs from the routine of daily life.

I used unreality to get free publicity. Cheney used his media manipulations to drive the public toward war. Trump used it to stir tensions with our neighbors and to slander entire races and regions. And no one was able to stop it. By the time they did the facts had been established, the fake made real by media chatter, and real wars had been waged. From the pseudo-environment came actual behavior. Welcome to unreality, my friends. It’s fucking scary.

When you see a blog begin with “According to a tipster . . . ,” know that the tipster was someone like me tricking the blogger into writing what I wanted.

When you see “We’re hearing reports,” know that “reports” could mean anything from random mentions on Twitter to message-board posts, or worse.

When you see “leaked” or “official documents,” know that really means someone just e-mailed a blogger, and that the documents are almost certainly not official and are probably fake or fabricated for the purpose of making desired information public.

When you see “BREAKING” or “We’ll have more details as the story develops,” know that what you’re reading reached you too soon.

When you see “Updated” on a story or article, know that no one actually bothered to rework the story in light of the new facts—they just copied and pasted some shit at the bottom of the article.

When you see “Sources tell us . . . ,” know that these sources are not vetted, they are rarely corroborated, and they are desperate for attention.

When you see someone call themselves a “bestselling author,” know that they probably mean their self-published book was number one in a tiny category on Amazon for five minutes, and the same goes for every “top-ranked” podcast and “award-winning” website.

When you see a story tagged “EXCLUSIVE,” know that it means the blog and the source worked out an arrangement that included favorable coverage. Know that in many cases the source gave this exclusive to multiple sites at the same time or that the site is just taking ownership of a story they stole from a lesser-known site.

When you see “said in a press release,” know that it probably wasn’t even actually a release the company paid to officially put out over the wire. They just spammed a bunch of blogs and journalists via e-mail.

When you see “According to a report by,” know that the writer summarizing this report from another outlet has but the most basic ability in reading comprehension, little time to spend doing it, and every incentive to simplify and exaggerate.

When you see “We’ve reached out to so-and-so for comment,” know that the blogger sent an e-mail two minutes before hitting “publish” at 4:00 A.M., long after they’d written the story and closed their mind, making absolutely no effort to get to the truth before passing it off to you as the news.

When you see an attributed quote or a “said so-and-so,” know that the blogger didn’t actually talk to that person but probably just stole the quote from somewhere else, and per the rules of the link economy, they can claim it as their own so long as there is a tiny link to the original buried in the post somewhere.

When you see “which means” or “meaning that” or “will result in” or any other kind of interpretation or analysis, know that the blogger who did it likely has absolutely zero training or expertise in the field they are opining about. Nor did they have the time or motivation to learn. Nor do they mind being wildly, wildly off the mark, because there aren’t any consequences.

When you hear a friend say in conversation “I was reading that . . . ,” know that today the sad fact is that they probably just glanced at something on a blog.

Why does this matter? We’ve been taught to believe what we read. That where there is smoke there must be fire, and that if someone takes the time to write down and publish something, they believe in what they are saying. The wisdom behind those beliefs is no longer true, yet the public marches on, armed with rules of thumb that make them targets for manipulation rather than protection.

It is now almost cliché for people to say, “If the news is important, it will find me.” This belief itself relies on abandoned shells. It depends on the assumption that the important news will break through the noise while the trivial will be lost. It could not be more wrong. As I discovered in my media manipulations, the information that finds us online—what spreads—is the worst kind. It raised itself above the din not through its value, importance, or accuracy but through the opposite, through slickness, titillation, and polarity.

Our knowledge and understanding is the final empty, hollow shell. What we think we know turns out to be based on nothing, or worse than nothing—misdirection and embellishment. Our facts aren’t facts; they are opinions dressed up like facts. Our opinions aren’t opinions; they are emotions that feel like opinions. Our information isn’t information; it’s just hastily assembled symbols.

Well, television is no longer the main stage of culture. The internet is. Blogs are. YouTube is. Twitter is. And their demands control our culture exactly as television once did. Only the internet worships a different god: traffic. It lives and dies by clicks, because that’s what drives ad revenue and influence. The central question for the internet is not, Is this entertaining? but, Will this get attention? Will it spread?

But incentives can be changed, just as the New York Times showed in switching from the one-off to a subscription model under Adolph Ochs. In order to survive as a quality publication, the New York Times is redefining its economics once again. The recent implementation of their controversial paywall (which limited readers first to twenty free articles a month and then to ten before requiring them to pay for more access) is a lesson in great incentives. According to economist Tyler Cowen, it means that “the new NYT incentive is to have more than twenty must-read articles each month.”2 The Wall Street Journal and other publications have harder paywalls—and guess what? Subscriptions are increasing. How absurd that under the current model—the one that most publishers are sticking with and believe in—there is no imperative to produce these must-read articles, only must-clicks. The New York Times recently announced they once again make more total revenue from subscriptions than from advertising. A deep-pocketed donor just agreed to subsidize on $1 million worth of New York Times subscriptions for students. This is all very good news. Whether it will be replicated, or whether it can be, is another question. Would you pay for most of the crap that is created online? I wouldn’t.

We never asked the critical question: If we have to do all the work, what are we paying you guys for?

When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?

My decision to spend less time online is not a selfish one, though it did make my life better. It’s voting with my wallet. If more people do the same, it will have impact.

You cannot have your news instantly and have it done well. You cannot have your news reduced to 140 characters or less without losing large parts of it. You cannot manipulate the news but not expect it to be manipulated against you. You cannot have your news for free; you can only obscure the costs. If, as a culture, we can learn this lesson, and if we can learn to love the hard work, we will save ourselves much trouble and collateral damage. We must remember: There is no easy way.