Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (28 page)

LEARNING FROM BOTH

Andrew Breitbart did eventually issue a correction for the widely disproved Sherrod story. At the top of the article:

Correction:
While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured in the first video featured in this post while she held a federally appointed position, the story she tells refers to actions she took before she held that federal position.

A bullshit correction, to say the least.

Sherrod’s attempt to clear her name and later to sue Breitbart for libel and slander were just other chances for him to bluster. The press release Breitbart issued was an exercise in defiant misdirection: “Andrew Brietbart on Pigford Lawsuit: ‘Bring It On.’” It’s exactly what I would have advised him to do if he’d asked me—in fact, I’ve basically done the exact same thing, only I was a bit more vulgar. Remember, I’m the guy who put out a press release with the headline: “Tucker Max Responds to CTA Decision: ‘Blow Me.’”

I did that because the best way to make your critics work for you is to make them irrationally angry. Blinded with rage or indignation, they spread your message to every ear and media outlet they can find. Breitbart telling his haters to bring it on certainly accomplished this, as did completely side-stepping the Sherrod issue and pretending this was some giant political conspiracy about reparations for slavery. In refusing to acknowledge, even in the slightest, that she may have been innocent of everything he accused her of, Breitbart played it like an old pro.

If you can put aside the unfortunate fate that befell Sherrod, you can see what masterful music Breitbart and O’Keefe are able to play on the instruments of online media. When they sit down to publish on their blogs, they are not simply political extremists but ruthless seekers of attention. From this attention comes fame and profit—a platform for bestselling books, lucrative speaking and consulting gigs, donations, and millions of dollars in online advertising revenue.

Some of you may be able to ignore the morality of it. I wasn’t. Not anymore. I can’t forget that Sherrod, as a randomly selected target, suffered deeply. And that well-meaning employees at various nonprofits lost their jobs after being framed by O’Keefe. I can’t
not
focus on that.

Those people are the casualties of a media system defined by what spreads—wholly at the mercy of fraud, exaggeration, stunts, and a thousand subtle felonies against the truth.

*
According to Media Matters for America,
FoxNews.com
and the blog
Gateway Pundit
picked the story up first, followed within minutes by
Hot Air
and dozens of other blogs (most of which embedded the YouTube video and repeated the “racist” claim). The first television station to repeat the story, later that day, was a CBS affiliate in New York City. Next came the
Drudge Report
, followed by lead stories on nearly every nighttime cable news show and then morning show in the country. You could say it traded up the chain perfectly.

XV

CUTE BUT EVIL

ONLINE ENTERTAINMENT TACTICS THAT DRUG YOU AND ME

YOU SIT DOWN TO YOUR COMPUTER TO WORK. FIVE minutes later you’re on your fifth YouTube video of talking babies. What happened? Do you just not have any self-control? Sorry, but self-control has got nothing to do with it. Not when the clip was deliberately made more attractive by subliminally embedded images guaranteed to catch your attention. Not when the length of the video was calibrated to be precisely as long as average viewers are statistically most likely to watch.

Would you also be surprised to hear that the content of the video was designed around popular search terms? And that the title went through multiple iterations to see which got the most clicks? And what if the video you watch after this one (and the one after that and after that) had been recommended and optimized by YouTube with the deliberate intention of making online video take up as much time in your life as television does?
¹

No wonder you can’t get any work done. They won’t let you.

The key, as megawatt liberal blogger Matt Yglesias advised when interviewed for the book
Making It in the Political Blogosphere
, is to keep readers addicted: “The idea is to discourage people from drifting away. If you give them a break, they might find that there’s something else that’s just as good, and they might go away.”

We once naively believed that blogs would be a boon to democracy. Unlike TV, the web wasn’t about passive consumption. Blogs were about engagement and citizen activism. Blogs looked like they would free us from a crummy media world of bias, conflict, manipulation, and sensationalism. But as James Fennimore Cooper presciently observed in the nineteenth century, “If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.”

Tyranny is an understatement for the media today. Those between the ages of eight and eighteen are online roughly eight hours a day, a figure that does not include texting or television. America spends more than fifty billion minutes a day on Facebook, and nearly a quarter of all Internet browsing time is spent on social media sites and blogs. In a given month, blogs stream something like 150 million video streams to their users. So of course there is mass submission and apathy—everyone is distracted, deliberately so.
²

The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. Everything you consume online has been “optimized” to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found—like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you. Blogs are out to game you—to steal your time from you and sell it to advertisers—and they do this every day.

THE ART OF THUMBNAIL CHEATING

You see a link to a video in a YouTube search that makes it look like a hot girl is in it, so you click. You watch, but she’s nowhere to be found. Welcome to the art of “thumbnail cheating.” It’s a common tactic YouTube publishers use to make their videos more tantalizing than the competition.

The most common play is to use a girl, preferably one who looks like she might get naked, but it can be anything from a kitten to a photo of someone famous. Anything to give the clip an edge. Some of the biggest accounts on YouTube were built this way. The technique can drive thousands or even tens of thousands of views to a video, helping it chart on most viewed lists and allowing it to spread and be recommended.

Online video publishers do this with YouTube’s consent. Originally, YouTube chose a video thumbnail from the ½, ¼, or ¾ points of the video. So smart manipulators simply inserted a single frame of a sexy image at exactly one of those points in order to draw clicks. Members of the YouTube Partner Program—the people who get paid for their contributions to YouTube through ad revenue and make millions for the company—are allowed to use
any
image they choose as their thumbnail, even images that don’t ever appear in the video. Sure, YouTube asks that the image be “representative” but if they were actually serious about quashing profitable trickery, why allow the practice at all?