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

  As off-putting as it is, that story seems quaint in light of the 2016 election. I’m not a Tim Pawlenty fan, but he was at least a legitimate politician who conceivably could have run for president. Donald Trump had “considered” a presidential run for as long as I have been alive. His subsequent election actually obscures the extent to which this was all a publicity stunt—clearly he was not too serious about politics or he might have spent at least a few months over thirty years trying to acquire a passing knowledge of policy. At the very least one assumes he might have said fewer dumb, unguarded things when there were microphones around. As late as 2012, he was still playing this publicity game, toying with running because it always made for good headlines. And what became of all this? Nothing. Because there was enough discretion, enough unity within the media that there was still some semblance of a line. Politics was at least partly serious business—and so was reporting the news.

  But by 2015, when Trump declared his candidacy once again, that was no longer true. He wouldn’t have actually run if he didn’t think things were different, if he didn’t at least subconsciously realize that his incendiary, provocative, and unpredictable personality would be traffic and attention gold online and offline. The man clearly sensed something that most politicians hadn’t yet realized: that the culture of Twitter, the economics of online content, had swallowed everything else in the world.

  There’s a famous twentieth-century political cartoon about the Associated Press, which 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 and social media as today’s newswires. They’re what poisoned the debate and the clarity of a nation of some 325 million people. They’re how we fell for one of the greatest cons in history.

  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 Media, Business Insider, Breit-bart, Politico, Vox, BuzzFeed, Vice, the Huffington Post, Medium, 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. Not only that, but their proselytizing founders, Nick Denton, Henry Blodget, Jonah Peretti, and Arianna Huffington, have an immense amount of influence as thought leaders. A blog isn’t small if its puny readership is made up of TV producers and writers for national newspapers. It doesn’t matter how many followers someone has if what they produce ends up going viral.

  Radio DJs and news anchors once filled their broadcasts with newspaper headlines; today they repeat what they read online—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.

  Think about it: Where do people find stuff today? They find it online. This is just as true for normal people as it is for the so-called gatekeepers. If something is being chatted about on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, it will make its way through all other forms of media and eventually into culture itself. That’s a fact.

  When I figured this out early in my career in public relations, I had a thought that only a naive and destructively ambitious twenty-something 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. Donald Trump did become president. 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 ruled over Politico literally almost ruled over everyone.

  To understand what makes blogs act—why Politico followed Pawlenty around, why the media ended up giving Trump something like $4.6 billion worth of free publicity—is the key to making them do what you want (or stopping this broken system). 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.” Today, a few election cycles later, Politico has three hundred employees. It has spawned countless competitors, some of whom are even bigger.

  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 may have failed, but for blogs and other media, it was a 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 journalists first covered Trump, they loved him because they thought he was a joke. They loved how he polarized the audience and how each crazy thing he said or did made for better headlines. Over time, he became a serious candidate—repeated, incessant media coverage can do that—and despite the supposed liberal bias of the media, they continued to shower him with attention. He was great for business.

  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, gravitating toward the absurd and controversial; election cycle star
ts earlier

  The person they cover, by virtue 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 2012 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.*

  And so another noncandidate was created, made real, and then taken out. Another one bit the dust so that blogs could fill their cycle. In some ways the reliability of this cycle—in which despite all the absurdity eventually a normal candidate would win out (be it Mitt Romney or whoever)—was the worst thing that could have happened to us. Because it meant we thought Trump would eventually lose. He’ll eventually come crashing back down to earth. Eventually people will see who he is. He can’t avoid this forever.

  Except none of that was true. That’s what happens when you feed the monster. It defies all expectations and rules.

  *See my column “Electile Dysfunction: Why the Media Turned a Foregone Conclusion into a Horse Race” in the New York Observer for a complete account of the 2012 election.

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

  *To paraphrase Budd Schulberg, from his memoir Moving Pictures: “It is not only a case of the tail wagging the dog, they were trying to take over the bark too.”

  II

  TRADING UP THE CHAIN: HOW TO TURN NOTHING INTO SOMETHING IN THREE WAY-TOO-EASY STEPS

  Some people in the press, I think, are just lazy as hell. There are times when I pitch a story and they do it word for word. That’s just embarrassing. They’re adjusting to a time that demands less quality and more quantity. And it works to my advantage most of the time, because I think most reporters have liked me packaging things for them. Most people will opt for what’s easier, so they can move on to the next thing. Reporters are measured by how often their stuff gets on Drudge. It’s a bad way to be, but it’s reality.

  —KURT BARDELLA, FORMER PRESS SECRETARY FOR REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN DARRELL ISSA

  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 every day.

  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 the strategy I helped lay out, 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 Boing Boing, 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.

  With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a half million views, and funded his project for the next two years. One exaggerated amateur video became a news story that was written about independently by dozens of outlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions. He had created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself. It went from nothing to something.

  This is not uncommon. Did you ever hear of the guy who created a company called Ship Your Enemies Glitter? He literally turned nothing into something. Drunk one night, he had a funny idea about sending envelopes of glitter to people—and charging for it. So he created a landing page and put it up on a site called ProductHunt.com, which features newly launched start-ups. From there, his “company” was featured in the Washington Post, Business Insider, the Huffington Post, the Verge, Time, and Fast Company. Almost instantly he took in almost twenty thousand dollars’ worth of orders, but because it was not a real company, he ended up selling the domain to another entrepreneur who wanted to take it to the next level . . . for eighty thousand dollars. Fake idea, real money.

  Before you get upset at us, remember: We were only doing what Lindsay Robertson, a blogger from Videogum, Jezebel, and New York magazine’s Vulture blog, taught us to do. In a post explaining to publicists how they could better game bloggers like herself, Lindsay advised focusing “on a lower traffic tier with the (correct) understanding that these days, content filters up as much as it filters down, and often the smaller sites, with their ability to dig deeper into the [I]nternet and be more nimble, act as farm teams for the larger ones.”1*

  This is not new either.

  Early-twentieth-century media critics were some of the first to describe how false news was easily propagated through the media system. A local newspaper would run an inaccurate item. With the advent of the telegraph, these stories could be and often were republished over the next week in newspapers across the country. As Max Sherover wrote in 1914 of newspapers, “The stories they have forwarded are obviously composed in large part of wild romancing. They snap up the most improbable reports and
enlarge upon them with every detail that their fancy can suggest.”

  A document from 1995 recently released by the Clinton archive shows that more modern political manipulators have also tried to use the lower rungs of online media to plant narratives or scandals. As the document explains,

  This is how the stream works: Well-funded right wing think tanks and individuals underwrite conservative newsletters and newspapers such as the Western Journalism Center, the American Spectator and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Next, the stories are reprinted on the internet where they are bounced into the mainstream media through one of two ways: 1) The story will be picked up by the British tabloids and covered as a major story, from which the American right-of-center mainstream media, (i.e. the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and New York Post) will then pick the story up; or 2) The story will be bounced directly from the internet to the right-of-center mainstream American media. After the mainstream right-of-center media covers the story, congressional committees will look into the story. After Congress looks into the story, the story now has the legitimacy to be covered by the remainder of the American mainstream press as a “real” story.

  The Clintons famously alleged a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and as self-serving and unreliable as the couple is, they weren’t totally wrong. They just didn’t mention that the left wing can and does use the same strategy. How else would one venture to explain the 2012 story that Republican South Carolina governor Nikki Haley would soon be indicted on tax fraud charges from work related to the Sikh Religious Society? Thanks to a defamation suit filed by the Sikh Religious Society, we know that the story got its start when a blogger tweeted about it, citing as his sources “two well placed legal experts” that turned out to be a local blog and a local television reporter. After the tweet, the story was picked up by the Daily Beast, Daily Caller, and Drudge Report.