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

by Ryan Holiday

  In response, I helped Dov write a long statement that was eventually turned into an editorial in The Guardian. It said, in part:

  My intention was to call upon people to see beyond media and lawsuit-inspired scandal, and to consider people for their true value and for their contribution to society.

  I feel that the comments of a former friend of Woody Allen, Harvard professor and famous civil rights lawyer Allan Dershowitz, apply to this particular phenomenon: “Well, let’s remember, we have had presidents…from Jefferson, to Roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Clinton, who have been great presidents…. I think we risk losing some of the best people who can run for public office by our obsessive focus on the private lives of public figures.”

  I agree that the increasingly obsessive scrutinization of people’s personal lives and their perceived social improprieties has tragically overshadowed the great work of too many artists, scientists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, athletes, and politicians, including Woody Allen.1

  Today blogs are our representatives in these degradation ceremonies. They level the accusations on the behalf of the “outraged public.” How dare you hold yourself up in front of us as a human being instead of as a caricature, they seem to say. If you don’t feel shame, then we will make you feel shame. The onlookers delight in the destruction and pain. Blogs lock onto targets for whatever frivolous reason, which makes sense, since they often played a role in creating the victim’s celebrity in the first place, usually under equally frivolous pretenses.

  You used to have to be a national hero before you got the privilege of the media and the public turning on you. You had to be a president or a millionaire or an artist. Now we tear people down just as we’ve begun to build them up. We do this to our fameballs. Our viral video stars. Our favorite new companies. Even random citizens who pop into the news because they did something interesting, unusual, or stupid. First we celebrate them, then we turn to snark, and then, finally, to merciless decimation. No wonder only morons and narcissists enter the public sphere.

  It feels good to be a part of something—to tear down and berate. It’s not surprising to me that the media would want to assume this role. Consider how the ceaseless, staged, and artificial online news chase makes today’s generation of reporters feel. They attended an expensive grad school and live in New York City or San Francisco or Washington, D.C. The wondrous $200,000 a year journalism job is not some myth to them; it was an opportunity dangled in front of them—just as the first generation of reporters after it went extinct. Their life is nothing like that myth. Bloggers must write and film and publish an insurmountable amount of material per day, and only if they’re lucky will any of it be rewarded with a bonus or health insurance. Yet the people they cover are often rich and successful or worse, like idiotic and talentless reality television stars. It’s enough to make anyone bitter and angry. And indeed they are. They grind with the “rage of the creative underclass,” as New York magazine called it.

  Philosopher Alain de Botton once pointed out that Greek tragedies, though popular entertainment in their day, had a purpose. Despite being gossipy, sometimes salacious, and often violent, they taught the audience to think about how easily an unfortunate situation could befall them, and to be humbled by the flaws of another person. Tragedies could be learned from. But the news of the twenty-first century, he writes, “with its lexicon of perverts and weirdos, failures and losers, lies at one end of the spectrum,” and “tragedy lies at the other.”

  There is nothing to be learned from the tragic rise and fall of public men that we see on blogs. That is not their function. Their degradation is mere spectacle that blogs use to sublimate the general anxieties of their readers. To make us feel better by hurting others. To stress that the people we’re reading about are freaks, while we are normal.

  And if we’re not getting anything out of it, and nobody learns anything from it, then I don’t see how you can call blogs anything other than a digital blood sport.

  * Blakeley had been arrested recently for a domestic dispute, and the story had been covered up. I wanted people to know. He later pled guilty but only to harassment.

  * Nor was he the only vicitim of the capriciousness of this web trial. One former Jezebel blogger revealed the identity of Assange’s accusers on her blog for the Washington City Paper—in violation of the paper’s strict policy of protecting the anonymity of potential victims.

  XXIII

  WELCOME TO UNREALITY

  IN THIS BOOK I HAVE ILLUSTRATED THE WAYS IN WHICH bloggers, as they sit down at their computers, are prompted to speculate, rush, exaggerate, distort, and mislead—and how people like me encourage these impulses

  Blogs are assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimportant stories.

  To me, the individual bad stories coughed up by blogging culture looked like success. Their failings were my opportunities. But when I started to see what this process amounted to collectively—the cumulative effect of tens of thousands of such posts, written and uploaded day in and day out—my pride turned to fear.

  What happens when this material becomes the basis for tomorrow’s material—when CNN uses Gawker for story ideas? What is the result of millions of blogs fighting to be heard over millions of other blogs—each hoping for a share of an increasingly shrinking attention span? What happens when the incentives rippled through every part of the media system?

  These results are unreality. A netherworld between the fake and the real where each builds on the other and they cannot be told apart. This is what happens when the dominant cultural medium—the medium that feeds our other mediums—is so easily corrupted by people like me.

  When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals pressure politicians to resign and scuttle election bids or knock millions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about “how the story unfolded”—unreality is the only word for it. It is, as Daniel Boorstin, author of 1962’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, put it, a “thicket…which stands between us and the facts of life.”

  A SLOW CREEP

  Let’s start a basic principle: Only the unexpected makes the news. This insight comes from Robert E. Park, the first sociologist to ever study newspapers. “For the news is always finally,” he wrote “what Charles A. Dana described it to be, ‘something that will make people talk.’” Nick Denton told his writers the same thing nearly one hundred years later: “The job of journalism is to provide surprise.”* News is only news if it departs from the routine of daily life.

  But what if most of what happens is expected? Most things do not depart from the routine. Most things are not worth talking about. But the news must be. And so the normal parts of life are omitted from the news by virtue of being normal. I don’t mean to say that the constant search for newness or the unexpected is what distorts the news. That would be unfair, because almost everything blogs do distorts the news. But this one basic need—fundamental to the very business of blogging—inherently puts our newsmakers at odds with reality. It can only show us a version of reality that serves their needs.

  What’s known as news is not a summary of everything that has happened recently. It’s not even a summary of the most important things that have happened recently. The news, whether it’s found online or in print, is just the content that successfully navigated the media’s filters. Possibly with my help. Since the news informs our understanding of what is occurring around us, these filters create a constructed reality.


  Picture a funnel. At the top we have everything that happens, then everything that happens that comes to be known by the media, then everything that is considered newsworthy, then what they ultimately decide to publish, and finally what spreads and is seen by the public.

  The news funnel:

  ALL THAT HAPPENS

  ALL THAT’S KNOWN BY THE MEDIA

  ALL THAT IS NEWSWORTHY

  ALL THAT IS PUBLISHED AS NEWS

  ALL THAT SPREADS

  In other words, the media is a mechanism for systematically limiting the information seen by the public.

  But we seem to think that the news is informing us! The Internet is what technologists call an “experience technology.” The more it is used, the more trust users have in it. The longer a user engages with it, the more comfortable they get and the more they believe in the world it creates.

  As we become immersed in blogs our trust in the information we get from them increases. I saw an example of this very clearly in my own education: I watched “Internet sources” go from strictly forbidden in school research to the status quo, and the citing of Wikipedia articles in papers from unacceptable to “okay, but only for really general background information.” Internet culture has done one thing with this trust: utterly abused it.

  EMBRACING THE FAKE

  In April 2011, Business Insider editor Henry Blodget put out an advisory to the PR world. He was drowning in elaborate story pitches and information about new services. He just couldn’t read them all, let alone write about them. So he proposed a solution: The publicists could write about the product launches of their own clients, and Blodget’s site would edit and publish them. “In short,” he concluded, “please stop sending us e-mails with story ideas and just contribute directly to Business Insider. You’ll get a lot more ink for yourself and your clients and you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted work” [emphasis mine].1 His post was seen more than ten thousand times, and each and every view, I can only assume, was followed by a marketer cumming all over their pants.

  In Blodget’s overzealous drive to create traffic for his site, he didn’t mind misinforming. He didn’t care who wrote it, so long as it got pageviews. He was willing to let PR and marketing professionals and people like me write about their own clients—which he would then pass off as real news and commentary to his readers.

  Consider the pseudo-event that is critical to the concept of unreality. As Daniel Boorstin defined them—way back in the 1960s—pseudo-events are anything planned deliberately to attract the attention of the media. A quick run down the list of pseudo-events shows their indispensability to the news business: press releases, award ceremonies, red-carpet events, premieres, product launches, anniversaries, grand openings, “leaks,” the contrite celebrity interview after a scandal, the sex tape, the tell-all, the public statement, controversial advertisements, marches on Washington, press junkets, and on and on. While these events do occur, they are not by any stretch of the imagination real, since they have been meticulously staged and serve no purpose other than to generate press. The event is not intended to accomplish anything itself but instead to introduce certain narratives into the media.

  Apple orchestrates its famous product releases and press conferences at great expense because the publicity helps sell iPhones and iPads. Naturally, that’s what a company that wants to increase sales would do: Stage an event, bait the media, profit. Very simple and, honestly, pretty expected. But Blodget, with his “Dear PR Folks” advisory, wasn’t falling for a pseudo-event. He was the perpetrator. By inviting publicists to collaborate with him to create fake news he became the purveyor of unreality and its publisher.

  Blog economics both depend on and indulge in pseudo-events even more than old media—they thrive on the artificiality. By the nature of being planned, staged, and designed for coverage, pseudo-news is a kind of news subsidy. It is handed to blogs like a glass of water to a thirsty man. As deadlines get tighter and news staffs get smaller, fake events are exactly what bloggers need. More important, because they are clean, clear, and not constrained by the limits of what happens naturally, pseudo-events are typically much more interesting to publishers than real events.

  FROM THE FAKE, THE REAL

  It’s at these vulnerable points that manipulation becomes more powerful than reality. The process is simple: Create a pseudo-event, trade it up the chain, elicit real responses and action, and you have altered reality itself. I may understand the consequences of it now, but that doesn’t stop a part of me, even as I write this, from seeing this thirst as an opportunity to insert messages into the discussion online. You can’t count on people to restrain themselves from taking advantage of an absurd system—not with millions of dollars at stake. Not when the last line of defense—the fourth estate, known as the media—is involved in the cash grab too.

  From here we get the defining feature of our world today: a blurred line between what is real and what is fake; what actually happens and what is staged; and, finally, between the important and the trivial.* There is no doubt in my mind that blogs and blogging culture were responsible for this final break. When blogs can openly proclaim that getting it first is better than getting it right; when a deliberately edited (fake) video can reach, and within hours require action by, the president of the United States; when the perception of a major city can be shaped by what photographs spread best in an online slideshow; and when someone like me can generate actual outrage over advertisements that don’t actually exist—the unreal becomes impossible to separate from the real.

  If fake news simply deceived, that would be one thing. The problem with unreality and pseudo-events is not simply that they are unreal; it is that they don’t stay unreal. While they may themselves exist in some netherworld between real and fake, the domain in which they are consumed and acted on is undoubtedly real. In being reported, these counterfeit events are laundered and passed to the public as clean bills—to buy real things.

  As Walter Lippmann wrote, the news constitutes a sort of pseudo-environment, but our responses to that environment is not pseudo but actual behavior. In 1922, Lippmann warned us “about the worldwide spectacle of men”—government officials, bankers, executives, artists, ordinary people, and even other reporters—“acting upon their environment moved by stimuli from their pseudo-environment.”

  That world is exactly what we have now. It’s a world where, in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney leaked bogus information to an attention-hungry reporter for the New York Times, and then mentioned his own leak on Meet the Press to help convince us to invade Iraq.2 “There’s a story in the New York Times this morning, and I want to attribute the Times,” Cheney said, citing himself, using something he had planted in the press as proof that untrue information was now “public” and accepted fact. He used his own pseudo-event to create pseudo-news.

  I use unreality to get free publicity. Cheney used his media manipulations to drive the public toward war. And no one knew until it was way too late. By the time they did the facts had been established, the fake made real by media chatter, and a real war had been waged. From the pseudo-environment came actual behavior.

  Welcome to unreality, my friends. It’s fucking scary.

  * Remember Bennett as well, trying “not to instruct, but to startle.”

  * An actual TechCrunch headline: “Rumors of Apple Rumors Now Leading to Rumors of Counter-Rumors.”

  XXIV

  HOW TO READ A BLOG

  AN UPDATE ON ACCOUNT OF ALL THE LIES

  WHEN YOU SEE A BLOG BEGIN WITH “ACCORDING TO A tipster …” know that the tipster was someone like me tricking the blogger into writing what I wanted.

  When you see “We’re hearing reports” know that reports could mean anything from random mentions on Twitter to message board posts, or worse.

  When you see “leaked” or “official documents” know that the leak really meant someone just e-mailed a blogger, and that the documents are almost certainly not official and are usually fake
or fabricated for the purpose of making desired information public.

  When you see “BREAKING” or “We’ll have more details as the story develops” know that what you’re reading reached you too soon. There was no wait and see, no attempt at confirmation, no internal debate over whether the importance of the story necessitated abandoning caution. The protocol is going to press early, publishing before the basics facts are confirmed, and not caring whether it causes problem for people.

  When you see “Updated” on a story or article know that no one actually bothered to rework the story in light of the new facts—they just copied and pasted some shit at the bottom of the article.

  When you see “Sources tell us …” know that these sources are not vetted, they are rarely corroborated, and they are desperate for attention.

  When you see a story tagged with “EXCLUSIVE” know that it means the blog and the source worked out an arrangement that included favorable coverage. Know that in many cases the source gave this exclusive to multiple sites at the same time or that the site is just taking ownership of a story they stole from a lesser-known site.

  When you see “said in a press release” know that it probably wasn’t even actually a release the company paid to officially put out over the wire. They just spammed a bunch of blogs and journalists via e-mail.

  When you see “According to a report by” know that the writer summarizing this report from another outlet has but the basest abilities in reading comprehension, little time to spend doing it, and every incentive to simplify and exaggerate.