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

by Ryan Holiday

However the play starts, the end is the same: The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception—and sell product.

By the end of this book, you’ll see that we have a media system designed to trick, cajole, and steal every second of the most precious resource in the world—people’s time. I’m going to show you every single one of these tricks,

Online publications compete to get stories first, newspapers compete to “confirm” it, and then pundits compete for airtime to opine on it. The smaller sites legitimize the newsworthiness of the story for the sites with bigger audiences. Consecutively and concurrently, this pattern inherently distorts and exaggerates whatever they cover.