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

by Ryan Holiday

  They should have learned their lesson months earlier, after falling for a similar hoax. A prankster posted on CNN’s online iReport platform that a “source” had told them that Steve Jobs had had a severe heart attack.* It was the user’s first and only post. It was posted at 4:00 A.M. It was obviously a hoax. Even the site MacRumors.com, which writes about nothing but rumors, knew this post was bogus and didn’t write about it. Nonetheless, following its iterative instincts, Business Insider’s sister blog, Silicon Alley Insider, rushed to advance the story as a full-fledged post. Apple’s stock price plummeted. Twenty-five minutes later, the story in tatters—the fake tip deleted by iReport; the rumor denied by Apple—Business Insider rewrites the lead with a new angle: “‘Citizen journalism’…just failed its first significant test.”4 Yeah, that’s who failed here. You know who didn’t? Those who were shorting Apple stock.

  Ultimately, that is why iterative journalism is so attractive for publishers. It eliminates costs such as fact-checkers or staff time to build relationships with sources. It is profitable, because it allows writers to return to the same story multiple times and drives more comments, links, and excitement than normal, non-“breaking” news. To call it a learning experience or a process, or anything but a way to make more money, is a lie.

  COVERING THEIR ASSES

  Iterative journalists claim they welcome corrections as a way of justifying the risks they take when they break news. But then again, I also recall hearing Nick Denton complain to a packed house at SXSW 2012 that American Apparel and Dov Charney “waste a lot of editorial time” when we call his writers to complain about inaccurate stories. If only there was some way to avoid that….

  Even so, no blog wants to be embarrassingly wrong, so instead of standing behind embarrassing stories resulting from their silly approach to journalism, blogs duck behind qualifiers: “We’re hearing …”; “I wonder …”; “Possibly …”; “Lots of buzz that …”; “Sites are reporting …”; “Could…, Would…, Should …”; and so on. In other words, they toss the news narrative into the stream without taking full ownership and pretend to be an impartial observer of a process they began.

  For example, these are the first two sentences of New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog post about the David Paterson story I mentioned earlier:

  After weeks of escalating buzz about a New York Times piece that would reveal a “bombshell” scandal about New York Governor David Paterson, Business Insider is reporting that the story will likely come out tomorrow and will be followed by the governor’s resignation (!!). Though the nature of the revelation is still a mystery, reports are that this story is “much worse” than Paterson’s publicly acknowledged affair with a state employee [emphases mine].5

  Welcome to Covering Your Ass 101. Nearly every claim is tempered by what might happen or attributed to someone else. It says all it can and nothing at the same time. It is the perfect disingenuous hedge. Which worked out great for Daily Intel, since the story turned out to be totally wrong. Not that anyone learned from mistake—the posts were just updated with more speculation and guessing. One mistake is replaced by more mistakes.

  Another common iterative tactic is to write about the rumors “that other people are writing about.” This lets them blog about an undeveloped story without having to take ownership of it. The Daily Beast chose this path when they wrote a story about “still-below-the-radar-but-getting-tough-to-ignore buzz” that a female politician’s husband was a closeted homosexual. Such rumors, of course, were spread by the politician’s political enemies and enjoyed by her opposition. The writer even admitted that the claims were nothing more than “uncorroborated speculation” in the first sentence. But that doesn’t matter. We no longer discuss if rumors are true, only that they being talked about right now.

  This is justified by the self-serving distinction between reporting the rumors and reporting about the rumors. In reality there is no difference whatsoever. The public’s time is wasted with manipulative information because of the flawed contention that speculation about the implications of speculation gets us closer to the truth—instead of muddying the waters further.

  A TEST CASE

  There are certainly some advantages to iterative journalism—it’s cheap, it’s fast, it gets people’s attention. Take its most compelling performance: reporting the death of Osama bin Laden.

  At 10:25 P.M., a user named Keith Urbahn broke the big news on Twitter. “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.” Urbahn was first. He passed along the info as he heard it, and it worked. Word spread rapidly on Twitter and quickly onto blogs before the mainstream media even knew what happened. “Long before the news media and as President Obama was learning about the details of the events in Pakistan,” wrote social media guru Brian Solis, “individuals following @ReallyVirtual, @mpoppel, and @keithurbahn witnessed firsthand as the operation developed and the real news emerged.”

  His first source (a television news producer, of all people) turned out to be correct, and therefore Urbhan was correct before anyone else. Blogs dominated the story with their iterative approach and got the news to the public accurately and quickly. They wrote history before the mainstream media had a chance to get their expert pundits in the makeup chair, before even the official confirmation by the United States government. It wasn’t until twenty minutes after Urbahn tweeted the story that the news was confirmed and reported by the first news station.*

  Another way to look at it, though, is that the greatest success of iterative journalism gave us a story twenty minutes earlier than it would have come otherwise. Bravo. A whole twenty fucking minutes. The world is forever in your debt.

  To think it matters whether it came twenty minutes sooner or later basically misses the entire point of the news. What matters is that the man was dead. To correct the well-meaning Brian Solis, it’s pretty ridiculous to think that social media heard about the raid on bin Laden’s compound before the president who ordered it.

  Why is that a goal anyway? The twenty minutes is a vapid victory. And yet it is all that iterative journalism brings us when it works well. This was the instance—the exception—in which the person passing along earth-shattering news that he’s only partially confident about, that he himself says “could be misinformation or pure rumor,” is a hero instead of a fool.

  But let’s look at another test case. What do we get when iterative journalism fails?

  The answer is: a lot of pain and suffering for innocent people. Like when the blog Eater LA published a report from an anonymous reader stating that a popular Los Angeles wine bar not only had egregious health code violations, but also was advertising gourmet items on its menu while really serving generic substitutes. It was the kind of tip iterative publisher’s love to see, and Eater immediately put the story out there—before verifying it or contacting the restaurant:

  Besides not adhering to simple food saftey [sic] standards, such as soap, sanitizing, and throwing out chicken salad that’s 2 weeks old, 90% of all “fresh” menu items are cooked days beforehand and sit in the fridge. [emphasis theirs]

  Like so many iterative reports, it turned out to be wrong. Completely wrong. So Eater added an update that said the proprietors disputed the story. Yet the post—the disgusting hygiene allegations and the headline—remained the same. The post stayed up for people to read and comment on. Only after a second update—prompted by the threat of a lawsuit—did Eater begin to admit any wrongdoing. It said, in part:

  We ran this tip without contacting the owners of the restaurant, who have since refuted the tip in its entirety. We apologize to the owners of the restaurant, and our readers, for not investigating our source’s claims before airing them on the site. The resulting post didn’t rise to our standards, and we shouldn’t have published it.

  Yet, adhering to the rules of iterative journalism, the original post remains up some two years later. The updates are at the bottom of the post and are still seen after the now
repudiated anonymous allegations. Only with the direct threat of legal action were the restaurant owners able to reply to a story that the blog admitted shouldn’t have been published. It was not, however, enough to make them take the post down. Or reveal the identity of the malicious tipster.

  This is only one example of the myth of iteration having real consequences.* Imagine if the restaurant had been a larger, publicly traded company. Stocks move on news—any news—and rumors passed on by high-profile blogs are no exception. It does not matter if they are updated or corrected or part of a learning curve; blogs are read by real people who make opinions and decisions as they read.

  Process journalism, fed by controversy, rumors, and titillating scandals, is a beast that gives no quarter. Those who have never been on the other side of this equation don’t realize that it is precisely in situations like a scandal, an IPO, a lawsuit, or a tragic event that the subjects of the story are least able to communicate with the press. Legal reasons may preclude commenting publicly; SEC rules occasionally forbid speaking with the press; personal shame or simply the overwhelming nature of dealing with the event may make it impossible to response to every single media inquiry immediately. It is with the stories upon which we most need to tread lightly, to speak carefully on behalf of those who cannot speak, that bloggers are unwilling to do so, because it is not in their interest.

  Forcing someone to dispute a preposterously untrue allegation is just as much slander as making the accusation. The types of stories that scream out to be written and broken before they are fully written are precisely the types of stories that cannot be taken back. The scandals, the controversies, and the shocking announcements—the ones I have shown in this book to be so easy to fabricate or manipulate—cannot be unwritten or walked back. They spread too quickly. They stick too easily.

  And when they inevitably turn out to be wrong (or have less than the whole story), the subjects find themselves asking the same question that wrongly disgraced former United States secretary of labor Ray Donovan asked the court when he was acquitted of false charges that ruined his career: “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”

  SLAVES TO THE ITERATIVE GRIND

  Bill Simmons, a sportswriter who famously set off an iterative journalism frenzy when he accidentally published a private message confirming rumors of the trade of Randy Moss to the Vikings in 2010, wrote: “Twitter, which exacerbates the demands of immediacy, blurs the line between reporting and postulating, and forces writers to chase too many bum steers.” The allure of the scoop in the iterative world, he said, “entices reporters to become enslaved to certain sources, push transparent agendas, and ‘break’ news before there’s anything to officially break” [emphasis mine].

  Yet despite this, the best and brightest (and richest) online publishers push iterative reporting as the de facto model. The danger of real-time journalism hides in plain sight: Its jumpiness can easily be exploited by interested parties—people like me. Leaking or sharing information with the right blog introduces a narrative that can immediately and overwhelmingly take hold. By the time the proper facts have been established, it is too late to dislodge a now commonly held perception. In this model, the audience is viewed as nothing more than a dumb mob to be manipulated and used to create pageviews.

  It’s a vicious cycle. The lead bum steer of an iterative story starts a stampede. And after so many of these stampedes, the audience is conditioned to expect an endless parade of bigger and bigger scoops that no reporter could ever deliver. What spread yesterday—drove tweets of “Holy shit, did you hear?”—is hardly enough to spread the same way today. So it must be newer, faster, crazier. Now they must maintain it constantly by reporting on even more tenuous material and making crazier conclusions from it. And why shouldn’t they? They can just apologize later.

  Our friends Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington like to use the metaphor of beta to explain this new form of journalism—like how Google rolls out their new services with software bugs still in it. It’s just like that, they say. They forget we’re not dealing with software or ones and zeros; we’re dealing with the news and information, and those things affect people’s lives. Or more likely, Jarvis and Arrington know this and don’t care, content to advocate a concept with painful consequences for everyone but them. It’s made them wealthy and influential; what does it matter if the metaphor is wrong?

  What Google says when they release a product in beta is that the fundamentals are strong but the superficialities are a work in progress—aesthetics, feature additions, nagging issues. The iterative journalism reporting model suggests the opposite—the structure, the headline, the links, and the picture slideshows are there, but the facts are suspect. What kind of process is that?

  If there is a coding mistake, I won’t get an incorrect view of the market or an industry. I won’t begin to wrongly think that So-and-So is a racist or some restaurant is filled with cockroaches when it actually isn’t. Software as beta means the risk of small glitches; the news as beta means the risk of a false reality.

  The poet Hesiod once wrote that rumor and gossip are a “light weight to lift up, but heavy to carry and hard to put down.” Iterative journalism is much the same. Its practices come easily, almost naturally, given the way blogs are designed and the way the web operates. It seems cheaper, but it’s not. The costs have just been externalized, to the readers and the subjects of the stories, who write down millions each year in falsely damaged reputations and perceptions. Iterative journalism makes the news cheap to produce but expensive to read.

  * From an SB Nation sports post about the NFL lockout: “There are 382 more updates to this story. Read most recent updates.”

  * I imagine these repeated and exhausting rumors of Jobs’s death made it all the more painful for his family when they were eventually placed in the position, three years later, of announcing that he had actually passed away. No family should have to worry: Are people going to believe us? Or, Will he get less than his proper due because the public’s patience has been wasted through so many premature reports?

  * Urbahn got more than that one message out before the president’s announcement; he got several. He wrote, of his own breaking news: “Don’t know if it’s true, but let’s pray it is” and “Ladies, gents, let’s wait to see what the President says. Could be misinformation or pure rumor.”

  * See Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion for a discussion of blogs’ premature and overblown coverage of the 2009–2010 Iranian revolution and the subsequent crackdown on activists and social media in Iran.

  XIX

  THE MYTH OF CORRECTIONS

  ITERATIVE JOURNALISM IS POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF A belief in the web’s ability to make corrections and updates to news stories. Fans of iterative journalism acknowledge that while increased speed may lead to mistakes, it’s okay because the errors can be fixed easily. They say that iterative journalism is individually weak but collectively strong, since the bloggers and readers are working together to improve each story—iteratively.

  As someone who has been both written about as a developing story and worked with people who are written about this way all the time, I can assure you that this is bullshit. Corrections online are a joke. All of the justifications for iterative journalism are not only false—they are literally the opposite of how it works in practice.

  Bloggers are no more eager to seek out feedback that shows they were wrong than anyone else is. And they are understandably reluctant to admit their mistakes publicly, as bloggers must do. The bigger the fuckup, the less likely people want to cop to it. It’s called “cognitive dissonance.” We’ve known about it for a while.

  Seeing something you know to be untrue presented in the news as true is exasperating. I don’t know what it feels like to be a public figure (I realize it’s hard to be sympathetic to their feelings), but I have had untruths spread about me online, and I know that it sucks. I know that as a press agent, having seen that many of these mistakes bloggers ma
ke are easily preventable, it is extra infuriating. And they feel absolutely no guilt about making them.

  If you want to get a blogger to correct something—which sensitive clients painfully insist upon—be prepared to have to be an obsequious douche. You’ve got to flatter bloggers into thinking that somehow the mistake wasn’t their fault. Or be prepared to be an asshole. Sometimes the resistance is so strong, and the entitlement so baked in, that you have to risk your friendly to each other’s face relationship by calling the blogger out to their publisher boss.

  Sometimes it has to get even more serious than that. One of my favorite all-time blogger corrections stories involves Matt Drudge, the political blogger sainted in the history of blogging for breaking the Monica Lewinsky story. But few people remember the big political “scandal” Drudge broke before that one. Based on an unnamed source, Drudge accused prominent journalist and Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal of a shocking history of spousal abuse—and one covered up by the White House, no less.

  Except none of it was true. Turns out there was no evidence that Blumenthal had ever struck his wife, nor was there a White House cover-up. The story quickly fell apart after it became clear an anonymous Republican source had whispered into Drudge’s ear to settle a political score against Blumenthal. Drudge eventually admitted it to the Washington Post: “[S]omeone was using me to try to go after [him]…. I think I’ve been had.”

  Yet Drudge’s posted correction on the story said only, “I am issuing a retraction of my information regarding Sidney Blumenthal that appeared in the Drudge Report on August 11, 1997.” He refused to apologize for the pain caused by his recklessness, even in the face of a $30 million libel suit. And four years later, when the ordeal finally ended, Drudge still defended iterative journalism: “The great thing about this medium I’m working in is that you can fix things fast.”1