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

by Ryan Holiday

  When you see “We’ve reached out to So-and-So for comment” know that they sent an e-mail two minutes before hitting “publish” at 4:00 A.M., long after they’d written the story and closed their mind, making absolutely no effort to get to the truth before passing it off to you as the news.

  When you see an attributed quote or a “said So-and-So” know that the blogger didn’t actually talk to that person but probably just stole the quote from somewhere else, and per the rules of the link economy, they can claim it as their own so long as there is a tiny link to the original buried in the post somewhere.

  When you see “which means” or “meaning that” or “will result in” or any other kind of interpretation or analysis know that the blogger who did it likely has absolutely zero training or expertise in the field they are opining about. Nor did they have the time or motivation to learn. Nor do they mind being wildly, wildly off the mark, because there aren’t any consequences.

  When you hear a friend say in conversation “I was reading that …” know that today the sad fact is that they probably just glanced at something on a blog.

  RELYING ON ABANDONED SHELLS

  The process for finding, creating, and consuming information has fundamentally changed with the advent of the web and the rise of blogging. However, the standards for what constitutes news are different, the vigor with which such information is vetted is different, the tone with which this news is conveyed is different, and the longevity of its value is different. Yet, almost without exception, the words we use to describe the news and the importance readers place on them remains the same.

  In a world of no context and no standard, the connotations of the past retain their power, even if those things are fractions of what they once were. Blogs, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, left everything standing but cunningly emptied them of significance.

  Words like developing, exclusive, and sources are incongruent with our long-held assumptions about what they mean or what’s behind them. Bloggers use these “substance words” (like Wikipedia’s weasel words) to give status to their flimsy stories. They use the language of Woodward and Bernstein but apply it to a media world that would make even Hearst queasy. They us what George W. S. Trow called “abandoned shells.”

  Why does this matter? We’ve been taught to believe what we read. That where there is smoke there must be fire, and that if someone takes the time to write down and publish something, they believe in what they are saying. The wisdom behind those beliefs is no longer true, yet the public marches on, armed with rules of thumb that make them targets for manipulation rather than protection.

  I have taken advantage of that naïveté. And I’m not even the worst of the bunch. I’m no different than everyone else; I too am constantly tricked—by bloggers, by publishers, by politicians, and by marketers. I’m even tricked by my own monstrous creations.

  THE AGE OF NO AUTHORITIES

  And so fictions pass as realities. Everyone is selling and conning, and we hardly even know it. Our emotions are being triggered by simulations—unintentional or deliberate misrepresentations—of cues we’ve been taught were important. We read some story and it feels important, believing that the news is real and the principles of reporting took place, but it’s not.

  Picture a movie poster for an independent film that wants to be received as artistic and deep. It probably features the laurel leaves icon—for awards like “Best Picture,” “Critic’s Choice,” or “Official Selection.” These markers originally symbolized a handful of important film festivals. Then it became important for every city, even neighborhoods inside cities, to have their own film festival. There also the significant differences in the “winners” and the few dozen or even hundreds of “selections.” The use of the festival laurels is to conjure up the implicit value associated with scarcity for the viewer despite the enormous gap between the connotation and the reality.

  The laurel leaf illusion is a metaphor for the web. It underpins everything from the link economy—a link looks like a citation, yet it is not—to headlines that bait our clicks. It’s why trading up the chain works and it’s the reason why you could get your name in the press tomorrow through HARO.

  What these people are trying to do is to find some, any, stamp of approval or signal of credibility. Blogs have a few minutes to write their posts, few resources, and little support, but because of the One-Off Problem they need to be heard over thousands of other sites. They desperately need something that says “this is not like those other things” even though it is. So they make up differentiators and misuse old ones.

  “In the age of no-authority” wrote Trow, “these are the authorities.”

  We live in a media world that desperately needs context and authority but can’t find any because we destroyed the old markers and haven’t created reliable new ones. As a result, we couch new things in old terms that are really just husks of what they once were. Skepticism will never be enough to combat this. Not even enough to be a starting point.

  It is now almost cliché for people to say, “if the news is important, it will find me.” This belief itself relies on abandoned shells. It depends on the assumption that the important news will break through the noise while the trivial will be lost. It could not be more wrong. As I discovered in my media manipulations, the information that finds us online—what spreads—is the worst kind. It raised itself above the din not through its value, importance, or accuracy but through the opposite, through slickness, titillation, and polarity.

  I made a lot of money and had a great time playing with the words that make up the news. I exploited the laziness behind the news and people’s reading habits. But from the abuse of abandoned shells came another one.

  Our knowledge and understanding is the final empty, hollow shell. What we think we know turns out to be based on nothing, or worse than nothing—misdirection and embellishment. Our facts aren’t fact, they are opinions dressed up like facts. Our opinions aren’t opinions; they are emotions that feel like opinions. Our information isn’t information; it’s just hastily assembled symbols.

  There is no way that is a good thing, no matter how much I gained from it personally.

  CONCLUSION

  SO…WHERE TO FROM HERE?

  I WISH I COULD TELL YOU THAT THE QUOTE I’M ABOUT to give you is from some courageous new media critic. I wish I could point to it and say, See, someone gets it. We’re going to be OK. Hell, I wish I’d said it.

  Fake news. I don’t mean fake news in the Fox News sense. I mean the fake news that clogs up most newspapers and most news websites, for that matter. The new initiative will go nowhere. The new policy isn’t new at all…. The product isn’t revolutionary. And journalists pretend that these official statements and company press releases actually constitute news…. Fake news, manufactured, hyped, rehashed, retracted—until at the end of the week you know no more than at the beginning. You really might as well wait for a weekly like the Economist to tell you what the net position is at the end of the week.1

  I was hoping to be able to go out on a hopeful note. But I’m not able do that. Because the person who said it is Nick Denton, one of the biggest topics of this book.

  In an interview with The Atlantic magazine, Denton claimed he was on a “jihad” inside Gawker “against fake news.” It’s an irony almost too much to bear, from him or from virtually all other bloggers. It’s like Kim Kardashian complaining about how fake reality TV shows are. Not that there is any question about a media jihad. As I have shown in this book, there is one, only it is a war with you, against you. It’s me against them, against you. By proxy we fight countless battles for your attention, and we’ll go to any length to get it.

  The result is a loop of incentives that cannot be escaped.

  More than twenty-five years ago, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that the needs of television, then our culture’s chief mode of communicating ideas, had come to determine the very culture it was supposed to represent. The partic
ular way that television stages the world, he wrote, becomes the model for how the world itself is to be staged.

  Entertainment powered television, and so everything that television touched—from war to politics to art—would inevitably be turned into entertainment. TV had to create a fake world to fit its needs, and we, the audience, watched that fake world on TV, imitated it, and it became the new reality in which we lived. The dominant cultural medium, Postman understood, determines culture itself.

  Well, television is no longer the main stage of culture. The Internet is. Blogs are. YouTube is. Twitter is. And their demands control our culture exactly as television once did. Only the Internet worships a different god: Traffic. It lives and dies by clicks, because that’s what drives ad revenue and influence. The central question for the Internet is not, Is this entertaining? but, Will this get attention? Will it spread?

  You’ve seen the economics behind the spread of news online. It’s not a pretty picture (although if it was, it’d be a slideshow). Rather than turn the world into entertainment, these forces reduce it to conflict, controversy, and crap. Blogs have no choice but to turn the world against itself for a few more pageviews, turning you against the world, so you’ll read them. They produce a web of mis-, dis-, and un-information so complete that few people—even the system’s purveyors—are able to tell fact from fiction, rumor from reality. This is what makes it possible for manipulators like me to make our living.

  What does it mean when Nick Denton, the innovator behind nearly every trend that has come to define blogging today—the man who fed and raised the monster more than anyone—can’t stand the final product? What does it mean when he doesn’t realize that his sites created the very market for fake news he claims to hate?

  I guess it brings us full circle. He is unhappy. I am unhappy—both with the system and my own role in it. We’re right back to where we started, and now we have another chance to decide how the story ends. Only this time you should be involved, now that you know how the media works.

  I could have confessed a thousand more violations, felonies I have committed against a media system that practically invited me to perpetrate them. But what I have disclosed is more than enough to show you what goes on behind the scenes and the sickening secrets by which blogs and their millionaire publishers operate. There is more, and the appalling splendor only gets more stunning the deeper you dig.

  Bloggers lie, distort, and attack because it is in their interest to do so. The medium believes it is giving the people what they want when it simplifies, sensationalizes, and panders. This creates countless opportunities for manipulation and influence. I now know what the cumulative effect of this manipulation is: Its effect is unreality. Surrounded by illusions, we lash out at our fellow man for his very humanness, congratulate ourselves as a cover for apathy, and confuse advertising with art. Reality. Our lives. Knowing what is important. Information. These have been the causalities.

  My mission was to rip back the curtain and expose a problem that thus far everyone else has been too intimidated or self-interested to discuss openly: Our dominant cultural medium—the web—is hopelessly broken. I did so at considerable risk to my own livelihood and reputation. Despite those costs, I intended to make it impossible for you to read this book and conclude anything other than this: All aspects of our society suffer because of these economics.

  I wish there was an easy solution to all of it. It would help me answer my critics and the defensive bloggers who will invariably whine: Well, what are we supposed to do about it? Or, Okay, wise guy, tell us how to fix it. Well, I don’t know the answer, and I don’t put any stock in that kind of chatter. My job was to prove that something was massively, massively wrong and to come clean about my role in it. To prove that we’ve all been feeding the monster. What exactly to do about it will be the work of those who come after me.

  If I saw bright spots or green sprouts, I would have pointed them out. If there were solutions, I would give them to you. But currently I don’t see any. In fact, I object to using the word “solution” at all. To seek a solution implies and confirms that this problem needs to even exist. It takes for granted the bad assumptions at the root of blogs—assumptions that are deeply mistaken.

  Take the frantic chase for pageviews, for example. This wrongly assumes that the traffic blogs generates is worth anything. It isn’t. Sites sell only a fraction of their inventory each month, essentially giving the rest away for pennies, yet they attempt to grow their traffic above all else. As I write this the TMZ.com tab in my browser has refreshed dozens of times even though I have not looked at it in nearly an hour. Many sites do this: Drudge Report, Huffington Post, Search Engine Journal, and so on. Free pageviews! The advertisers who paid for those impressions were robbed, and the blogs that charged for them are no more than crooks.

  Meanwhile, smaller sites that have built core audiences on trust and loyalty sell out their ad space months in advance. They have less total inventory, but they sell all of theirs at higher prices and are more profitable, sustainable businesses. Blogs scramble for a few thousand extra pageviews, and manipulate their readers to do so, because they value the wrong metrics and the wrong revenue stream. They follow short-term and short-sighted incentives.

  But incentives can be changed, just as the New York Times showed in switching from the one-off to a subscription model under Adolph Ochs. In order to survive as a quality publication, the New York Times is redefining its economics once again. The recent implementation of their controversial pay wall (which limits readers to twenty free articles a month before requiring them to pay for more access) is a lesson in great incentives. According to economist Tyler Cowen, it means that “the new NYT incentive is to have more than twenty must-read articles each month.”2 How absurd that under the current model—the one that most publishers are sticking with and believe in—there is no imperative to produce these must-read articles, only must-clicks.

  As Ed Wallace, the BusinessWeek writer, reminds us: “The first job of the journalist is to ask, ‘Is this information true?’” Bloggers refuse to accept this mantle. Instead of getting us the truth, they focus on one thing, and one thing only: getting their publisher pageviews. I don’t care that finding the truth can be expensive, that iterative news is faster, or that it’s too hard not to play the pageview game. Find another business if you don’t like it. Because your professional’s true purpose is to serve the best interests of your readers—doing anything else is to misread your own long-term interests. Advertisers pay you to get to readers, so screwing the readers is a bad idea.

  Readers hold equally exhausting assumptions of their own. The current system of delegated trust and deferred responsibility exists because readers have tacitly accepted the burden that blogs have abdicated. We’ve assumed it was our duty to sort through the muck and garbage to find the occasional gem, to do their fact-checking for them, to correct their mistakes and call ourselves contributors, when actually we’re cogs. We never asked the critical question: If we have to do all the work, what are we paying you guys for?

  When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information? Most readers have abandoned even pretending to consider this. I imagine it’s because they’re afraid of the answer: There isn’t a thing we can do with it. There is no practical purpose in our lives for most of what blogs produce other than distraction. When readers decide to start demanding quality over quantity, the economics of Internet content will change. Manipulation and marketing will immediately become more difficult.

  It took me a long time to get to this point, but I know that I am a large part of the problem as well. Nobody forced me to do what I did. I was a bad actor, and I created many of the loopholes I now criticize. Both I and my clients profited greatly from the manipulations I confessed here: Millions of books were sold, celebrity was created, and brands were reinvigorated and built. But we also paid very heavily for those gains with currency like dignity, respe
ct, and trust. Deep down I suspect that the losses may not have been worth the cost. Marketers need to understand this. Social media is an industry that now employs thousands of people, and you may just be starting out in it. All I will say is that if you chase the kind of attention I chased, and use the tactics I have used, there will be blowback. Consider that seriously.

  As a society, we don’t need to submit to the rule of an abusive media system, as though those who control it are in charge and not us or our laws. In other countries, libel and defamation laws require a “conspicuous retraction” by the publisher if proven. A lame update at the bottom of a blog wouldn’t cut it there and shouldn’t cut it anymore anywhere. Colonial newspapers at various points in British history were required to post a security bond in order to enter the publishing business. It was intended to secure payments in the event of a libel action and to ensure some responsibility by the press. It gave the public (and the state) some recourse against publishers who often had few assets to pay for the damage they could potentially inflict. There is precedent for these types of protections—which blogs show us we desperately need once again. We have simply forgotten about them.

  We must rid ourselves of the false beliefs that caused so much of this. Publicity does not come easily, profits do not come easily, and knowledge does not come easily. The delusion that they could was what fed the monster most heartily. It is what propelled us past so many of the warning signs that this was simply not working.

  You cannot have your news instantly and have it done well. You cannot have your news reduced to 140 characters or less without losing large parts of it. You cannot manipulate the news but not expect it to be manipulated against you. You cannot have your news for free; you can only obscure the costs. If, as a culture, we can learn this lesson, and if we can learn to love the hard work, we will save ourselves much trouble and collateral damage. We must remember: There is no easy way.