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

by Ryan Holiday

  With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a half million views, and funded his project for the next two years. It went from nothing to something.

  This may have all been for charity, but it still raises a critical question: What exactly happened? How was it so easy for him to manipulate the media, even for a good cause? He turned one exaggerated amateur video into a news story that was written about independently by dozens of outlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions. It even registered nationally. He had created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself.

  Before you get upset at us, remember: We were only doing what Lindsay Robertson, a blogger from Videogum, Jezebel, and New York magazine’s Vulture blog, taught us to do. In a post explaining to publicists how they could better game bloggers like herself, Lindsay advised focusing “on a lower traffic tier with the (correct) understanding that these days, content filters up as much as it filters down, and often the smaller sites, with their ability to dig deeper into the [I]nternet and be more nimble, act as farm teams for the larger ones.”*1

  Blogs have enormous influence over other blogs, making it possible to turn a post on a site with only a little traffic into posts on much bigger sites, if the latter happens to read the former. Blogs 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.

  THE LAY OF THE LAND

  Here’s how it works. There are thousands of bloggers scouring the web looking for things to write about. They must write several times each day. They search Twitter, Facebook, comments sections, press releases, rival blogs, and other sources to develop their material.

  Above them are hundreds of mid-level online and offline journalists on websites and blogs and in magazines and newspapers who use those bloggers below them as sources and filters. They also have to write constantly—and engage in the same search for buzz, only a little more developed.

  Above them are the major national websites, publications, and television stations. They in turn browse the scourers below them for their material, grabbing their leads and turning them into truly national conversations. These are the most influential bunch—the New York Times, the Today Show, and CNN—and dwindling revenues or not, they have massive reach.

  Finally, between, above, and throughout these concentric levels is the largest group: us, the audience. We scan the web for material that we can watch, comment on, or share with our friends and followers.

  It’s bloggers informing bloggers informing bloggers all the way down. This isn’t anecdotal observation. It is fact. In a media monitoring study done by Cision and George Washington University, 89 percent of journalists reported using blogs for their research for stories. Roughly half reported using Twitter to find and research stories, and more than two thirds use other social networks, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, in the same way.2 The more immediate the nature of their publishing mediums (blogs, then newspapers, then magazines), the more heavily a journalist will depend on sketchy online sources, like social media, for research.

  Recklessness, laziness, however you want to categorize it, the attitude is openly tolerated and acknowledged. The majority of journalists surveyed admitted to knowing that their online sources were less reliable than traditional ones. Not a single journalist said they believed that the information gathered from social media was “a lot more reliable” than traditional media! Why? Because it suffers from a “lack of fact-checking, verification or reporting standards.”3

  For the sake of simplicity, let’s break the chain into three levels. I know these levels as one thing only: beachheads for manufacturing news. I don’t think someone could have designed a system easier to manipulate if they wanted to.

  Level 1: The Entry Point

  At the first level, small blogs and hyperlocal websites that cover your neighborhood or particular scene are some of the easiest sites to get traction on. Since they typically write about local, personal issues pertaining to a contained readership, trust is very high. At the same time, they are cash-strapped and traffic-hungry, always on the lookout for a big story that might draw a big spike of new viewers. It doesn’t have to be local, though; it can be a site about a subject you know very well, or it can be a site run by a friend.

  What’s important is that the site is small and understaffed. This makes it possible to sell them a story that is only loosely connected to their core message but really sets you up to transition to the next level.

  Level 2: The Legacy Media

  Here we begin to see a mix of online and offline sources. The blogs of newspapers and local television stations are some of the best targets. For starters, they share the same URL and often get aggregated in Google News. Places like the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and CBS all have sister sites like SmartMoney.com, Mainstreet.com, BNet.com, and others that feature the companies’ logos but have their own editorial standards not always as rigorous as their old media counterparts’. They seem legitimate, but they are, as Fark.com founder Drew Curtis calls them, just “Mass Media Sections That Update More Often but with Less Editorial Oversight.”

  Legacy media outlets are critical turning points in building up momentum. The reality is that the bloggers at Forbes.com or the Chicago Tribune do not operate on the same editorial guidelines as their print counterparts. However, their final output can be made to look like they carry the same weight. If you get a blog on Wired.com to mention your startup, you can smack “‘A revolutionary device’—Wired” on the box of your product just as surely as you could if Wired had put your CEO on the cover of the magazine.

  These sites won’t write about just anything, though, so you need to create chatter or a strong story angle to hook this kind of sucker. Their illusion of legitimacy comes at the cost of being slightly more selective when it comes to what they cover. But it is worth the price, because it will grant the bigger websites in your sights later the privilege of using magic words like: “NBC is reporting …”

  Level 3: National

  Having registered multiple stories from multiple sources firmly onto the radar of both local and midlevel outlets, you can now leverage this coverage to access the highest level of media: the national press. Getting to this level usually involves less direct pushing and a lot more massaging. The sites that have already taken your bait are now on your side. They desperately want their articles to get as much traffic as possible, and being linked to or mentioned on national sites is how they do that. These sites will take care of submitting your articles to news aggregator sites like Digg, because making the front page will drive tens of thousands of visitors to their article. Mass media reporters monitor aggregators for story ideas, and often cover what is trending there, like they did with the charity story after it made the front page of Reddit. In today’s world even these guys have to think like bloggers—they need to get as many pageviews as possible. Success on the lower levels of the media chain is evidence that the story could deliver even better results from a national platform.

  You just want to make sure that such reporters notice the story’s gaining traction. Take the outlet where you’d ultimately like to receive coverage and observe it for patterns. You’ll notice that they tend to get their story ideas from the same second-level sites, and by tailoring the story to those smaller sites (or site), it sets you up to be noticed by the larger one. The blogs on Gawker and Mediabistro, for instance, are read very heavily by the New York City media set. You can craft the story for those sites and automatically set yourself up to appeal to the other reporters reading it—without ever speaking to them directly. An example: Katie Couric claims she gets many story ideas from her Twitter followers, which means that getting a few tweets out of the seven hundred or so people she follows is all it
takes to get a shot at the nightly national news.

  News anchors aren’t the only people susceptible to this trick. Scott Vener, the famous hit maker responsible for picking the songs that go into HBO’s trendiest shows, like Entourage and How to Make It in America, has a reputation for discovering “unknown artists.” Really, he admits, most of the music he finds is just “what is bubbling up on the Internet.”4 Since Vener monitors conversations on Twitter and the comments on trendy music blogs, a shot at a six-figure HBO payday and instant mainstream exposure is just a few manufactured bubbles away.

  It’s a simple illusion: Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter (or the music supervisor or celebrity stylist) is doing is popularizing it. They rarely bother to look past the first impressions.

  LEVELS 1, 2, 3:

  HOW I TRADED UP THE CHAIN

  My campaign for I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell began by vandalizing the billboards. The graffiti was designed to bait two specific sites, Curbed Los Angeles and Mediabistro’s FishbowlLA. When I sent them photos of my work under the fake name Evan Meyer, they both quickly picked it up.5 (For his contributions as a tipster, Evan earned his own Mediabistro profile, which still exists. According to the site he has not been “sighted” since.)

  Curbed LA began their post by using my e-mail verbatim:

  A reader writes: “I saw these on my way home last night. It was on 3rd and Crescent Heights, I think. Good to know Los Angeles hates him too.” Provocateur Tucker Max’s new movie “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” opens this weekend [emphasis mine].

  Thanks for the plug!

  In creating outrage for the movie, I had a lot of luck getting local websites to cover or spread the news about protests of the screenings we had organized through anonymous tips.* They were the easiest place to get the story started. We would send them a few offensive quotes and say something like “This misogynist is coming to our school and we’re so fucking pissed. Could you help spread the word?” Or I’d e-mail a neighborhood site to say that “a controversial screening with rumors of a local boycott” was happening in a few days.

  Sex, college protesters, Hollywood—it was the definition of the kind of local story news producers love. After reading about the growing controversy on the small blogs I conned, they would often send camera crews to the screenings. The video of the story would get posted on the station’s website, and then get covered again by the other, larger blogs in that city, like those hosted by a newspaper or companies like the Huffington Post. I was able to get the story to register, however briefly, by using a small site with low standards of newsworthiness. Other media outlets might be alerted to this fact, and in turn cover it, giving me another bump. At this point I now have something to work with. Three or four links are the makings of a trend piece, or even a controversy—that’s all major outlets and national website need to see to get excited. Former Slate.com media critic Jake Shafer called such manufactured online controversy “frovocation”—a portmanteau of faux provocation. It works incredibly well.

  The key to getting from the second to the third level is the soft sell. I couldn’t very well e-mail a columnist at the Washington Post and say, “Hey, will you denounce our movie so we can benefit from the negative PR?” So I targeted the sites that those kinds of columnists were likely to read. Gawker and Mediabistro are very media-centric, so we tailored stories to them to queue ourselves up for outrage from their audiences—which happen to include reporters at places like the Washington Post.* And when I want to be direct, I would register a handful of fake e-mail addresses on Gmail or Yahoo and send e-mails with a collection of all the links gathered so far and say, “How have you not done a story about this yet?” Reporters rarely get substantial tips or alerts from their readers, so to get two or even three legitimate tips about an issue is a strong signal.

  So I sent it to them. Well, kind of. I actually just did more of the same fake tips from fake e-mail addresses that worked for the other sites—only this time I had a handful of links from major blogs that made it clear that everyone was talking about it. At this point something amazing happened: The coverage my stunts received began helping the twenty-thousand-dollar-a-month publicist the movie had hired. Rejections from late-night television, newspaper interviews, and morning radio turned into callbacks. Tucker did Carson Daly’s NBC late-night show for the first time. By the end of this charade, hundreds of reputable reporters, producers, and bloggers had been swept up into participating. Thousands more had eagerly gobbled up news about it on multiple blogs. Each time they did, views of the movie trailer spiked, book sales increased, and Tucker became more famous and more controversial. If only people had known they were promoting the offensive Tucker Max brand for us, just as we’d planned.

  With just a few simple moves, I’d taken his story from level 1 to level 3—not just once but several times, back and forth. Ultimately the movie did not do nearly as well at release as we’d hoped—this supplementary guerrilla marketing ended up being the entirety of the movie’s advertising efforts rather than a small part of it for reasons outside of my control—but the attention generated by the campaign was overwhelming and incredibly lucrative. Eventually the movie became a cult hit on DVD.

  Once you get a story like this started it takes on a life of its own. That’s what happened after I vandalized Tucker’s billboards. Exactly one week later, inspired by my example, sixteen feminists gathered in New York City late at night to vandalize I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell posters all over Manhattan.6 Their campaign got even more coverage than my stunt, including a 650-word, three-picture story on a Village Voice blog with dozens of comments (I posted some comments under fake names to get people riled up, but looking at them now I can’t tell which ones are fake and which are real). From the fake came real action.

  THE MEDIA: DANCING WITH ITSELF

  Trading up the chain relies on a concept created by crisis public relations expert Michael Sitrick. When attempting to turn things around for a particularly disliked or controversial client, Sitrick was fond of saying, “We need to find a lead steer!” The media, like any group of animals, gallops in a herd. It takes just one steer to start a stampede. The first level is your lead steer. The rest is just pointing everyone’s attention to the direction it went in.

  Remember: Every person (with the exception of a few at the top layer) in this ecosystem is under immense pressure to produce content under the tightest of deadlines. Yes, you have something to sell. But more than ever they desperately, desperately need to buy. The flimsiest of excuses is all it takes.

  It freaked me out when I began to see this sort of thing happen without the deliberate prodding of a promoter like myself. I saw media conflagrations set off by internal sparks. In this networked, interdependent world of blogging, misinformation can spread even when no one is consciously pushing or manipulating it. The system is so primed, tuned, and ready that often it doesn’t need people like me. The monster can feed itself.

  Sometimes just a single quote taken out of context can set things off. In early 2011, a gossip reporter for an AOL entertainment blog asked former quarterback Kurt Warner who he thought would be the next ex-athlete to join the show Dancing with the Stars. Warner jokingly suggested Brett Favre, who was then embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal. Though the show told him they wanted nothing to do with Favre, the reporter still titled the post “Brett Favre Is Kurt Warner’s Pick to Join ‘Dancing’: ‘Controversy Is Good for Ratings,’” and tagged it as an exclusive. The post made it clear that Warner was just goofing around.

  Two days later the blog Bleacher Report linked to the piece but made it sound as though Warner was seriously urging Favre to join the show (which, remember, had just told AOL they wanted nothing to do with Favre).

  After their story, the rumor started to multiply rapidly. A reporter from a local TV-news website, KCCI Des Moines, caught the story and wrote a sixty-two-word piece titled “Brett Favre’s Next Big Step?” and mentioned t
he “rumors” discussed on Bleacher Report. From there the piece was picked up by USA Today—“Brett Favre Joining ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Season 12 Cast?”—ProFootballTalk, and others, making the full transition to the national stage.7

  To recap what happened: a gossip blog manufactured a scoop by misrepresenting, deliberately or not, a joke. That scoop was itself misrepresented and misinterpreted as it traveled up the chain, going from a small entertainment blog to a sports site to a CBS affiliate in Iowa and eventually to the website of one of the biggest newspapers in the country.* What spread was not even a rumor, which at least would have been logical. It was just an empty bit of nothing.

  The fake Favre meme spread almost exactly along the lines of my fake outrage campaign for Tucker’s movie—only there was no me involved! The media is hopelessly interdependent. Not only is the web susceptible to spreading false information, but it can also be the source of it.

  For a gossip story, it’s not a big deal. But the same weakness creates the opportunity for dangerous, even deadly, abuses of the system.

  A TRUE FOOL FEEDING THE MONSTER

  I am obviously jaded and cynical about trading up the chain. How could I not be? It’s basically possible to run anything through this chain, even utterly preposterous and made-up information. But for a long time I thought that fabricated media stories could only hurt feelings and waste time. I didn’t think anyone could die because of it.

  I was wrong. Perhaps you remember Terry Jones, the idiotic pastor whose burning of the Koran in March 2011 led to riots that killed nearly thirty people in Afghanistan. Jones’s bigotry happened to trade up the chain perfectly, and the media unwittingly allowed it.

  Jones first made a name for himself in the local Florida press by running offensive billboards in front of his church. Then he stepped it up, announcing that he planned to stage a burning of the Koran. This story was picked up by a small website called Religion News Service. Yahoo linked to their short article, and dozens of blogs followed, which led CNN to invite Jones to appear on the network. He was now a national story.