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

by Ryan Holiday

A man much smarter than I am once described a “racket” as something that “is not what it seems to the majority of the people,” where only a small group of insiders know what’s really going on and they operate for the benefit of a few and at the expense of basically everyone else.

It was a mention of a 1913 editorial cartoon published in the long since defunct Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper. The cartoon, it said, showed a businessman throwing coins into the mouth of a giant fang-bared monster of many arms, which stood menacingly in front of him. Each of its tentacle-like arms, which were destroying the city around it, was tattooed with the words like: “Cultivating Hate,” “Distorting Facts,” and “Slush to Inflame.” The man was an advertiser and the mouth belonged to the malicious yellow press that needed his money to survive. Underneath was a caption: THE FOOL WHO FEEDS THE MONSTER.

I don’t think it’s controversial now, looking at the collapse of our political discourse, when a reality-television star has been elected to the presidency, to say that everyone is starting to learn what the consequences of feeding the monster are. We can’t even talk to each other anymore, each of us running our own polarized little world on Facebook. Both sides throw the label “fake news” at each other because we can’t even agree on basic truth anymore.

Think about it: Where do people find stuff today? They find it online. This is just as true for normal people as it is for the so-called gatekeepers. If something is being chatted about on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, it will make its way through all other forms of media and eventually into culture itself. That’s a fact.

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