by Ryan Holiday
Like Breitbart’s clips, O’Keefe’s work is heavily and disingenuously edited—far beyond what the context and actual events would support. His clips spread quickly because they are perfectly designed to suit a specific and vocal group: angry Republicans. By prefitting the narrative to appeal to conservative bloggers, his sensational stories quickly overwhelm the atrophied verification and accountability muscles of the rest of the media and become real stories. And even when they don’t, as was the case with the CNN story, it’s still enough to get their names in the news.
O’Keefe learned from Breitbart that in the blogging market there is a profound shortage of investigative material or original reporting. It’s just too expensive to produce. So rather than bear those costs, O’Keefe’s stories are hollow shells—an edited clip, a faux investigation—that blogs can use as a substitute for the real thing. Then he watches as the media falls over itself to propagate it as quickly as possible. Short, shocking narratives with a reusable sound bite are all it takes.
Because they assume the cloak of the persecuted underdog, the inevitable backlash helps O’Keefe and Breitbart rather than hurting them. Nearly all of O’Keefe’s stories have been exposed as doctored to some extent. When forced to reveal the unedited footage of the NPR and ACORN stunts, most of the main accusations were found to have been amplified or manipulated. But by that point the victims had already lost their jobs or been publicly branded.
For instance, the ACORN clip shows O’Keefe wearing a comical pimp hat, a fur coat, and a cane to the meetings, when in reality he wore a suit and tie. He’d edited in frames with the other costume after the fact. By the time this was exposed six months later, the pimp image was indelibly stuck in people’s minds, and the only effect of the discovery was to put O’Keefe’s name back in the news. Being caught as a manipulator can only help make you more famous.
Charles Johnson is another media manipulator. I can’t rest all the blame for him on Breitbart, as Charles has several times said that my book was influential in his development as a political provocateur and troll. I hope my writing had nothing to do with Charles’s decision to try to personally impugn Michael Brown—the teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri—or his obsession with trying to prove that Obama is gay. (When I asked him about his fascination with race, he gave me a bunch of theories about how blacks are not as intelligent as whites and possibly more prone to violence, which to me is real racism and much more serious than politically incorrect language.) In any case, Charles has developed a serious track record of inserting controversial discussion points in the media and claims to have the ear of many powerful politicians and writers. Even if this isn’t true, his attempts to stir things up are verifiable and have real impact. Below is an e-mail exchange that he forwarded me (unsolicited) in 2017 that he had with Daily Beast reporter Gideon Resnick where Johnson tried to confess that he had fabricated the controversial “Trump dossier”:
From: Charles Johnson
Date: Tuesday, January 10, 2017 at 11:50PM
To: “Resnick, Gideon”
Subject: Confession
My friends placed the fake news with BuzzFeed.
On Tuesday, January 10, 2017, Resnick, Gideon wrote:
Huh. Tell me more.
On Tuesday, January 10, 2017, Charles Johnson wrote:
My friends targeted BuzzFeed because they knew that they would fall for it because they have no journalistic integrity.
The piss stuff re Trump is in reference to this.
https://mpcdot.com/forums/topic/8748-rick-wilsons-son-is-a-goddamn-piss-pimp/page__st__40
Rick Wilson attacked alt-right. They went after his son and found “Pimpfeet”, his high school son was posting raunchy erotica stuff.
Though I wasn’t involved I love the creativity of people including “golden showers”, if Rick Wilson was involved. With his son advocating for pissing in women’s mouths last year, calling for sadistic scatplay, it’s perfect someone turned that back on him.
Rick Wilson’s career is now over and Ben Smith needs to resign as editor in chief of BuzzFeed’s news division.
I don’t have any reason to suspect that the dossier was fake or placed by Johnson, but you can see why a reporter might. It’s in their interest to print something like that—or to print that someone is claiming that, just as it was in their interest to run the unverified dossier in the first place.
Johnson also runs a site called Wesearchr.com, which puts up crowdfunded bounties on information and leaks. The site is really just a vehicle for trolling—their campaigns raise money for information that proves certain politicians are gay or for evidence that Obama used a ghostwriter for his bestselling memoirs. They raised north of five thousand dollars to find “criminal acts” committed by Gawker publisher Nick Denton and ten thousand dollars to secure audio recordings of John McCain producing propaganda for the North Vietnamese. Even if these claims are dubious and ridiculous, that’s not the point—the manipulation is that by raising money to look for them, Johnson and his supporters are repeating the claims and giving them weight.
BEATING THEM AT THEIR OWN GAME
Andrew Breitbart did eventually issue a correction to the widely disproved Sherrod story. He was so wrong and the backlash was so strong, he had to. But he remained defiant. At the top of the article:
Correction: While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured in the first video featured in this post while she held a federally appointed position, the story she tells refers to actions she took before she held that federal position.
A bullshit correction, to say the least.
Sherrod’s attempt to clear her name and later to sue Breitbart for libel and slander were just other chances for him to bluster.* The press release Breitbart issued was an exercise in defiant misdirection: “Andrew Breitbart on Pigford Lawsuit: ‘Bring It On.’ ” It’s exactly what I would have advised him to do if he’d asked me—in fact, I’ve basically done the exact same thing, only I was a bit more vulgar. Remember, I’m the guy who put out a press release with the headline: tucker max responds to cta decision: “blow me.”
I did that because the best way to make your critics work for you is to make them irrationally angry. Blinded by rage or indignation, they spread your message to every ear and media outlet they can find. Breitbart telling his haters to bring it on certainly accomplished this, as did completely side-stepping the Sherrod issue and pretending this was some giant political conspiracy about reparations for slavery. In refusing to acknowledge, even in the slightest, that she might have been innocent of everything he accused her of, Breitbart played it like an old pro.
This is what opponents of the alt-right seem to miss. They are trying to make you upset. They want you to be irrationally angry—it’s how they win. Most brands and personalities try to appeal to a wide swath of the population. Niche players and polarizing personalities are only ever going to be interesting to a small subgroup. While this might seem like a disadvantage, it’s actually a huge opportunity, because it allows them to leverage the dismissals, anger, mockery, and contempt of the population at large as proof of their credibility. Someone like Andrew Breitbart or Milo Yiannopoulos or Charles Johnson doesn’t care that you hate them—they like it. It’s proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful. It gives their followers something to talk about. It imbues the whole movement with a sense of urgency and action—it creates purpose and meaning.
The only way to beat them is by controlling your reaction and letting them embarrass themselves, as they inevitably will. I told you earlier about the violent protests of Milo at UC Berkeley. While those adults—and college students are adults—were flipping out and acting like babies, a sixteen-year-old girl in Canada simply did some research. She found some utterly indefensible comments Milo had made about pedophilia and leaked them to a conservative group, and within a few days Milo had lost his book deal and his job . . . at Breitbart, no less. The irony could not have been sweeter fo
r some.
If you can put aside your anger, if you can put aside the unfortunate fate that befell Sherrod, you can see what masterful music Breitbart and O’Keefe are able to play on the instruments of online media. When they sit down to publish on their blogs, they are not simply political extremists but ruthless seekers of attention. From this attention comes fame and profit—a platform for bestselling books, lucrative speaking and consulting gigs, donations, and millions of dollars in online advertising revenue.
Their subtle felonies against the truth are deliberate and premeditated. The way to beat them is not by freaking out. It’s by beating them at their own game. And sooner is better—because every day we wait there is more collateral damage.
*According to Media Matters for America, FoxNews.com and the blog Gateway Pundit picked the story up first, followed within minutes by Hot Air and dozens of other blogs (most of which embedded the YouTube video and repeated the “racist” claim). The first television station to repeat the story, later that day, was a CBS affiliate in New York City. Next came the Drudge Report, followed by lead stories on nearly every nighttime cable news show and then morning show in the country. You could say it traded up the chain perfectly.
*A thought exercise for the liberals who were aghast at Peter Thiel’s funding Hulk Hogan’s successful lawsuit against Gawker: If a billionaire had supported Sherrod’s lawsuit against Breitbart and by winning shut them down, would you be upset?
XV
SLACKTIVISM IS NOT ACTIVISM
RESISTING THE TIME AND MIND SUCK OF ONLINE MEDIA
There is no more Big Lie, only Big Lulz, and getting gamed is no shame. It’s the seal on the social contract, a mark of our participation in this new covenant of cozening.
—WIRED
YOU SIT DOWN TO YOUR COMPUTER TO WORK. FIVE minutes later you’re on your fifth YouTube video of talking babies. What happened? Do you just not have any self-control? Sorry, but self-control has got nothing to do with it. Not when the clip was deliberately made more attractive by subliminally embedded images guaranteed to catch your attention. Not when the length of the video was calibrated to be precisely as long as average viewers are statistically most likely to watch. Not when autoplay starts the next video before you have time to click away.
Would you also be surprised to hear that the content of the video was designed around popular search terms? And that the title went through multiple iterations to see which got the most clicks? And what if the video you watch after this one (and the one after that and after that) had been recommended and optimized by YouTube with the deliberate intention of making online video take up as much time in your life as television does?1
No wonder you can’t get any work done. They won’t let you.
The key, as megawatt liberal blogger Matt Yglesias advised when interviewed for the book Making It in the Political Blogosphere, is to keep readers addicted: “The idea is to discourage people from drifting away. If you give them a break, they might find that there’s something else that’s just as good, and they might go away.”
We once naively believed that blogs would be a boon to democracy. Unlike TV, the web wasn’t about passive consumption. Blogs were about engagement and citizen activism. Blogs looked like they would free us from a crummy media world of bias, conflict, manipulation, and sensationalism. But as James Fenimore Cooper presciently observed in the nineteenth century, “If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.”
Tyranny is an understatement for the media today. Those between the ages of eight and eighteen are online roughly eight hours a day, a figure that does not include texting or television. America spends more than fifty billion minutes a day on Face-book, and nearly a quarter of all internet browsing time is spent on social media sites and blogs. In a given month, blogs stream something like 150 million videos to their users. So of course there is mass submission and apathy—everyone is distracted, deliberately so.2
The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. Everything you consume online has been “optimized” to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found—like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you. Blogs are out to game you—to steal your time from you and sell it to advertisers—and they do this every day.
CHEATING IS EVERYWHERE
You see a link to a video in a YouTube search that makes it look like a hot girl is in it, so you click. You watch, but she’s nowhere to be found. Welcome to the art of “thumbnail cheating.” It’s a common tactic YouTube publishers use to make their videos more tantalizing than the competition.
The most common play is to use a girl, preferably one who looks like she might get naked, but it can be anything from a kitten to a photo of someone famous. Anything to give the clip an edge. Some of the biggest accounts on YouTube were built this way. The technique can drive thousands or even tens of thousands of views to a video, helping it chart on “most viewed” lists and allowing it to spread and be recommended.
Online video publishers do this with YouTube’s consent. Originally, YouTube chose a video thumbnail from the halfway, one-quarter, or three-quarters points of the video. So smart manipulators simply inserted a single frame of a sexy image at exactly one of those points in order to draw clicks. Members of the YouTube Partner Program—the people who get paid for their contributions to You-Tube through ad revenue and make millions for the company—are allowed to use any image they choose as their thumbnail, even images that don’t ever appear in the video. Sure, YouTube asks that the image be “representative,” but if they were actually serious about quashing profitable trickery, why allow the practice at all?
Because this is an endless battle for clicks and attention. Everyone is trying to get an edge.
FAKE NEWS
I was speaking with my father the other day and he asked me a question about some news story he’d read. What he said was confusing and didn’t quite add up. So I looked online and found it. Oops, the story was from the Onion. It was satire. Shared on Facebook and glanced at only for its headline, though, it seemed real. No wonder people voted a notorious liar into office—they’ve gotten used to being lied to!
The Onion isn’t the only one who exploits this phenomenon, of course. Andy Borowitz, the left-wing satirist, knows that a huge portion of his traffic comes from unthinking clicks by people who confuse satire with real headlines. And the New Yorker, who publishes him, benefits from that confusion.
More recently we’ve seen a rise in publications that specialize in almost outright propaganda—actual fake news. Sites like Denver Guardian, Info Wars, National Report, 70 News, The Political Insider, and Ending the Fed. Headlines like fbi agent suspected in hillary email leaks found dead in apparent murder-suicide. wikileaks CONFIRMS hillary sold weapons to isis . . . then drops another BOMBSHELL! BREAKING: fox news exposes traitor megyn kelly, kicks her out for backing hillary. These are not real publications and the claims in those headlines are not true. But that’s precisely the point. They feel true. People share and spread them for the same reasons that, deep down, motivate you to share most of the articles you share on Facebook or Twitter, as Ricky Van Veen pointed out in his excellent TEDx talk: They confirm what you want to be true and what you want to reflect your identity.
Even when the sites are reputable, the content might not be. Even reputable outlets seem to be unable to resist the urge to traffic in fake news. For instance, I’m no fan of Ben Carson. When I saw this USA Today headline, I just shook my head: ben carson just referred to slaves as “immigrants.” What an asshole, right? The New York Times headline is not much better: ben carson refers to slaves as “immigrants” in first remarks to hud staff. If the Times and USA Today say it, it’s got to be true. But it was because I had this immediately negative reaction to Ben Carson, because it seemed almost too boneheaded even for him, that I urged myself to check the article out. Turns out, after speaking about immi
grants coming to America via Ellis Island, Carson had said:
There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.
Only someone trying to deliberately wrench those remarks out of context would think Carson—who is black, by the way—was referring to slaves as willing immigrants. He clearly said they came here in slave ships and was making a point most people who disagree with his policies would agree with—that African Americans have had to work even harder than immigrants to fulfill even the most basic dreams for their children. Yet all of that was lost because somebody wanted to get more traffic for their article.
I still don’t like Ben Carson. But I dislike him for real reasons, not because of fake news. I cannot stress enough how important this distinction is. The more an article feels like it is true, the more skeptical you should be about it. If you haven’t heard of the website before, it’s probably because it’s not legitimate. Be discerning. Be cynical. Don’t let “close enough” be your standard for truth and opinion. Insist on accuracy and on getting it right.
