by Ryan Holiday
My experience is not uncommon. A friend, a car blogger earnestly passionate about his job, once e-mailed the writer of a less-than-reputable car site after they published a rumor that turned out to be false.
Him: Why keep the headline up, since we now know it’s not true?
Blogger: You guys are so funny.
Bloggers often stick their updates way down at the bottom, because they are vain, just like the rest of us—they’d rather not shout their mistakes loudly for all to hear, or have them be the first thing the reader sees. In other cases, blogs will just paste your e-mail at the bottom of the post, as though it’s “your opinion” that they’re wrong. Of course, it isn’t just an opinion or they wouldn’t have been forced to post it. But they get to keep the article up by framing it as a two-sided issue. The last thing they want to do is rewrite or get rid of their post and throw away the few minutes of work they put into it. “He lies like a newspaper” was a common midnineteenth-century expression about people you couldn’t trust. Or as Lincoln once joked to a friend about the “reliability” of newspapers, “They lie and then they re-lie.” One could swap out “newspaper” for “blog” in those quotes, and they’d be just as accurate now as 150 years ago.
BEING WRONG
Factual errors are only one type of error—perhaps the least important kind. A story is made of facts, and it is the concrescence of those facts that creates a news story. Corrections remove those facts from the story—but the story and its thrust remain. Even writers who are averse to acknowledging errors but have nevertheless done so will only under the rarest of circumstances follow the logic fully: 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.
It’s a real golden age for journalists when they not only get traffic by posting jaw-dropping rumors, but then also get traffic the next day by shooting down the same rumors they created. I once heard Megan McCarthy (Gawker, Techmeme, CNET) speak at a SXSW panel about how false stories, such as fake celebrity death reports, spread online. During the Q&A I got up and asked, “This is all well and good, but what about mistakes of a less black-and-white variety? You know, something a little more complex than whether someone is actually dead or not. What about subtle untruths or slight mis-characterizations? How does one go about getting those corrected?” She laughed. “I love your idea that there can be nuance on the internet.”
It’s too hard to get complicated things right, so why bother?
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERROR
If it were simply a matter of breaking through the endemic arrogance of bloggers and publishers, iterative journalism might be fixable. But the reality is that learning iteratively doesn’t work for readers either—not even a little.
Think of Wikipedia, which provides a good example of the iterative process. By 2010 the article on the Iraq war had accumulated more than twelve thousand edits, enough to fill twelve volumes and seven thousand printed pages (someone actually did the math on this for an artistic book project). Impressive, no doubt. But that number obscures the fact that though the twelve thousand changes collectively result in a coherent, mostly accurate depiction, it is not what most people who looked at the Wikipedia entry in the last half decade saw. Most of them did not consume it as a final product. No, it was read, and relied upon, piecemeal—while it was under construction. Thousands of other Wikipedia pages link to it; thousands more blogs used it as a reference; hundreds of thousands of people read these links and formed opinions accordingly. Each corrected mistake, each change or addition, in this light is not a triumph but a failure. Because for a time the article was wrongly presented as being correct or complete—even though it was in a constant state of flux. Think about it: Do you make a habit of checking back on Wikipedia pages just to make sure nothing has changed?
The reality is that while the internet allows content to be written iteratively, the audience does not read or consume it iteratively. Each member usually sees what he or she sees a single time—a snapshot of the process—and draws his or her conclusions from that.
An iterative approach fails because, as a form of knowledge, the news exists in what psychologists refer to as the “specious present.” As sociologist Robert E. Park wrote, “News remains news only until it has reached the persons for whom it has ‘news interest.’ Once published and its significance recognized, what was news becomes history.” 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.* Bloggers ask for this suspended state of incredulity from readers while the news is being hashed out in front of them. But like a student taking a test and trying to slow down time so they can get to the last few questions, it’s just not possible.
Suppressing one’s instinct to interpret and speculate, until the totality of evidence arrives, is a skill that detectives and doctors train for years to develop. This is not something we regular humans are good at; in fact, we’re wired to do the opposite. 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.” How can we expect people to transcend their biology while they read celebrity gossip and news about sports?
The science shows that not only are we bad at remaining skeptical, we’re also bad at correcting our beliefs when they’re proven wrong. In a University of Michigan study called “When Corrections Fail,” political scholars Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler coined a phrase for it: the “backfire effect.”3 After being shown a fake news article, half of the participants were provided with a correction at the bottom discrediting a central claim in the article—just like one you might see at the bottom of a blog post. All of the subjects were then asked to rate their beliefs about the claims in the article.
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.
What happens is that the correction actually reintroduces the claim into the reader’s mind and forces them to run it back through their mental processes. Instead of prompting them to discard the old thought, as intended, corrections appear to tighten their mind’s grip on the now disputed fact.
In this light, I have always found it ironic that the name for the Wall Street Journal corrections section is “Corrections & Amplifications.”* If only they knew that corrections actually are amplifications. But seriously, there can’t really be that many cases where a newspaper would ever need to “amplify” one of its initial claims, could there? What are they going to do? Issue an update saying that they didn’t sound haughty and pretentious enough the first go-round?
Bloggers brandish the correction as though it is some magical balm that heals all wounds. Here’s the reality: Making a point is exciting; correcting one is not. An accusation is much likelier to spread quickly than a quiet admission of error days or months later. Upton Sinclair used the metaphor of water—the sensational stuff flows rapidly through an open channel, while the administrative details like corrections hit the concrete wall of a closed dam.
Once the mind has accepted a plausible explanation for something, it becomes a framework for all the information that is perceived afterward. We’re drawn, subconsciously, to fit and contort all the subsequent knowledge we receive into our framework, whether it fits or not. Psychologists call this cognitive rigidity. The facts that built an original premise are gone, but the conclusion remains—the general feeling of our opinion floats over the collapsed foundation that established it.
Information overload, “busyness,” speed, and emotion all exacerbate this phenomenon. They make it ev
en harder to update our beliefs or remain open-minded. When readers repeat, comment on, react to, and hear rumors—all actions blogs are designed to provoke—it becomes harder for them to see real truth when it is finally presented or corrected.
In another study researchers examined the effect of exposure to wholly fictional, unbelievable news headlines. Rather than cultivate detached skepticism, as proponents of iterative journalism would like, it turns out that 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 more extreme a headline, the longer participants spend processing it, and the more likely they are to believe it. The more times an unbelievable claim is seen, the more likely they are to believe it.4
It is true that the iterative model can eventually get the story right, just like in theory Wikipedia perpetually moves toward higher-quality pages. The distributed efforts of hundreds or thousands of blogs can aggregate a final product that may even be superior to what one dedicated newsroom could ever make. When they do, I’ll gladly congratulate them—they can throw themselves a tweeter-tape parade for all I care—but I’ll have to remind them when it’s all over that it didn’t make a difference. More people were misled than helped.
The ceaseless, instant world of iterative journalism is antithetical to how the human brain works. Studies have shown that the brain experiences reading and listening in profoundly different ways; they activate different hemispheres for the exact same content. We place an inordinate amount of trust in things that have been written down. This comes from centuries of knowing that writing was expensive—that it was safe to assume that someone would rarely waste the resources to commit to paper something untrue. The written word and the use of it conjures up deep associations with authority and credence that are thousands of years old.
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. But acknowledging this paradox would undermine the premise of this very profitable and gratifying practice. I can’t decide if it is more ironic or sad that the justification for iterative journalism needs its own correction. If only Jeff Jarvis would post on his blog: “Oops, turns out errors are a lot more difficult to correct than we thought . . . and trying to do so only makes things worse. I guess we shouldn’t have pushed this whole ridiculous enterprise on everyone so hard.”
That would be the day.
Instead, the philosophy behind iterative journalism is like a lot of the examples of bad stories I have mentioned. The facts supporting the conclusions collapse under scrutiny, and only the hubris of a faulty conclusion remains.
*Conveniently, this reading style would generate the most pageviews for the blog.
*By contrast, the wire service Reuters puts their updates and new facts at the top of their articles and often reissues them over the wire to replace the older ones.
XIX
THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY DEGR A DATION CEREMONY
BLOGS AS MACHINES OF MOCKERY, SHAME, AND PUNISHMENT
It is taking one’s conjectures rather seriously to roast someone alive for them.
—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
—WILLIAM HAZLITT, “ON THE PLEASURE OF HATING” (1826)
SOCIOLOGIST GER A LD CROMER ONCE NOTED that the decline of public executions coincided almost exactly with the rise of the mass newspaper. Oscar Wilde said it best: “In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.”
If only they had known what was coming next: Online lynch mobs. Social media shaming Smear campaigns. Snark. Cyberbullying. Distributed denial of service attempts. Internet meltdowns. Anonymous tipsters. Blog wars. Trolls. Trial by comments section.
It is clear to me that the online media cycle is a process not for developing truth but for performing a kind of cultural catharsis. Blogs, I understand from Wilde and Cromer, serve the hidden function of dispensing public punishments. Think of the Salem witch trials: They weren’t court proceedings but ceremonies. In that light, the events three hundred years ago suddenly feel very real and current: They were doing with trumped-up evidence and the gallows what we do with speculation and sensationalism. Ours is just a more civilized way to tear someone to pieces.
My experience with digital lynch mobs is unique. I get frantic calls from sensitive millionaires and billionaires who want me to fend these mobs off. Occasionally they ask that I discreetly direct this mob toward one of their enemies. I am not afraid to say I have done both. I feel I can honestly look myself in the mirror and say the people I protected deserved my efforts—and so did the people I set my sights on. But it is a power I don’t relish using, because once I start, I don’t stop.
Ask the blogger we went after during Tucker’s movie campaign. The ad I ran, which the blog MediaElites later called “one of the most despicable personal attacks” they’d ever seen, read in part: “Tucker Max Facts #47: Domestic violence is not funny. Unless Gawker editor Richard Blakeley gets arrested for it.”* The New York Post once caught wind of a campaign of mine against an enemy after my e-mail account was hacked. They were so appalled that they ran a full-page article about it in their Sunday edition: “Charney [ really, me] Wages Bizarre Cyber Battle.” This article, along with the press I’d bagged to embarrass our target, hangs on my wall like a hunting trophy. It is interesting to me that when I pointed the attention back toward the media (in the domestic assault case involving the editor), it was a “despicable personal attack,” but when the media does it to other people it’s called journalism.
THE DEGRADATION CEREMONY
These acts of ritualized destruction are known by anthropologists as “degradation ceremonies.” Their purpose is to allow the public to single out and denounce one of its members. To lower their status or expel them from the group. To collectively take out its anger at them by stripping them of their dignity. It is a we-versus-you scenario with deep biological roots. By the end of it, the disgraced person’s status is cemented as “not one of us.” Everything about them is torn down and rewritten.
The burning passion behind such ceremonies, William Hazlitt wrote in his classic essay “On the Pleasure of Hating,” “carries us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs, and the revenge of a barbarous age and people.” You can nudge blogs toward those dangerous instincts. They love the excitement of hunting and the rush of the kill without any of the danger. In the throes of such hatred, he writes, “the wild beast resumes its sway within us.”
What happens when that happens?
Ask Justine Sacco, who tweeted a misunderstood joke about AIDS, became a trending topic on Twitter, and lost her job. Ask news anchor Brian Williams, who saw decades of goodwill evaporate because he exaggerated a story in a way that every normal person has a hundred times. Ask Monica Lewinsky, who dared have consensual sex with a married man twenty years ago and is still paying for it. Ask Jonah Lehrer, the author and speaker who got caught making up quotes and recycling some of his old material in articles online and became a favorite punching bag of journalists.*
I think about Jonah because I relate to him. We’ve never met, but I share an editor and a speaking agent with him. I certainly can’t afford a $2.25 million historic home in Laurel Canyon like he apparently once did, but from my books and career as a similarly young though less accomplished author, I might be able to buy a condo nearby.
When the story first broke about him, I hated him. I cheered on the people who were attacking him. Serves him right, I thought. It was only in reading Jon Ronson’s absolutely spectacular book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, perhaps the best book on online culture of the last decade, that I got the proper perspective on the infamous plagiarist and fabulist.
Th
at perspective is this: There but for the grace of God go I. There but for the grace of God goes any of the rest of us.
In one of the book’s more remarkable passages, Ronson writes:
We all have ticking away within us something we fear will badly harm our reputation if it got out—some “I’m glad I’m not that” at the end of “I’m glad I’m not me.” . . . Maybe our secret is actually nothing horrendous. Maybe nobody would even consider it a big deal if it was exposed. But we can’t take that risk. So we keep it buried.
What is your shame? Can you even bring yourself to mouth it silently to yourself? Or does even that seem like tempting fate? Imagine what would happen if someone found out about it; imagine what they could do to you with it. Personally, I think my work and my behavior are aboveboard. I believe my passwords and accounts to be secure. But I wouldn’t bet my life on it. Would you?
Yet increasingly those are the stakes required for the gamble of daily life. Our online culture is both fueled by and ruled by this bitterness and anger that pretend that other people aren’t human beings.
Justine Sacco makes a dumb joke. Celebrities take private nude photos that get hacked. Brian Williams embellishes a story or has a generous memory. Amy Pascal says something offensive in an e-mail. Jonah Lehrer self-plagiarizes.
The fact that many of us have done the same and gotten away with it, or in fact sit on far darker secrets, is pushed aside. After all, there are page views to get. Social share bonuses to collect. Pain to sublimate. Right, bloggers?