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

by Ryan Holiday

  I’m not saying it is a perfect system by any means. I don’t want to imply that newspapers in the twentieth century were paragons of honesty or accuracy or embraced change immediately. As late at the 1970s, papers like the New Orleans Times-Picayune were still heavily dependent on street and newsstand sales, and thus continued to play up and sensationalize crime stories.

  The subscription model may have been free of the corruptive influence of the masses, but that didn’t spare it from corruption from the top. As the character Philip Marlowe observed in Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye:

  Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition—hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners.

  This was incisive media criticism (in fiction, no less) that was later echoed with damning evidence by theorists such as Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian. A friend put it more bluntly: “Each generation of media has a different cock in its mouth.”

  At least there was once an open discussion about the problems of the media. Today, the toxic economics of blogs are not only obscured, but tech gurus on the take actually defend them. We have the old problems plus a host of new ones.

  THE DEATH OF SUBSCRIPTION, REBIRTH OF MEDIA MANIPULATION

  For most of the last century, the majority of journalism and entertainment was sold by subscription (the third phase). It is now sold again online à la carte—as a one-off. Each story must sell itself, must be heard over all the others, be it in Google News, on Twitter, or on your Facebook wall. This One-Off Problem is exactly like the one faced by the yellow press a century or more ago, and it distorts today’s news just as it did then—only now it’s amplified by millions of blogs instead of a few hundred newspapers. As Eli Pariser put it in The Filter Bubble, when it comes to news on the Internet:

  Each article ascends the most-forwarded lists or dies an ignominious death on its own…. The attention economy is ripping the binding, and the pages that get read are the pages that are frequently the most topical, scandalous, and viral.

  People don’t read one blog. They read a constant assortment of many blogs, and so there is little incentive to build trust. Competition for readers is on a per-article basis, taking publishers right back to the (digital) street corner, yelling, “War Is Coming!” to sell papers. It takes them back to making things up to fill the insatiable need for new news.

  Instead of being a nineteenth-century press agent manipulating newspapers, I am a twenty-first-century press agent manipulating blogs. The tactics are the same, but I ply my trade with more influence, less oversight, and faster results than ever imagined. I got all sorts of great inspiration (and ideas) for the job by reading old books like The Harder They Fall and All the King’s Men, which are about press agents and media fixers for powerful politicians and criminals of many years ago. You want to know how to con bloggers today? Look at media hoaxes from before your grandparents were born. The same things will play. They may even play better now.

  Think about how we consume blogs. It is not by subscription. The only viable subscription method for blogs, RSS, is dead. For some of you who still religiously use an RSS reader, it might feel strange to hear me speak about it in the past tense, but RSS has died.* And so has the concept of subscribing.

  Just look at the top referring sources of traffic to major websites and blogs. Cumulatively, these referring sources almost always account for more visitors than the site’s direct traffic (i.e., people who typed in the URL). Though it varies from site to site, the biggest sources of traffic are, usually, in this order: Google, Facebook, Twitter. The viewers were sent directly to a specific article for a disposable purpose: they’re not subscribers; they are seekers or glancers.

  This is great news for a media manipulator, bad news for everyone else. The death of subscription means that instead of attempting to provide value to you, the longtime reader, blogs are constantly chasing Other Readers—the mythical reader out in viral land. Instead of providing quality day in and day out, writers chase big hits like a sexy scandal or a funny video meme. Bloggers aren’t interested in building up consistent, loyal readerships via RSS or paid subscriptions, because what they really need are the types of stories that will do hundreds of thousands or millions of pageviews. They need stories that will sell.

  A popular article on the technology blog Ars Technica blares the headline: “Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity.”1 Poisonous? What sounds poisonous to me is the writer’s newly RSS-free life, which included scanning social media and new aggregators at constant intervals throughout the day, because she knew “if something truly important or controversial blew up, I’d hear about it instantly via Twitter and our loyal readers” [emphasis mine].

  Blogs must fight to be that story. You can provide them the ammunition. Getting something “controversial” to blow up is easy, and it’s the tactic I prefer to use over doing something “important.” With limited resources and the constraints of a tight medium, there are only a handful of options: sensationalism, extremism, sex, scandal, hatred. The media manipulator knows that bloggers know that these things sell—so that’s what we sell them.

  Whereas subscriptions are about trust, single-use traffic is all immediacy and impulse—even if the news has to be distorted to trigger it. Our news is what rises, and what rises is what spreads, and what spreads is what makes us angry or makes us laugh. Our media diet is quickly transformed into junk food, fake stories engineered by people like me to be consumed and passed around. It is the refined and processed sugars of the information food pyramid—out of the ordinary, unnatural, and deliberately sweetened.

  Inside the chaos, it is easy to mislead. Only the exciting, sensational stuff finds readers—the stories that “blow up.” Reporters don’t have time for follow-ups or reasoned critiques, only quick hits. Blogs are all chasing the same types of stories, the mass media chase blogs, and the readers are following both of them—and everyone is led astray.

  The reason subscription (and RSS) was abandoned was because in a subscription economy the users are in control. In the one-off model, the competition might be more vicious, but it is on the terms of the publisher. Having followers instead of subscribers—where readers have to check back on sites often and are barraged with a stream of refreshing content laden with ads—is much better for their bottom line.

  RSS never became truly mainstream for this reason. It’s antithetical to the interests of the people who would need to push readers toward using it. It comes as no surprise that despite glowing reports from satisfied readers and major investments from Google and others that it would not be able to make it. So today, as RSS buttons disappear from browsers and blogs, just know that this happened on purpose, so that readers could be deceived more easily.

  * Day invented the Help Wanted and Classifieds sections around this time. It was a highly effective way to drive daily sales.

  * In other words, we’ve been tearing down public figures on bogus charges for more than a century. Do yourself a favor and look up the Fatty Arbuckle scandal for a sobering look at One-Off consequences.

  * RSS readers Bloglines and NewsGator are in the deadpool. Apple’s Mountain Lion OS X doesn’t include RSS, and Google no longer features Reader in its top-level navigation. The latest versions of the Firefox browser don’t even have RSS buttons. Twitter and Facebook both stopped supporting direct RSS feeds. And the death of RSS has been heralded in a million headlines.

  IX

  TACTIC #6

  MAKE IT ALL ABOUT THE HEADLINE

  FOR MEDIA THAT LIVES AND DIES BY CLICKS (THE ONE-Off Problem) it all comes down to the headline. It’s what catches the attention of the public—yelled by a newsboy or seen on a search engine. In a one-off world there is nothing more important than the pitch to prospective buyers. And they need many exciting new pitches every day, each
louder and more compelling than the last. Even if reality is not so interesting.

  That’s where I come in. I make up the news; blogs make up the headline.

  Although it seems easy, headline writing is an incredibly difficult task. The editor has to reduce an entire story down to just a few units of text—turning a few hundred- or thousand-word piece into just a few words, period. In the process it must express the article’s central ideas in an exciting way.

  According to Gabriel Snyder, the former managing editor of Gawker Media and now an editor at the traffic powerhouse TheAtlantic.com, blog headlines are “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.” Readers and revenue depend on the headline’s ability to win this fight.

  In the days of the yellow press the front pages of the World and the Journal went head to head every day, driving each other to greater and greater extremes. As a publisher, William Randolph Hearst obsessed over his headlines, tweaking their wording, writing and rewriting them, riding his editors until they were perfect. Each one, he thought, could steal another one hundred readers away from another paper.1

  It worked. As a young man Upton Sinclair remembered hearing the newsboys shouting “Extra!” and saw the headline “War Declared!” splashed across the front page of Hearst’s New York Evening Journal. He parted with his hard-earned pennies and read eagerly, only to find something rather different between what he’d thought and what he’d bought. It was actually: “War (may be) Declared (soon).”2

  They won, he lost. That same hustle happens online every day. Each blog is competing not just to be the leader on a particular story but against all the other topics a reader could potentially commit to reading about (and also against checking e-mail, chatting with friends, and watching videos, or even pornography). So here we are in 2012, on our fancy MacBooks and wireless Internet, stuck again with the same bogus headlines we had in the nineteenth century.

  From today:*

  Naked Lady Gaga Talks Drugs and Celibacy

  Hugh Hefner: I Am Not a Sex Slave Rapist in a Palace of Poop

  The Top Nine Videos of Babies Farting and/or Laughing with Kittens

  How Justin Bieber Caught a Contagious Syphilis Rumor

  WATCH: Heartbroken Diddy Offers to Expose Himself to Chelsea Handler

  Little Girl Slaps Mom with Piece of Pizza, Saves Life

  Penguin Shits on Senate Floor

  Now compare those to some of these classic headlines from 1898 to 1903:

  WAR WILL BE DECLARED IN FIFTEEN MINUTES

  AN ORGY OF GRAY-HAIRED MEN, CALLOW YOUTHS, GAMBLERS, ROUGHS, AND PAINTED WOMEN—GENERAL DRUNKENNESS—FIGHTS AT INTERVALS—IT WAS VICE’S CARNIVAL.

  COULDN’T SELL HIS EAR, OLD MAN SHOOTS HIMSELF

  OWL FRIGHTENS WOMAN TO DEATH IN HOSPITAL

  BULLDOG TRIES TO KILL YOUNG GIRL HE HATES

  CAT GAVE TENANTS NIGHTLY “CREEPS”

  As magician Ricky Jay once put it, “People respond to and are deceived by the same things they were a hundred years ago.” Only today the headlines aren’t being yelled on busy street corners but on noisy news aggregators and social networks.

  In a subscription model the headlines of any one article compete only with the other articles included in the publication. The articles on the front page compete with those on the inside pages, and perhaps with the notion of putting down the paper entirely, but they do not, for the most part, compete head to head with the front pages of other newspapers. The subscription takes care of that—you already made your choice. As a result, the job of the headline writer for media consumed by subscription is relatively easy. The reader has already paid for the publication, so they’ll probably read the content in front of them.

  The predicament of an online publisher today is that it has no such buffer. Its creative solution, as it was one hundred years ago, is exaggeration and lies and bogus tags like EXLUSIVE, EXTRA, UNPRECEDENTED,* and PHOTOS in the requisite CAPITAL LETTERS. They overstate their stories, latching on to the most compelling angles and parading themselves in front of the public like a prostitute. They are more than willing for PR people and marketers to be their partners in crime.

  PICK ME, PICK ME!

  In 1971, the New York Times, a subscription paper, had a big story on their hands. A disillusioned government analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of documents, now known as the Pentagon Papers, proving that the United States had systematically deceived the public and the world to go to war with Vietnam.

  Could a one-off paper have gotten away with this headline: “Vietnam Archive: A Consensus to Bomb Developed Before ’64 Election, Study Says”?

  Because that’s what the New York Times ran, still successfully reaching everyone in the country with the big news. They could afford to be reasoned, calm, and circumspect while still aggressively pursuing the story, despite the shameful efforts of the U.S government to block its publication. The truth and significance of the Pentagon Papers were enough.

  Compare this to a headline I conned Jezebel into writing for a nonevent: “Exclusive: American Apparel’s Rejected Halloween Costume Ideas (American Appalling).”3 It did nearly one hundred thousand pageviews. Not only was the headline overstated, the leak was fake. I just had one of my employees send over some extra photos I couldn’t use for legal reasons.

  Outside of the subscription model, headlines are not intended to represent the contents of articles but to sell them—to win the fight for attention against an infinite number of other blogs or papers. It must so captivate the customer that they click or plunk down the money to buy it. Each headline competes with every other headline. On a blog, every page is the front page. It’s no wonder that the headlines of the yellow press and the headlines of blogs run to such extremes. It is a desperate fight. Life or death.

  Newspapers from the stable period not only had plainly stated headlines, but they also had a tradition of witty headlines. Readers had time to get subtle jokes. Things are a little different now. As they say, Google doesn’t laugh. According to CEO Eric Schmidt, Google News sends more than a billion clicks a month to newspapers and another three billion clicks through its search and other services. In other words, Google’s sense of humor matters the most.4

  Follow a story through Google News and you’ll see. The service begins by displaying twenty or so main news stories from which a reader may choose. I may read one article, or I may read five, but I likely will not read all, so each one vies for my attention—to scream, in so many words, “Pick Me! Pick Me! Pick Me!” Google News displays the story from a handful of outlets under each of those bold headlines. If the main headline is from CNN, the smaller headlines underneath may be from Fox News or the Washington Post or Wikipedia or TalkingPointsMemo. Each outlet’s headline screams “Pick Me! Pick Me!” and Google alludes to the rest of the iceberg lurking beneath under these chosen few: “All 522 news articles.” How does one stand out against five hundred other articles? Its scream of “No, Pick Me! Pick Me!” must be the loudest and most extreme.

  Andrew Malcolm, creator of the Los Angeles Times’s massive Top of the Ticket political blog (thirty-three million readers in two years), specifically asks himself before writing a headline, “How can we make our item stick out from all the other ones?” And from this bold approach to editorial ethics comes proud headlines such as: “Hillary Clinton Shot a Duck Once” and “McCain Comes Out Against Deadly Nuclear Weapons, Obama Does Too.” I’m not cherry-picking: That’s what he chose to brag about in a book of advice to aspiring bloggers.

  “We do ironic headlines, smart headlines, and work hard to make very serious stories as interesting as we can,” Arianna Huffington told the New York Times.5 “We pride ourselves on bringing in our community on which headlines work best.”

  They also do their headlines in a massive thirty-two-point font. By best, Huffington does not mean the one that represents the story better. The question is not “Was this headline accurate?” but “Was it clicked more
than the others?” The headlines must work for the publisher, not the reader. Yahoo!’s homepage, for example, tests more than forty-five thousand unique combinations of story headlines and photos every five minutes.6 They too pride themselves in how they display the best four main stories they can, but I don’t think their complicated, four-years-in-the-making algorithm shares any human’s definition of that word.

  SPELLING IT OUT FOR THEM

  It should be clear what types of headlines blogs are interested in. It’s not pretty, but if that’s what they want, give it to them. You don’t really have a choice. They aren’t going to write about you, your clients, or your story unless it can be turned into a headline that will drive traffic.

  You figured out the best way to do this when you were twelve years old and wanted something from your parents: Come up with the idea and let them think they were the ones who came up with it. Basically, write the headline—or hint at the options—in your e-mail or press release or whatever you give to the blogger and let them steal it. Make it so obvious and enticing that there is no way they can pass it up. Hell, make them tone it down. They’ll be so happy to have the headline that they won’t bother to check whether it’s true or not.

  Their job is to think about the headline above all else. The medium and their bosses force them to. So that’s where you make the sale. Only the reader gets stuck with the buyer’s remorse.

  * My favorite: The Washington Post accidentally published a headline to an article about weather preparedness: “SEO Headline Here” (SEO stands for search engine optimization).