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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
August 26 - October 1, 2019
You’ve got to flatter bloggers into thinking that somehow the mistake wasn’t their fault.
the onus for pointing out inaccuracy falls on basically everybody but the person who gets paid to report facts for a living.
Getting a correction posted takes time, often hours or days, occasionally weeks, because bloggers deliberately drag their feet.
Factual errors are only one type of error
The challenged fact requires a reexamination of the premises built on top of it. In other words: We don’t need an update; we need a rewrite.
gets traffic by posting jaw-dropping rumors, but then also gets traffic the next day by shooting down the same rumors he created.
learning iteratively doesn’t work for readers either—not even a little.
Think of Wikipedia,
Most of them did not consume it as a final product. No, it was read, and relied upon, in piecemeal—while it was under construction.
Each corrected mistake, each change or addition, in this light is not a triumph but a failure.
while the Internet allows content to be written iteratively, the audience does not read or consume it iteratively.
An iterative approach fails because, as a form of knowledge, the news exists in what psychologists refer to as the “specious present.”
Journalism can never truly be iterative, because as soon as it is read it becomes fact—in this case, poor and often inaccurate fact.
Iterative journalism advocates try to extend the expiration date of the news’s specious present by asking readers to withhold judgment, check back for updates, and be responsible for their own fact-checking.
The human mind “first believes, then evaluates,” as one psychologist put it. To that I’d add, “as long as it doesn’t get distracted first.”
we are not only bad at remaining skeptical, we’re bad at correcting our beliefs when they’re proven wrong.
Those who saw the correction were, in fact, more likely to believe the initial claim than those who did not. And they held this belief more confidently than their peers. In other words, corrections not only don’t fix the error—they backfire and make misperception worse.
corrections appear to tighten their mind’s grip on the now disputed fact.
Making a point is exciting; correcting one is not.
Once the mind has accepted a plausible explanation for something, it becomes a framework for all the information that is perceived after it.
cognitive rigidity.
Information overload, “busyness,” speed, and emotion all exacerbate this phenomenon.
the more unbelievable headlines and articles readers are exposed to, the more it warps their compass—making the real seem fake and the fake seem real.
the iterative model can eventually get the story right,
More people were misled than helped.
iterative journalism is antithetical to how the human brain works.
We place an inordinate amount of trust in things that have been written down.
Iterative journalism puts companies and people in an impossible position: Speaking out only validates the original story—however incorrect it is—while staying silent and leaving the story as it was written means that the news isn’t actually iterative.
sites like yours, the Huffington Post, pass along rumors as fact and rehash posts from other blogs without checking them. It’s impossible to fight back against that.
Why are we cheering on our own deception?
that’s exactly what we are doing when we have conversations about how marketers and PR specialists could do their job better.
It’s easier to co-opt readers with marketing bullshit than it is to protect their interests or provide worthwhile material.
blogs, marketers, and publicists cannot help but conspire to meet one anothers’ needs and dress up the artificial and unreal as important.
Public relations and marketing are something companies do to move product.
ADVERTISING AS CONTENT
“Get out there and make your own noise. Advertise the advertising.”
the old trick of getting a music video or a commercial banned in order to make it a news story.
They get the attention—and they don’t have to pay for the ad space.
it is pathetic worship of our own deception.
Blogs often liveblog their own conferences,
the real goal of this coverage is to make the conference seem newsworthy enough that people pay to attend next year.
COVERAGE ABOUT COVERAGE
Coverage about coverage is not more coverage, though it may feel like it.
worthless filler—news that tells us how we were told about the news.
Every few months blogs trot out the tired old story of how to pitch coverage to them.
it is essentially a manual with step-by-step instructions on how to infiltrate and deceive that blogger with marketing.
It’s one thing when it is possible to plant a story; it’s another entirely when blogs write stories about how people plant stories on their site.
Only when you see this type of coverage for what it is—lazy, cheap, and self-interested—does it lose its allure;
The media and the public are supposed to be on the same side. The media, when it’s functioning properly, protects the public against marketers
Marketers and the media—me and the bloggers—we’re on the same team, and way too often you are played into watching with rapt attention as we deceive you.
