Trust Me I'm Lying (5th Anniversary Edition)

by Ryan Holiday

  Live video is the future of journalism. Soon we will have drones with GoPros on them doing “reality journalism.” The RNC and DNC both banned drones or else I’d have done that.

  Marc Andreessen has said that being “too soon” is as bad as being “too late.” Live media is too soon, which is why Twitter is losing money.

  Twitter lacks business focus. Twitter is not a social media platform. It’s part talk radio, part live news coverage, part political commentary. Twitter needs to be streamlined with those business focuses in mind.

  What’s your media diet look like? Is there anything you’ve learned making the sausage (so to speak) that has changed what you will and won’t eat?

  Most of what the liberal media does is outright hoaxing. We’ve gone from a world where journalists are biased to a world where journalists fabricate stories, as Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone did.

  Independent voices from both sides appeal to me. If you don’t lie about the facts, your views won’t offend me. It’s America, people disagree, no big deal.

  My trip to the RNC and DNC sickened me. We’ve all seen Twitter pundits like Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat hold course about what Americans think. They don’t leave Twitter.

  It’s hilarious to me that those who accuse people of being “basement dwelling trolls” never leave their neighborhoods to attend a Trump or Clinton rally. They were nowhere to be found during the many massive protests at the DNC.

  I have a lot of respect for Michael Tracey, who is a liberal. He tells the truth (as he sees it) about everyone. He isn’t a shill for the establishment.

  Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit does a great job of collecting news from across the web. Stefan Molyneux has a great commentary show where he presents a view that contradicts the dominant narrative.

  Traditional media hates Breitbart, but I attended the RNC and DNC. Breitbart had reporters in the field providing coverage. Where were the New York Times and other “legitimate” publications? They were inside the media tents drinking hot chocolate and sucking up to each other.

  It may also come as a surprise to many to learn that I respect Glenn Greenwald, even though he’d likely disavow me or call me odious or something.

  There is a shortage of real journalism. Most of [what] the “conservative media” does is churnalism—jabbering about what the “liberal media” wrote.

  “MEET THE JOURNALIST WHO FOOLED MILLIONS ABOUT CHOCOLATE AND WEIGHT LOSS”

  JOHN BOHANNON

  New York Observer, June 2015*

  A MAN TRICKS THE ENTIRE MEDIA ESTABLISHMENT and millions of people into thinking that something unhealthy is actually good for them with a deliberately misleading study. Worse, they now think it’s the secret to being healthy. He’s a bad person, right?

  But what if it was actually an attempt to illustrate the woeful prevalence of junk science and how easily it can be propagated through culture? If the man was a computer hacker who revealed a back door, we might marvel at his mastery and cleverness. If he was a whistleblower, we’d admire his courage.

  Some people might be conflicted at the story of John Bohannon, who recently revealed that he’d helped dupe millions of people into believing that chocolate was healthy. He created a fake organization, orchestrated a study to show that chocolate was correlated with weight loss, published it in an open access journal, put out a fake press release, and traded it up the chain until the news appeared in several major media outlets. Now, finally, he’s exposed the inner-workings of this stunt (his piece on i09 has been read more than 835,000 times).

  I think John is a hero. I think he’s made the world better (or at least more aware) by what he’s done. The only people with anything to be embarrassed about are the ones who got caught sleeping on the job. You see, it’s journalists who are supposed to protect us against these types of manipulations. They’re supposed to weed out the bad studies from the good. They’re supposed to realize that Ship Your Enemies Glitter stunts are blatant money grabs or when self-interested sources should be excluded or qualified. They should see that someone like Charles C. Johnson is exploiting the political dialog.

  Yet instead of learning from something like these, outlets like the Daily Mail are rushing to cover their ass. They deny they ever fell for it. And even if they didn’t—they can’t see how much their business models and the model of almost all journalism today needlessly exposes them to such risks. Because they don’t care. They don’t want to be better or know the truth. The truth would be bad for business.

  As John recently told The Washington Post, although there is plenty of blame to go around there’s one group who deserves it more than any others. “It’s the reporters. The reporters and ultimately the editors . . . People who are on the health science beat need to treat [what they write] like science, and that has to come from the editors. You need to talk to a source who has real scientific expertise.”

  It’s clear that reporters, not only in the health space, but everywhere, have stopped caring. Well, maybe a few readers do care. To help with that, I’ve reached out to John to get a little more information on how his brilliant stunt worked and what else people should know.

  So tell us how you managed to fool not only hundreds of thousands of people and media outlets, but fooled them with something that is on its face, ridiculous?

  Well, did it really seem ridiculous that chocolate can help you lose weight? Compared to the diet headlines you can read every day, it seemed like a fairly normal claim. And that’s the problem! Somehow we’ve all decided that the science of nutrition doesn’t matter.

  What gave you the idea—any inspirations you can tell us about? Did you actually think you could pull it off? Was it exhilarating, scary, did you feel guilty? Tell us your thought process.

  I got a call out of the blue in December from Peter Onneken, a German television reporter. It was all his brilliant idea: Do a really bad but authentic scientific study of chocolate and weight loss, then build a media campaign around it. I was skeptical that any of my journalist colleagues would take the bait. But take it they did.

  Was there one outlet or channel that you feel like did more to propagate the narrative than any others?

  A huge thank you must go out to the Daily Mail. They even tried to weasel out of it. One of their PR people sent me and NPR an email implying that they hadn’t in fact taken the bait, since we accidentally used a screen shot of the wrong Daily Mail story. (It was one of their other stories about the miraculous health benefits of eating chocolate, if you can believe it.) They were clearly hoping that we would just quietly remove the screen shot and let them off the hook. To my knowledge, they have printed no retraction, correction, or clarification. Here is their story: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3018945/New-study-reveals-eating-chocolate-doesn-t-affect-Body-Mass-Index-help-LOSE-weight.html.

  Some people might say that what you did was unfair or potentially harmful (this is a criticism I got with my stunts). Have [you] heard that at all? I believe you did everyone a favor by pointing out an obvious flaw in the system—it’s up to the reporters responsible to make changes around this information. What do you think?

  It is true that these kinds of investigations pose an ethical dilemma. We must weigh the possible benefits against the possible harms. In this case, it is the risk of making some people eat a chocolate bar and embarrassing some bad journalists versus promoting skepticism about diet claims and showing that scientific studies can get misleading results when they don’t understand statistics. I’ll leave it to your readers to decide for themselves.

  With that in mind, what do you think the solution is? What do we have to change?

  The next time you read a news story that seems to be giving you clear diet advice to lose weight, you should get angry and write to the editor. We have a better understanding of why stars sometimes blow up than why people become obese. This is hard science, not “lifestyle” fodder.

  You did this with something that I do think is relatively
harmless and you did come clean. Do you think that the same tactics or manipulation could be used more nefariously? Is that what’s happening?

  I think all of the diet-nutrition-fitness media is corrupt. It’s bad science and worse journalism, all driven by companies selling rubbish. Oh sorry, you weren’t talking about mainstream media?

  Now that you’ve come clean and revealed the bogus facts behind the story—do you think the original narrative is going to die or keep going like some sort of zombie? Have you seen the corrections you were hoping for?

  I’ve seen one and only one real correction.

  “EXCLUSIVE : ‘DIGITAL DARTH VADER’ CHARLES C. JOHNSON ON MANIPULATING POLITICS AND MEDIA”

  CHARLES C. JOHNSON

  New York Observer, May 2015*

  I’M NOT SURE WHEN I FIRST BECAME AWARE OF Charles C. Johnson. It may have been from a few tweets he directed at me. It might have been from one of the numerous controversial profiles of him in the New York Times, Politico, Gawker and other places. I do specifically recall being tagged in a tweet for a $500 bounty he’d put on anyone who could get an advertiser to pull out of Al Sharpton’s TV show.

  It was exactly the kind of political divisiveness that I have tried to cut out of my life over the last few years, so I mostly ignored it. It’s also the kind of stunt that has made Charles wildly popular in some conservative circles. He’s aggressive, he’s unorthodox, he knows which buttons to press. With the collapse of traditional media, he’s figured out how to drive media narratives better than just about anyone. In this way, he is very much the heir to the legacy of Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe.

  For some people, that’s an honor. Others consider it a damning insult. To some, Charles is a toxic troll, abusing the system. To an equal number of people, he’s a maverick and a truth teller.

  I can see it both ways. It’s complicated and here’s why: Charles cites my book Trust Me, I’m Lying as one of his most significant influences. In other words, I may want [to] disavow what he does, but I cannot avoid admitting that he is partially a reflection of myself. It’s an unusual position for an author to be in—to see his own book used in ways he’d rather not have it be used. In fact, in this instance I’m seeing it used in precisely the ways I warned against. At the same time, it’d be hard to argue that Charles C. Johnson is doing anything that your average publicist, blogger, pundit or strategist doesn’t do—the only real difference is degree.

  When Charles tweeted about my book last week, I decided to act. Why not email him and talk? Clearly we share some common ground, why not connect? Having already spoken to left-wing activists who manipulate the media and the people behind #Gamer-Gate, why not learn from someone equally controversial? We ended up chatting on the phone for about thirty minutes last week discussing everything from the Overton Window to the towns of central California. It was pleasant, provocative and challenging. I came away impressed in a lot of ways. I followed up over email with the questions below. Some of the views he expressed I strongly disagree with. In other answers, I think he nails it. But that is the nature of a figure like Charles—smart, but undeniably frustrating in the ways he uses it.

  I hope that Charles’s honest and amoral tactics help reveal even more about the media system (sorry, racket) to you, the public. Only when we know how our news really gets made, can we gauge our appetite for consuming it.

  So we’ve never met, never really spoken, but it occurred to me that I had rather strong opinions about you. Yet, if I really dig into my own views here, I have to admit those opinions come almost entirely from sources I don’t trust or respect much. Do you find that that is fairly common with people who interact with you?

  You’d be surprised at the sorts of people I interact with on a day-to-day basis. I’m friendly with dozens of journalists, multiple billion-aires, law enforcement, and thousands of everyday researchers. This is how I like it. In Shakespeare the fool was the one who was allowed to tell the truth. I don’t mind it if I’m made fun of or mocked so long as all the right people know that I’m right. I simply don’t believe that most of the media has any real power at all and that it’s only a matter of time before it all implodes.

  There was a concerted effort by various publications and blogs to demonize me in 2014, especially after I exposed the Rolling Stone scandal and Jackie [Ed note: Last name has been deleted], the lying girl behind it. These include BuzzFeed, Gawker, Jezebel, Deadspin, etc., who just made things up about me. Normally this negative attention would have bothered me but I don’t really respect all of these sites so I understood what they were doing. They saw a competitor so they reacted negatively. Andy Warhol once said that he doesn’t read criticism but measures it in inches. I’m much the same way.

  I think a lot of the dislike for me isn’t real but a social signaling thing that’s used by reporters to vainly assure themselves that I’m not onto something.

  Tell me, how do you describe what it is that you do? What’s your livelihood? How does it work? What place do you see yourself fitting in our current media culture?

  I like to tell people I do research and that I’m building a private intelligence network. I own two companies—one is a news company and the other a research firm. The two operate synergistically. I make money from clients, from speaking gigs, from donors, from traffic, and from a hundred or so other sources. I like to use Twitter because that’s where the self-appointed cognoscenti create public opinion, i.e. the media or the political class. Jesse James robbed banks because that’s where the money is. I mess with Twitter because that’s where the people who need to be messed with are. In so doing I combine celebrity culture, nerd culture, and heavy research. It’s essentially #GamerGate applied to everything in the cultural space. I really enjoy having people from all over the world work with me to change the narrative and ultimately to change the world.

  David Carr (who I did respect), wrote in his column about you that your style of journalism “says everything about the corrosive, underreported news era we are living through.” I agree we live in a corrosive media era, but I would argue that we’re anything but “underreported.” What would you say to the idea that we have far too much media and that at some point, it’s become this giant beast that needs to be constantly fed?

  I spoke to David for 4 hours and explained to him very politely what I was doing and why it was important and in keeping with the journalistic icons we hold dear. He couldn’t write the column that I may actually be brilliant so he had to slime me. He kept insisting that I was like the ghost from Ghostbusters 2 and then he said I was juvenile or something. It was kind of sad. I wrote about the story.

  I think there was something very revealing about the Times and our media where great reporters like Ray Hernandez and Nicholas Wade don’t get the media attention they deserve and ultimately leave the Times while recovering crack addicts like Carr—with no technical chops whatsoever—are lionized as the voice of the internet. It’s very strange. I don’t agree that there is such a thing as too much information and I’m a tad bit disappointed that there’s not even more information available. I suppose the human brain is only capable of so much.

  Is there anything you’ve published that you regret? I’ve argued in the past that iterative journalism is a real problem—this reporting live, in real time, as everything happens—but you clearly operate your Twitter feed in a sort of stream of consciousness reporting style. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t.

  I regret publishing the wrong photo of Jackie for an hour [Ed note: last name deleted]. Other than that, I don’t regret anything I’ve published. I think there are higher standards for me than there are for massive media conglomerates, which is odd, because I have a millionth [of] their resources. Still, I’m profitable and they are not so maybe it doesn’t really matter.

  I can’t think of anything I’ve gotten wrong. Sometimes I’ll be right years later, like I was with U.S. Senator Menendez. Sometimes I’ll be proven right in real time as I was
with Sony not being hacked by North Korea or Elizabeth O’Bagy, a Syria analyst, manufacturing her credentials to lie us into war. Of course in the media these days it doesn’t much matter if you are right. It matters if you can persuade people you are right. This is kind of a fascinating feature of our time. You have to become a celebrity before people start to listen. I wish this weren’t so but it is.

  Who is the least trustworthy person in journalism?

  Shane Smith of Vice is a serial con artist who lied about being a wartime correspondent. The notion that his company is worth a billion-plus dollars is laughable. (I wrote about it at the Daily Caller.) Anderson Cooper is a close second. The more you dig in on Cooper the more you’ll find out he’s made up things in his past, too.

  What is the easiest loophole to exploit in our current system?

  The newsroom can never know as much information as the crowd or private network can. There’s a certain necessary occupational arrogance that comes with assuming that a few thousand people can know all the news that’s fit to print. I’m a bit more suspicious. There’s a huge bias toward breaking news. If you can break new news while everyone else is following your lead you can control the future. People are tired of the right-wing and left-wing ghettos.

  If you wanted to pass a totally false story through the media, how would you do it? If you wanted to take someone down, how would you do it? Can you spot when that is happening or being done by other people?

  Well, Rolling Stone and NBC News are the experts on fake stories and I had a hand in exposing both of these organizations. I have only one rule—which is that I don’t do anything fake. I start with the unguarded moment. Most people have moments where they aren’t “on,” where they reveal their true selves. Oftentimes it’s in decisions they make or don’t make. I focus on the “who” behind the headlines. I look at their finances, at their spouses, I go through the public records, and then begin working the phones. I try to learn about how people actually are. There is often a huge disconnect between the public profile and the private self. This is where much of my work gets its power.