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

by Ryan Holiday

  Shamelessness is a virtue in Siegler’s world. It helps create nothing from something. It helps people at the Huffington Post stomach creating stories like: “Amy Winehouse’s Untimely Death Is a Wake Up Call for Small Business Owners.” The same holds true for reputable outlets too. They need only the slightest push to abandon all discretion, like the Daily Mail in the UK did when I had some deliberately provocative ads posted on the American Apparel website and pretended they were part of a new campaign. “Has American Apparel Gone too Far with ‘Creepy’ Controversial New Campaign?” the Mail’s headline read. According to whom had it gone too far? The article quotes “Some Tweeters.”4

  Thanks for the free publicity, guys! God knows what it would have cost to pay to run those full page ads in their paper.

  Whatever will be more exciting, get more pageviews, that is what blogs will say happened. Like when Gawker bought a scoop from man who had pictures of a wild Halloween night with politician Christine O’Donnell. According to editor Remy Stern, the skeevy man’s one concern was “that a tabloid would imply that they had sex, which they did not.” The headline of the Gawker article was…drumroll…“I Had a One-Night Stand With Christine O’Donnell.”5

  ALWAYS WRONG, NEVER IN DOUBT

  At American Apparel I had to deal with a pesky blog called BNET on which a “reporter” named Jim Edwards would troll through the company’s financial disclosures and come up with some of the most fantastical misinterpretations I could imagine. We invited this on ourselves. Having made the company and its advertising such a juicy subject for gossip and entertainment blogs, it was natural that other pageview-hungry writers would try to get in on the game. Still, even as I knowingly fed that monster, I did not expect what happened with Edwards.

  The man once asked critically—in a blog post, not a request for comment—why the company did not roll a last-minute necessary-to-make-payroll personal loan from Dov Charney at 6 percent interest into the larger loan from investors at 15 percent interest? (I assume the answer is so obvious to normal people like you that I do not need to explain how 6 percent is less than 15 percent.) Edwards posed this question not once but several times, in several posts, each with a more aggressive headline (e.g., “How American Apparel’s CEO Turned a Crisis Into a Pay Raise”).

  From our conversation after he published his post:

  Me: “I don’t know if you recall, but we discussed your assertion about the 6% interest rate…. You issued a correction on this story in 2009.”

  Jim Edwards: “I do recall. But I’m quoting the status of Charney’s loans directly from the proxy. Is the proxy wrong?”

  Me: YOUR BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF MATH IS WRONG!

  He made bold speculations, like, “Why American Apparel CEO Must Resign” and “Is American Apparel’s CEO Facing the Endgame?” In retrospect he seems even more foolish, since not a single one of his predictions turned out to be right. Or he’d concoct ridiculous conspiracy theories, including one that accused the company of timing controversial ads with SEC-mandated announcements to distract the public from corrupt dealings inside the company—and as proof would use the very nonexistent loan scandal he’d uncovered. (Not to mention that the ads weren’t new, and some weren’t even actual ads—just fake ones I’d leaked online.)

  One kook is hardly a problem. But the obliviousness and earnest conviction a kook maintains in their own twisted logic makes for great material for other sites to disingenuously use by reporting on what the kook reported. As part of the CBS Interactive Business Network, Edwards’s blog on BNET featured the CBS logo at the top. Since he looked like he had some official industry status, his questions became fodder for fashion websites at the national level.

  Fictive interpolation on one site becomes the source for fictive interpolation on another, and again in turn for another, until the origins are eventually forgotten. To paraphrase Charles Horton Cooley, the products of our imagination become the solid facts of society. It’s a process that happens not horizontally but vertically, moving each time to a more reputable site and seeming more real at each level. And so, in Edwards’s case, American Apparel was forced to deal with a constant stream of controversy borne of one man’s uncanny ability to create an angle where there wasn’t one. (He was rewarded soon after with a new gig at…Business Insider!)

  Imagine if an enemy had decided to use him as a cat’s paw, as I have done with other such bloggers. The damage could have been even worse. As I wrote to a company attorney at the time, who mistakenly believed we could “reason” with the blogger:

  Basically, these blogs have a hustle going where one moves the ball as far as they can up the field, and then the next one takes it and in doing so reifies whatever baseless speculation was included in the first report. Jezebel needs Jim Edwards’ “reporting” to snark on, Jim Edwards needs Jezebel’s “controversy” to justify his analysis, and all this feeds into the fashion news websites who pass the articles along to their readers. Posting a comment on his blog doesn’t interrupt this cycle.

  Neither would the lawsuit the lawyer was considering. It would just give Edwards more to talk about. In this situation I was tasked with defending a company against exactly the type of subtle mischaracterizations and misleading information that I use on behalf of other clients. The insanity of that fact is not lost on me. What makes it all the more scary in this case is that there wasn’t someone like me behind the scenes, exerting influence over the information the public saw. The system was manipulating itself—and I was called in to mitigate that manipulation—with more manipulation.

  What else could I expect? Early on I worked tirelessly to encourage bloggers to find nonexistent angles on stories I hoped they would promote. I made it worth their while—dangling pageviews, traffic, access, and occasionally advertising checks to get it going. After a point they no longer needed me to get those things. They got traffic and links by writing anything extreme about my clients, and if I wouldn’t be their source, they could make one up or get someone to lie. Other advertisers were happy to profit from stories at our expense. The Jezebel/Edwards cycle wasn’t some conspiracy; it was partly my creation.

  It should be obvious that companies must be on guard against the immense pressures that bloggers face to churn out exciting news to their advantage. Do something perfectly innocent—prepare to have it wrenched out of context into a blog post. Do something complicated—expect to have it simplified until it’s unrecognizable. It goes in both directions. Do nothing—you can still turn it into something. Do something wrong, don’t despair; you can spin it beyond comprehension. If you play in this world as a manipulator, prepare for faux outrage (which becomes real outrage) when you don’t deserve it, and expect actual violators to get off without a peep. Those are the economics in the angle-hungry world of Jim Edwards.

  It’s why I can safely say that all the infamous American Apparel controversies were made up. Either I made them up or bloggers did. To the public, this process was all invisible. Only as an insider was I able to know that 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.

  It’s even hard for me to avoid falling for the occasional confabulations myself—there are too many, and they are often too pervasive to completely resist. For that reason, even some employees at American Apparel succumbed to the persistent accusations of people like Edwards and began to believe them. The accumulation of “reporting” trumped their own personal experience. There are thousands of these unnamed and unknown victims out there, collateral damage in a system where bloggers and marketers can just make stuff up.

  BOOK TWO

  THE MONSTER ATTACKS

  WHAT BLOGS MEAN

  XIII

  IRIN CARMON, THE DAILY SHOW, AND ME

  THE PERFECT STORM OF HOW TOXIC BLOGGING CAN BE

  IN THE FIRST HALF OF THIS BOOK YOU SAW THE INSIDE on how to manipulate blogs. There are fatal flaws in the blogging medi
um that create opportunities for influence over the media—and, ultimately, culture itself. If I were writing this book two or three years ago, it would have ended there.

  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.

  Realizing all this changed me. It made it impossible for me to continue down the path that I was on. The second half of this book explains why. It is an investigation not in how the dark arts of media manipulation work but of their consequences.

  HOW BLOGS CREATE THEIR OWN NARRATIVES FOR FUN AND PROFIT

  In 2010, I oversaw the launch of a new line of a Made in USA, environmentally friendly nail polish for American Apparel. Although American Apparel typically manufactures all of its products at its vertically integrated factory in L.A., for this product we’d collaborated with an old-fashioned family-owned factory in Long Island, where even their ninety-year-old grandmother still worked on the factory floor. Shortly after shipping the polish to rave reviews, we noticed that several bottles had cracked or burst underneath the bright halogen lights in our stores.

  It didn’t pose a risk to our customers, but to be safe rather than sorry, we informed the factory that we’d be pulling the polish from store shelves and expected immediate replacements. We’d discussed the plan in-depth on a weekly conference call with our relevant employees. A confidential e-mail was sent to store managers informing them of the changes and asking them to place the bottles in a cool, dry place in the store until instructions for proper disposal were given. The last thing we wanted, even with environmentally friendly nail polish, was to throw fifty thousand bottles of it in trashcans in twenty countries.

  A Jezebel blogger named Irin Carmon somehow received this innocent internal communication and e-mailed me at 6:25 A.M. West Coast time (Gawker is in Manhattan) to ask about it. Well, she pretended to ask me about it, since she signed her e-mail with the following:

  Our post with the initial information is going up shortly, but I would be more than happy to update or post a follow-up. Thanks so much. Irin

  By the time I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, the post was already live. When I saw it, all I could feel was a pit in my stomach—and, frankly, that surprised me. I knew how blogs worked, was plenty cynical, but even then I sensed that this would be awful.

  The headline of Jezebel’s piece: “Does American Apparel’s New Nail Polish Contain Hazardous Material?”

  To settle Jezebel’s reckless conjecture: The answer is no, it doesn’t. Unequivocally no. For starters, the leaked e-mail specifically says the problem was with the glassware and mentions nothing about the polish. But Carmon wasn’t actually interested in any of that and she definitely wasn’t interested in writing an article that addressed the issue fairly. Why would she want an actual answer to her incredibly disingenuous question? The post was already written. Hell, it was already published.

  As I had not intended to discuss the nail polish bottles publicly yet, it took about an hour for me to get a statement approved by the company lawyers. During that time dozens of other blogs were already parroting her claims. Major blogs, many of which had posted positive reviews of the nail polish on their sites, followed her bogus lead. The story was so compelling (American Apparel! Toxic polish! Exploding glass!) they had to run with it, true or not.

  Within about an hour I e-mailed the following statement to Carmon, thinking I was taking her up on the offer for a follow-up to her first post:

  After receiving a few reports of bottles breaking, we made the internal decision to do a voluntary recall of the bottles on both a retail and public level.

  We chose this small US manufacturer to produce our nail polish because we support their business model and have a fondness for [the] family who runs it. However, one of the realities of all manufacturing is first-run glitches. We worked all last week with the manufacturer to make the improvements necessary for the second run. Another reason we sought out a US-based company is so we would be able make changes, and now we can investigate what went wrong as quickly as possible. We still believe in the factory we’re working with and the new polish will be in stores within the next two weeks.

  We will offer an exchange of two new bottles or a $10 gift card for anyone who brings in a unit from the original run or a receipt.

  On another note, one thing we’re taking very seriously is the disposal of the bottles we had in the stores. Even though our polish was DBP-, toluene-, and formaldehyde-free, we don’t want our stores just tossing it in the trash. We’re using our internal shipping and distribution line to arrange a pickup and removal of the polish to make sure it gets done right.

  I felt this was a great—and ethical—response. But it was too late. Carmon copied and pasted my statement to the bottom of the article and left the headline exactly as it was, adding only “Updated” to the end of it. Even though the statement disproved the premise of her article, Carmon’s implication was that she was mostly right and was just adding a few new details. She wasn’t—she’d been totally wrong, but it didn’t matter, because the opportunity to change the readers’ minds had passed. The facts had been established.

  To make matters worse, Carmon replied to my last e-mail with a question about another trumped-up story she planned to write about the company. She ended again with:

  By the way, just FYI—I’d love to be able to include your responses in my initial post, but unfortunately I won’t be able to wait for them, so if this is something you can immediately react to, that would be great.

  The controversy eventually meant the undoing of the nail polish company we’d worked so hard to support. Had these blogs not rushed to print a bogus story, the problem could have been handled privately. The massive outcry that followed Carmon’s post necessitated an immediate and large-scale response that the cosmetic company could not handle. No question, they’d made mistakes, but nothing remotely close to what was reported. Overwhelmed by the controversy and the pressure from the misplaced anger of the blogger horde, the small manufacturer fell behind on their orders. Their operations fell into disarray, and the company was later sued by American Apparel for $5 million in damages to recover various losses. As the lawyers would say, while the nail polish company is responsible for their manufacturing errors, if not for Carmon’s needless attack and rush to judgment—the proximate cause—it all could have been worked out.

  Carmon is a media manipulator—she just doesn’t know it. She may think she is a writer, but everything about her job makes her a media manipulator. She and I are in the same racket. 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 system I abused was now abusing me and the people I cared about. And nobody had any idea.

  A PATTERN OF MANIPULATION

  Did you know that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart hates women? And that they have a long history of discriminating against and firing women? Sure, one of its cocreators is female, and one of its best-known and longest-running correspondents is a woman, and there really isn’t any evidence to prove what I just claimed, but I assure you, I’d never lie.

  This was the manufactured scandal that Jezebel slammed into The Daily Show in June 2010. Irin Carmon’s piece blindsided them just as her Jezebel nail polish story had blindsided us. It began when Carmon posted an article titled, “The Daily Show’s Woman Problem.”2 Relying on some juicy quotes from people no longer with the show, Carmon claimed that the show had a poor record of finding and developing female comedic talent. She was also determined to make a name for herself. In order to accomplish this, she didn’t actually speak to anyone who still worked for The Daily Show. It was much easier to use a collection of anonymo
us and off-the-record sources—like an ex-employee who hadn’t worked there for eight years. As you should expect by now, the article was a sensation.

  The cluster of stories that followed were read more than five hundred thousand times. The story was picked up by ABC News, the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, E!, Salon, and others. In a memo to his staff, Carmon’s boss and 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.” Jon Stewart was even forced to respond to the story on air. The New York Times rewarded Carmon and the website with a glowing profile: “A Web Site That’s Not Afraid to Pick a Fight.”2

  For a writer like Carmon, whose pay is determined by the number of pageviews her posts receive, this was a home run. And for a publisher like Denton, the buzz the story generated made his company more attractive to advertisers and increased the valuation of his brand.

  That her story was a lie didn’t matter. That it was part of a pattern of manipulation didn’t matter.

  The women of The Daily Show published an open letter on the show’s website a few days after the story hit.3 Women accounted for some 40 percent of the staff, the letter read, from writers and producers to correspondents and interns, and had over a hundred years’ experience on the show among them. The letter was remarkable in its clarity and understanding of what the blogger was doing. They addressed it, “Dear People Who Don’t Work Here” and called Carmon’s piece an “inadequately researched blog post” that clung “to a predetermined narrative about sexism at The Daily Show.”