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

  The cluster of stories that followed were read more than 500,000 times. The story was picked up by ABC News, the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, E!, Salon, and others. In a memo to his staff, Carmon’s boss and the publisher of Gawker, Nick Denton, commended the story for getting the kind of publicity that can’t be bought. Denton wrote, “It was widely circulated within the media, spawned several more discussions, and affirmed our status as both an influencer and a muckraker.” Jon Stewart was even forced to respond to the story on air. The New York Times rewarded Carmon and the website with a glowing profile: “A Web Site That’s Not Afraid to Pick a Fight.”2 Yeah—it’s easy to pick fights when you don’t plan to fight fair.

  For a writer like Carmon, whose pay is determined by the number of pageviews her posts receive, this was a home run. And for a publisher like Denton, the buzz the story generated made his company more attractive to advertisers and increased the valuation of his brand.

  That her story was a lie didn’t matter. That it was part of a pattern of manipulation didn’t matter.

  The women of The Daily Show published an open letter on the show’s website a few days after the story hit.3 Women accounted for some 40 percent of the staff, the letter read, from writers and producers to correspondents and interns, and had over a hundred years’ experience on the show among them. The letter was remarkable in its clarity and understanding of what the blogger was doing. They addressed it “Dear People Who Don’t Work Here” and called Carmon’s piece an “inadequately researched blog post” that clung “to a predetermined narrative about sexism at The Daily Show.”

  If I hadn’t experienced the exact situation myself, the letter would have made me hopeful that the truth would win out. But that’s not how it works online. The next day the New York Times ran an article about their response. “the daily show” women say the staff isn’t sexist, the headline blared.4

  Think about how bullshit that is: Because the Jezebel piece came first, the letter from the Daily Show women is shown merely as a response instead of the refutation that it actually was. No matter how convincing, it only reasserts, in America’s biggest newspaper, Carmon’s faulty claim of sexism on the show. They could never undo what they’d been accused of—no matter how spurious the accusation—they could only deny it. And denials don’t mean anything online.

  Kahane Cooperman, a female co–executive producer at the show, told the New York Times: “No one called us, no one talked to us. We felt like, we work here, we should take control of the narrative.” She didn’t know how it works. Jezebel controls the narrative. Carmon drummed it up; no one else had a right to it.

  The day after the story ran, but before the women of The Daily Show could respond, Carmon got another post out of the subject: “5 Unconvincing Excuses for Daily Show Sexism,” as she titled it—dismissing in advance the criticism leveled by some concerned and skeptical commenters. It was a preemptive strike to marginalize anyone who doubted her shaky accusations and to solidify her pageview-hungry version of reality.5

  In the titles of her first and second articles, you can see what she is doing. The Daily Show’s “Woman Problem” from her first post became their “Sexism” in her second. One headline bootstraps the next; the what-ifs of the first piece became the basis for the second. Her story proves itself.

  When the New York Times asked Carmon to respond to the women of The Daily Show’s claim that they were not interviewed or contacted for the story (which restated the allegations), she “refused to comment further.” Yet when The Daily Show supposedly invoked this right by not speaking to Carmon, it was evidence that they were hiding something. A double standard? Um, yes.

  Did Carmon update her piece to reflect the dozens of comments released by Daily Show women? Or at least give their response a fair shake? No, of course not. In a forty-word post (forty words!) she linked their statement with the tag “open letter” and whined that she just wished they’d spoken up when she was writing the story. She didn’t acknowledge the letter’s claim that they actually had tried to speak with her and danced over the fact that it’s her job to get their side of the story before publishing, even if that’s difficult or time-consuming.6

  How many Jezebel readers do you think threw out their original impression for a new one? Or even saw the update? The post making the accusation did 333,000 views. Her post showing the Daily Show women’s response did 10,000 views—3 percent of the impressions of the first shot.

  Did Carmon really send repeated requests for comment to The Daily Show? A major television show like that would get hundreds of requests a week. Whom did she contact? Did she provide time for them to respond? Or is it much more likely that she gave the show a cursory heads-up minutes before publication? In my experience, the answers to these questions are appalling. No wonder she wouldn’t explain her methods to the Times. All I have to go on is my personal history with Carmon, and it tells me that at every juncture she does whatever will benefit her most. I’ve seen the value she places on the truth—particularly if it gets in the way of a big story.

  There is something deeply twisted about an arrangement like this one. Carmon’s accusations received five times as many views as the post about the Daily Show women’s response, even though the latter undermines much of the former. There is something wrong with the way the writer is compensated for both pieces—as well as the third, fourth, or fifth she managed to squeeze out of the topic (again, more than 500,000 pageviews combined). Finally, there is something wrong with the fact that Denton’s sites benefit merely by going toe to toe with a cultural icon like Jon Stewart—even if their reports are later discredited. They know this; it’s why they do it.

  This is how it works online. A writer finds a narrative to advance that is profitable to them, or perhaps that they are personally or ideologically motivated to advance, and are able to thrust it into the national consciousness before anyone has a chance to bother checking if it’s true or not.

  Emily Gould, a former editor of Gawker, later wrote a piece for Slate entitled “How Feminist Blogs Like Jezebel Gin Up Page Views by Exploiting Women’s Worst Tendencies,” in which she explained the motivations behind such a story:

  It’s a prime example of the feminist blogosphere’s tendency to tap into the market force of what I’ve come to think of as “outrage world”—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like Jezebel and also, to a lesser degree, Slate’s own XX Factor and Salon’s Broadsheet. They’re ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism. These firestorms are great for page-view-pimping bloggy business.7

  Let me go a step further. Writers like Irin Carmon are driven more by shrewd self-interest and disdain for the consequences than they are by jealousy. It’s a pattern for Carmon, as we’ve seen. She’s not stopping, either.

  Just a few months later, needing to reproduce her previous success, she saw an opportunity for a similar story, about producer and director Judd Apatow. After spotting him at a party, she tried to recapture the same outrage that had propelled her Daily Show piece into the public consciousness by again accusing a well-liked public figure of something impossible to deny.

  The actual events of the evening: Director Judd Apatow attended a party hosted by a friend. Carmon attempted to corner and embarrass him for a story she wanted to write but failed. Yet in the world of blogging, this becomes the headline: judd apatow defends his record on female characters. It did about 35,000 views and a hundred comments.8

  Carmon tried to “get” him, and did. I guess I have to give her credit, because this time she actually talked to the person she hoped to make her scapegoat. But still, you can actually see, as it happens, her effort to trap Apatow with the same insinuations and controversy that she did with Stewart. In the interview, Carmon repeatedly presented personal criticism of Apatow’s movies as generally accept
ed fact that she was merely the conduit for, referring to his “critics” as though she weren’t speaking for herself.

  From the interview:

  Q: So you think that’s unfair that you’ve gotten that criticism?

  A: Oh, I definitely think that it’s unfair. . . . But that’s okay.

  Q: I wonder if you could elaborate on your defense a little bit.

  A: I’m not defensive about it.

  Q: Do the conversation and the criticism change the way you work?

  A: I don’t hear any of the criticism when I test the movies and talk to thousands of people. I think the people who talk about these things on the internet are looking to stir things up to make for interesting reading, but when you make movies, thousands of people fill out cards telling you their intimate feelings about the movies, and those criticisms never came up, ever, on any of the movies.

  In other words, there is nothing to any of her claims. But the post went up anyway. And she got paid just the same. Notoriety from events of 2010 and 2011 translated into a staff position at Salon and a spot on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list for Carmon. Now she’s a regular on MSNBC. It all worked out very nicely for her.*

  HOW ONE SIDE LEARNS FROM THE OTHER

  In recent years, political groups of all kinds have picked up this play-book and run with it. Look at how the Right was able to make Hillary Clinton’s health a topic of conversation during the campaign. Look at how they were able to make her e-mails and the Clinton Foundation appear to be major issues. Look at Pizzagate, the alt-right claim that the Democrats and Clinton were somehow associated with a mysterious, international child sex-trafficking ring that was being run out of a D.C. pizza restaurant. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones—whose fans are just as rabid as Jezebel’s (if only a bit crazier)—were able to repeatedly ask the same paranoid questions, make enough accusations, and eventually get enough mainstream media attention that some people began to think it was real.

  The tactic has come to be called “concern trolling”—acting like you’re upset and offended in order to exploit the ethics and empathy of your opponent. For instance, in 2017 a New York Times reporter replied to tweets rapper Bow Wow made about supposedly pimping out the First Lady by joking that “the outrage from @BreitbarkNews is going to be through the woof.”* Trolls sprang into action, pretending like they were offended that a reporter would joke about sex slavery. And encourage “rape culture.” Of course, the reporter had done no such thing and, more important, the trolls are precisely the kind of people who reject that there even is such a thing as rape culture. Yet they cleverly managed to direct enough faux concern that the ombudsman for the New York Times replied and reprimanded the writer. Far enough down the line, it seemed like the reporter really had said something ill advised and that people really were upset. Except they weren’t.

  The diabolicalness of this strategy is this: How were the people on the other side of these scandals supposed to respond? They were fighting against someone who wasn’t fighting fair. Talking about it only gave the flimsy charges more airtime. Arguing that the other side wasn’t actually offended sounds like an excuse. It was an impossible, brilliant kind of gaslighting. It was so effective and relentless that in the case of Pizzagate, a real person with a real assault rifle entered that pizza restaurant to “investigate” and fired real bullets into it.

  I’m not trying to make a political point here. Whoever is doing it—Right or Left—it sucks. Even if Irin’s intentions had been good—even if she’d really thought she was making a difference—

  I want you to see where this kind of outrage manufacturing has left us. The manipulators are indistinguishable from the publishers and bloggers. While it used to be that progressives pulled the media strings, it’s clear the Right has begun to figure it out as well. That hasn’t balanced things out—it’s only made the truth harder to know. We’re awash in manipulation and manipulators. If you don’t believe me, keep reading.

  *After an excerpt of this chapter ran on BoingBoing.com, Irin posted a response on Salon, titled “Did I Ruin Journalism?” It’s (as you’ve probably guessed) a mostly self-centered and self-serving article filled with all sorts of rationalizations about her behavior that never challenge my core accusation: that she was motivated to attack high-profile targets with flimsy accusations because that’s the business model of blogging. Tucker e-mailed me when he saw this link and gave me some good advice: “She’s a legit idiot. You won, move on.”

  *More on Breitbart in the next chapter.

  XIV

  THERE A RE OTHERS

  THE MANIPUL ATOR HALL OF FAME

  We are the tools of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance.

  —JOHN SWINTON, JOURNALIST, NEW YORK SUN (1880)

  SOMETIMES ONLY A M A NIPUL ATOR CA N SPOT another manipulator’s work. In figuring out how to exploit the incentives of blogs, I discovered something pretty stunning: I wasn’t the only one. But where I felt I worked for companies doing good things (selling great books, selling clothes made in America), others wielded influence and power over national debates. They changed politics and upended people’s lives.

  Remember Shirley Sherrod, the black woman who lost her job as a rural director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture after a video of her purportedly making a racist speech surfaced online? Behind it was a manipulator—a political manipulator selling (backward) ideas using the same tactics that people like me used to sell products.

  This video caused a national shitstorm. Within hours it had gone from one blog to dozens of blogs to cable news websites, and then to the newspapers and back again.* Sherrod was forced to resign shortly after. The man who posted that video was the late Andrew Breitbart.

  Of course we now know Sherrod is not a racist. In fact, the speech she was giving was about how not to be racist. But the bloggers and reporters who repeated the story were chasing a sensational story, reporting in real time, using only the limited material they had been given by Breitbart. And each report became more extreme and confident than the last—despite the lack of any new evidence to support their stories.

  It was an embarrassing moment in modern politics (which says a lot). The fiasco ended with then-President Obama denouncing his own administration’s premature rush to judgment and apologizing personally to Sherrod. He lamented to Good Morning America: “We now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.”

  Breitbart was the master of making people scramble. Whenever I need to understand the mind of blogging, I try to picture Andrew Breitbart sitting down at his computer to edit and publish that video. Because he was not a racist either. Nor was he the partisan kook the Left mistook him for. He was a media manipulator just like me. He understood and embodied the economics of the web better than anyone. And in some ways I envy him, because he was able to do it without the guilt that drove me to write this book.

  Breitbart was the first employee of the Drudge Report and a founding employee of the Huffington Post. He helped build the dominant conservative and liberal blogs. He wasn’t simply an ideologue; he was an expert on what spreads—a provocateur.

  From his perspective, the wide discrediting of his Sherrod video was not a failure. Not even close. The Sherrod story put him and his blog on the lips—in anger and in awe—of nearly every media outlet in the country. Sherrod was just collateral damage. The political machine was a plaything for Breitbart, and he made it do just what he wanted (dance and give him attention). He’d never confess as much, so I’ll do it for him.

  Breitbart teed up the story perfectly. By splitting the edited Sherrod clip into two pieces (two minutes, thirty seconds, and one minute, six seconds, respectively), he made it quick to consume and easy for bloggers to watch and republish. Since the unedited clip is forty-three minutes long, it was doubtful anyone would sit through the whole thing to rain on his parade. The post was titled “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism,�
� and he spent most of his thirteen hundred words fighting the imaginary foil of efforts to suppress the Tea Party, instead of explaining where the video came from.

  For all the complaints from blogs, cable channels, and newspapers about being misled, Breitbart had actually given them a highly profitable gift. In getting to report on his accusations, and then the reversal, and then the discussion “about the Breitbart/Sherrod controversy,” news outlets actually got three major stories instead of one. Most stories last only a few minutes, but the Sherrod controversy lasted nearly a week. It’s still good for follow-ups today. Better than anyone, Breitbart understood that the media doesn’t mind being played, because they get something out of it—namely, pageviews, ratings, and readers.

  Breitbart, who died suddenly of heart failure in early 2012, might not be with us any longer, but it hardly matters. As he once said, “Feeding the media is like training a dog. You can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns.” Breitbart did plenty of training in his short time on the scene. Today one of the dog’s masters is gone, sure, but the dog still responds to the same commands.

  THE MASTER AND HIS PROTÉGÉS

  A system can tolerate a few bad actors. The problem is when those bad actors spawn replicants, and that is sadly the case with Breit-bart. Not only has Breitbart News managed to survive Breitbart’s passing, but the site is arguably stronger than ever—in fact, the site’s publisher, Steve Bannon, became a top adviser to Donald Trump. Breitbart’s fingerprints were all over the 2016 election, smudging the truth until it became impossible to see.

  Aside from Steve Bannon, the legacy of Breitbart lives on in a number of younger media manipulators like James O’Keefe and Charles Johnson. Take the young O’Keefe, who was mentored and funded by Breitbart early on (and later had some of his legal bills picked up by Trump supporters). O’Keefe is responsible for several stories nearly as big as the Sherrod piece. He posed as a pimp in a set of undercover videos that supposedly show the now-defunct community activist group ACORN giving advice to the “pimp” on how to avoid paying taxes. He recorded NPR seemingly showing its willingness to conceal the source of a large donation from a Muslim group. Once he even planned a bizarre attempt to seduce an attractive CNN correspondent on camera in order to embarrass the station.