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by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
August 26 - October 1, 2019
bloggers were seeing that which was not there. They had been so trained to find “big stories” that they hardly knew the difference between real and made up.
There are fatal flaws in the blogging medium that create opportunities for influence over the media
I did not fully understand the dangers of that world. The costs of the cheap power I had in it were hidden, but once revealed, I could not shake them. 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 in the process.
an investigation not in how the dark arts of media manipulation work but of their consequences.
The story was so compelling (American Apparel! Toxic polish! Exploding glass!) they had to run with it, true or not.
the opportunity to change the readers’ minds had passed. The facts had been established.
The controversy eventually meant the undoing of the nail polish company we’d worked so hard to support.
if not for Carmon’s needless attack and rush to judgment—the proximate cause—it all could have been worked out.
From the twisting of the facts, the creation of a nonexistent story, the merciless use of attention for profit—she does what I do.
the publisher of Gawker, Nick Denton, commended the story for getting the kind of publicity that can’t be bought. Denton wrote, “It was widely circulated within the media, spawned several more discussions, and affirmed our status as both an influencer and a muckraker.”
For a writer like Carmon, whose pay is determined by the number of pageviews her posts receive, this was a home run. And
That her story was a lie didn’t matter. That it was part of a pattern of manipulation didn’t matter.
In the titles of her first and second articles, you can see what she is doing.
One headline bootstraps the next;
The post making the accusation did 333,000 views. Her post showing the Daily Show women’s response did 10,000 views—3 percent of the impressions of the first shot.
A writer finds a narrative to advance that is profitable to them,
It’s a prime example of the feminist blogosphere’s tendency to tap into the market force of what I’ve come to think of as “outrage world”—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like Jezebel and also, to a lesser degree, Slate’s own XX Factor and Salon’s Broadsheet. They’re ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism. These firestorms are great for page-view-pimping bloggy business. 7
The problem is when they get too greedy. The problem is when they stop being able to see anything but the need for their own gain.
SOMETIMES ONLY A MANIPULATOR CAN SPOT ANOTHER manipulator’s work.
They changed politics and upended people’s lives.
Shirley Sherrod,
Behind it was a manipulator just like me.
the bloggers and reporters who repeated the story were writing about it iteratively, using only the limited material they had been given
“We now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.”
Breitbart
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’s wasn’t an ideologue; he was an expert on what spreads—a provocateur.
The political machine was a plaything for Breitbart, and he made it do just what he wanted
For all the complaints from blogs, cable channels, and newspapers about being misled, Breitbart had actually given them a highly profitable gift.
the media doesn’t mind being played, because they get something out of it—namely, pageviews, ratings, and readers.
“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.”
James O’Keefe.
knows what spreads, and he uses that knowledge for evil ends.
O’Keefe’s work is heavily and disingenuously edited—far beyond what the context and actual events would support.
in the blogging market there is a profound shortage of investigative material or original reporting.
Short, shocking narratives with a reusable sound bite are all it takes.
Being caught as a manipulator can only help make you more famous.
the best way to make your critics work for you is to make them irrationally angry.
they are not simply political extremists but ruthless seekers of attention. From this attention comes fame and profit—a platform
people are the casualties of a media system defined by what spreads—wholly at the mercy of fraud, exaggeration, stunts, and a thousand subtle felonies against the truth.
self-control has got nothing to do with it.
No wonder you can’t get any work done. They won’t let you.
keep readers addicted: “The
We once naively believed that blogs would be a boon to democracy.
“If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.”
everyone is distracted, deliberately so. 2
The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk.
Blogs are out to game you—to steal your time from you and sell it to advertisers—and they do this every day.
Entire companies are now built on this model, exploiting the intersection between entertainment, impulse, and the profit margins of low-quality content. What
algorithmically created media.
