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

by Ryan Holiday

  The story of the monster is a lot like my story. Except my story is not about drugs or the yellow press but of a bigger and much more modern monster—my monster is the brave new world of new media—one that I often fed and thought I controlled. I lived high and well in that world, and I believed in it until it no longer looked the same to me. Many things went down. I’m not sure where my responsibility for them begins or ends, but I am ready to talk about what happened.

  I created false perceptions through blogs, which led to bad conclusions and wrong decisions—real decisions in the real world that had consequences for real people. Phrases like “known rapist” began to follow what were once playfully encouraged rumors of bad or shocking behavior designed to get blog publicity for clients. Friends were ruined and broken. Gradually I began to notice work just like mine appearing everywhere, and no one catching on to it or repairing the damage. Stocks took major hits, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, on news from the same unreliable sources I’d often trick with fake stories.

  In 2008, a Gawker blogger published e-mails stolen from my inbox by someone else trying to intimidate a client through the media. It was a humiliating and awful experience. But with some distance I now understand that Gawker had little choice about the role they played in the matter. I know that I was as much a part of the problem as they were.

  I remember one day mentioning some scandal during a dinner conversation, one that I knew was probably fake, probably a scam. I did it because it was too interesting not to pass along. I was lost in the same unreality I’d forced on other people. I found that not only did I not know what was real anymore, but that I no longer cared. To borrow from Budd Schulberg’s description of a media manipulator in his classic novel The Harder They Fall, I was “indulging myself in the illusions that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch.” I no longer have those illusions.

  Winston Churchill wrote of the appeasers of his age that “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” I was even more delusional. I thought I could skip being devoured entirely. It would never turn on me. I was in control. I was the expert. But I was wrong.

  WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

  Sitting next to my desk right now is a large box filled with hundreds of articles I have printed over the last several years. The articles show all the trademarks of the fakes and scams I myself have run, yet they involve many of biggest news and entertainment stories of the decade. The margins are filled with angry little notes and question marks. The satirist Juvenal wrote of “cramming whole notebooks with scribbled invective” amid the corrupt opulence of Rome; that box and this book are my notebooks from my own days inside such a world. Collectively, it was this process that opened my eyes. I hope it will have the same effect for you.

  Lately I have slowed my contributions to the pile of evidence, not because the quality of the content has improved, but because hope for anything different would be silly. I’m not so foolish as to expect bloggers to know what they are talking about. I no longer expect to be informed—not when manipulation is so easy for bloggers and marketers to profit from. I can’t shake the constant suspicion that others are baiting, tricking, or cheating me, just as I did to them. It’s hard to browse the Internet when you are haunted by the words of A. J. Daulerio, the editor of the popular sports blog Deadspin: “It’s all professional wrestling.”1

  Some of you, by the time you are done with this book, will probably hate me for ruining it for you too. Or call me a liar. Or accuse me of exaggerating. You may not want me to expose the people behind your favorite websites as the imbeciles, charlatans, and pompous frauds they are. But it is a world of many hustlers, and you are the mark. The con is to build a brand off the backs of others. Your attention and your credulity are what’s stolen.

  This book isn’t structured like typical business books. Instead of extended chapters, it is split into two parts, and each part is made up of short, overlapping, and reinforcing vignettes. In the first part I explain why blogs matter, how they drive the news, and how they can be manipulated. In the second I show what happens when you do this, how it backfires, and the dangerous consequences of our current system.

  What follows are the methods used to manipulate bloggers and reporters at the highest levels, broken down into nine simple tactics.

  Every one of these tactics reveals a critical vulnerability in our media system. I will show you where they are and what can be done with them, and help you recognize when they’re being used on you. Sure, I am explaining how to take advantage of these weaknesses, but mostly I am saying that these vulnerabilities exist. It is the first time that these gaps have ever been exposed, by a critic or otherwise. Hopefully, once in the open they’ll no longer work as well. I understand that there is some contradiction in this position, as there has long been in me. My dis-integration wasn’t always healthy, but it does allow me to explain our problems from a unique perspective.

  This book is my experience behind the scenes in the worlds of blogging, PR, and online machinations—and what those experiences say about the dominant cultural medium. I’m speaking personally and honestly about what I know, and I know this space better than just about anyone.

  I didn’t intend to, but I’ve helped pioneer a media system designed to trick, cajole, and steal every second of the most precious resource in the world—people’s time. I’m going to show you every single one of these tricks, and what they mean.

  What you choose to do with this information is up to you.

  * By “real” I mean that people believe it and act on it. I am saying that the infrastructure of the Internet can be used against itself to turn a manufactured piece of nonsense into widespread outrage and then action. It happens every day. Every single day.

  BOOK ONE

  FEEDING THE MONSTER

  HOW BLOGS WORK

  I

  BLOGS MAKE THE NEWS

  I CALL TO YOUR ATTENTION AN ARTICLE IN THE NEW York Times written at the earliest of the earliest junctures of the 2012 presidential election, nearly two years before votes would be cast.1

  It told of a then obscure figure, Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota. Pawlenty was not yet a presidential candidate. He had no campaign director, no bus, few donors, and little name recognition. In fact, he did not even have a campaign. It was January 2011, after all. What he did have was a beat reporter from the blog Politico following him from town to town with a camera and a laptop, reporting every moment of his noncampaign.

  It’s a bit peculiar, if you think about it. Even the New York Times, the newspaper that spends millions of dollars a year for a Baghdad bureau, which can fund investigative reports five or ten years in the making, didn’t have a reporter covering Pawlenty. Yet Politico, a blog with only a fraction of the resources of a major newspaper, did. The Times was covering Politico covering a noncandidate.

  It was a little like a Ponzi scheme, and like all such schemes, it went from boom to bust. Pawlenty became a candidate, coverage of him generated millions of impressions online, then in print, and finally on television, before he flamed out and withdrew from the race. Despite all of this, his candidacy’s impact on the election was significant and real enough that the next Republican front-runner courted Pawlenty’s endorsement.

  There’s a famous twentieth-century political cartoon about the Associated Press that was, at the time, the wire service responsible for supplying news to the majority of the newspapers in the United States. In it an AP agent is pouring different bottles into a city’s water supply. The bottles are labeled “lies,” “prejudice,” “slander,” “suppressed facts,” and “hatred.” The image reads: “The News—Poisoned At Its Source.”

  I think of blogs as today’s newswires.

  BLOGS MATTER

  By “blog,” I’m referring collectively to all online publishing. That’s everything from Twitter accounts to major newspaper websites to web videos to group blogs with hundreds of writers. I
don’t care whether the owners consider themselves blogs or not. The reality is that they are all subject to the same incentives, and they fight for attention with similar tactics.*

  Most people don’t understand how today’s information cycle really works. Many have no idea of how much their general worldview is influenced by the way news is generated online. What begins online ends offline.

  Although there are millions of blogs out there, you’ll notice some mentioned a lot in this book: Gawker, Business Insider, Politico, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, and the like. This is not because they are the most widely read, but instead because they are mostly read by the media elite, and their proselytizing owners, Nick Denton, Henry Blodget, Jonah Peretti, and Arianna Huffington, have an immense amount of influence. A blog isn’t small if its puny readership is made up of TV producers and writers for national newspapers.

  Radio DJs and news anchors once filled their broadcasts with newspaper headlines; today they repeat what they read on blogs—certain blogs more than others. Stories from blogs also filter into real conversations and rumors that spread from person to person through word of mouth. In short, blogs are vehicles from which mass media reporters—and your most chatty and “informed” friends—discover and borrow the news. This hidden cycle gives birth to the memes that become our cultural references, the budding stars who become our celebrities, the thinkers who become our gurus, and the news that becomes our news.

  When I figured this out early in my career in public relations I thought what only a naive and destructively ambitious twentysomething would have: If I master the rules that govern blogs, I can be the master of all they determine. It was, essentially, access to a fiat over culture.

  It may have been a dangerous thought, but it wasn’t hyperbole. In the Pawlenty case, the guy could have become the president of the United States of America. One early media critic put it this way: We’re a country governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the press, so isn’t it critical to understand what governs the press? What rules over the media, he concluded, rules over the country. In this case, what rules over Politico literally almost ruled over everyone.

  To understand what makes blogs act—why Politico followed Pawlenty around—is the key to making them do what you want. Learn their rules, change the game. That’s all it takes to control public opinion.

  SO, WHY DID POLITICO FOLLOW PAWLENTY?

  On the face of it, it’s pretty crazy. Pawlenty’s phantom candidacy wasn’t newsworthy, and if the New York Times couldn’t afford to pay a reporter to follow him around, Politico shouldn’t have been able to.

  It wasn’t crazy. Blogs need things to cover. The Times has to fill a newspaper only once per day. A cable news channel has to fill twenty-four hours of programming 365 days a year. But blogs have to fill an infinite amount of space. The site that covers the most stuff wins.

  Political blogs know that their traffic goes up during election cycles. Since traffic is what they sell to advertisers, elections equal increased revenue. Unfortunately, election cycles come only every few years. Worse still, they end. Blogs have a simple solution: change reality through the coverage.

  With Pawlenty, Politico was not only manufacturing a candidate, they were manufacturing an entire leg of the election cycle purely to profit from it. It was a conscious decision. In the story about his business, Politico’s executive editor, Jim VandeHei, tipped his hand to the New York Times: “We were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly. Now we’re a 200-person production, with a precise feel and plan. We’re trying to take a leap forward in front of everyone else.”

  When a blog like Politico tried to leap in front of everyone else, the person they arbitrarily decided to cover was turned into an actual candidate. The campaign starts gradually, with a few mentions on blogs, moves on to “potential contender,” begins to be considered for debates, and is then included on the ballot. Their platform accumulates real supporters who donate real time and money to the campaign. The campaign buzz is reified by the mass media, who covers and legitimizes whatever is being talked about online.

  Pawlenty’s campaign for elected office may have failed, but for blogs and other media, it was profitable success. He generated millions of pageviews for blogs, was the subject of dozens of stories in print and online, and had his fair share of television time. When Politico picked Pawlenty they made the only bet worth making—where they had the power to control the outcome.

  In case you didn’t catch it, here’s the cycle again:

  Political blogs need things to cover; traffic increases during election

  Reality (election far away) does not align with this

  Political blogs create candidates early; move up start of election cycle

  The person they cover, by nature of coverage, becomes actual candidate (or president)

  Blogs profit (literally), the public loses

  You’ll see this cycle repeated again and again in this book. It’s true for celebrity gossip, politics, business news, and every other topic blogs cover. The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events.

  The economics of the Internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth. With the mass media—and today, mass culture—relying on the web for the next big thing, it is a set of incentives with massive implications.

  Blogs need traffic, being first drives traffic, and so entire stories are created out of whole cloth to make that happen. This is just one facet of the economics of blogging, but it’s a critical one. When we understand the logic that drives these business choices, those choices become predictable. And what is predictable can be anticipated, redirected, accelerated, or controlled—however you or I choose.

  Later in the election, Politico moved the goalposts again to stay on top. Speed stopped working so well, so they turned to scandal to upend the race once more. Remember Herman Cain, the preposterous, media-created candidate who came after Pawlenty? After surging ahead as the lead contender for the Republican nomination, and becoming the subject of an exhausting number of traffic-friendly blog posts, Cain’s candidacy was utterly decimated by a sensational but still strongly denied scandal reported by…you guessed it: Politico.

  I’m sure there were powerful political interests that could not allow Cain to become anything more than a sideshow. So his narrative was changed, and some suspect it was done by a person just like me, hired by another candidate’s campaign—and the story spread, whether it was true or not. If true, from the looks of it whoever delivered the fatal blow did it exactly the way I would have: painfully, untraceably, and impossible to recover from.

  And so another noncandidate was created, made real, and then taken out. Another one bit the dust so that blogs could fill their cycle.

  *I have never been a fan of the word “blogosphere” and will use it only sparingly.

  II

  HOW TO TURN NOTHING INTO SOMETHING IN THREE WAY-TOO-EASY STEPS

  IN THE INTRODUCTION I EXPLAINED A SCAM I CALL “trading up the chain.” It’s a strategy I developed that manipulates the media through recursion. I can turn nothing into something by placing a story with a small blog that has very low standards, which then becomes the source for a story by a larger blog, and that, in turn, for a story by larger media outlets. I create, to use the words of one media scholar, a “self-reinforcing news wave.” People like me do this everyday.

  The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause.

  A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned
an obscure cause into a popular Internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally.

  Following my instructions, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site.

  When the CBS News piece came out and the video was up, he was ready to post it all on Reddit. It made the front page almost immediately. This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well) put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like BoingBoing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit. From this final burst of coverage, money began pouring in, as did volunteers, recognition, and new ideas.