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

by Ryan Holiday

Greek tra...

taught the audience to think about how easily an unfortunate situation could befall them, and to be humbled by the flaws of another person.

There is nothing to be learned from the tragic rise and fall of public men that we see on blogs.

Their degradation is mere spectacle that blogs use to sublimate the general anxieties of their readers.

And if we’re not getting anything out of it, and nobody learns anything from it, then I don’t see how you can call blogs anything other than a digital blood sport.

Blogs are assailed on all sides,

These incentives are real,

Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimportant stories.

I started to see what this process amounted to collectively—the cumulative effect of tens of thousands of such posts, written and uploaded day in and day out

What is the result of millions of blogs fighting to be heard over millions of other blogs

These results are unreality.

This is what happens when the dominant cultural medium—the medium that feeds our other mediums—is so easily corrupted by people like me.

unreality is the only word for it.

“For the news is always finally,” he wrote “what Charles A. Dana described it to be, ‘something that will make people talk.’”

News is only news if it departs from the routine of daily life.

Most things are not worth talking about. But the news must be. And so the normal parts of life are omitted from the news by virtue of being normal.

almost everything blogs do distorts the news.

It can only show us a version of reality that serves their needs.

The news, whether it’s found online or in print, is just the content that successfully navigated the media’s filters.

the media is a mechanism for systematically limiting the information seen by the public.

The Internet is what technologists call an “experience technology.” The more it is used, the more trust users have in it.

Internet culture has done one thing with this trust: utterly abused it.

EMBRACING THE FAKE

Henry Blodget

The publicists could write about the product launches of their own clients, and Blodget’s site would edit and publish them. “In short,” he concluded, “please stop sending us e-mails with story ideas and just contribute directly to Business Insider.

he didn’t mind misinforming. He didn’t care who wrote it, so long as it got pageviews.

Consider the pseudo-event

pseudo-events are anything planned deliberately to attract the attention of the media.

press releases, award ceremonies, red-carpet events, premieres, product launches, anniversaries, grand openings, “leaks,” the contrite celebrity interview after a scandal, the sex tape, the tell-all, the public statement, controversial advertisements, marches on Washington, press junkets, and on and on.

serve no purpose other than to generate press.

Blodget, with his “Dear PR Folks” advisory, wasn’t falling for a pseudo-event. He was the perpetrator. By

Blog economics both depend on and indulge in pseudo-events even more than old media—

pseudo-events are typically much more interesting to publishers than real events.

FROM THE FAKE, THE REAL

It’s at these vulnerable points that manipulation becomes more po...

Create a pseudo-event, trade it up the chain, elicit real responses and action, and you h...

the defining feature of our world today: a blurred line between what is real and what is fake; what actually happens and what is staged; and, finally, between the important and the trivial.*

The problem with unreality and pseudo-events is not simply that they are unreal; it is that they don’t stay unreal.

the news constitutes a sort of pseudo-environment, but our responses to that environment is not pseudo but actual behavior.

Dick Cheney

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.