Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (30 page)

It came to a head when a reporter at CNN—the top of the news chain—contacted me, because they had watched the story develop and wanted to report on it.

This was our e-mail exchange (edited only for formatting and length):

To: Ryan Holiday

From: CNN

CNN is covering the story about you and your possible hiring practices reported by
gawker.com
. Would you be able to answer the accusations on CNN this Saturday evening either in the 5pm or 7pm hour?

The key bullshit word here is “possible” placed right before “hiring practices.” Obviously the reporter believed these were the actual hiring practices or they wouldn’t be doing a story. But since CNN couldn’t report on just rumors, they wanted to make it a story by getting me to deny it. I knew this was an attempt to pretend there were two sides to the issue. But there weren’t two sides; there was simply the truth and an untruth.

To appeal to the reporter’s sanity and expose how this story had been traded up the chain, I responded with the following e-mail, after passing along the company’s official statement:

To: CNN

From: Ryan Holiday

Hopefully you can tell from our statement that the Gawker report is probably misconstrued at best, possibly inaccurate in other areas. It’s important to point out that the verification and anonymous sourcing politics for blogs and the one that you surely have at CNN are very different and can’t be conflated.

It’s unfair and inaccurate to hold this up as being something the company engaged in primarily based on the fact that another less rigorous outlet mentioned it first. What we attempted to say in the statement was that as a company who has always challenged beauty and diversity norms in the fashion industry—not quietly but as the central part of our creativity—accusations like that are not only unfounded but are contrary to what we’re committed to. What I was attempting to convey in my original emails is that in the past outlets have used the vehicle of “reporting on what _____ is reporting” to include information they likely wouldn’t have included through their own editorial standards. Hopefully CNN does not do that.

After a long pause, the reply:

To: Ryan Holiday

From: CNN

Subject: CNN no longer doing Gawker story segment

After a lot of consideration we decided to no longer do the segment.

Though I narrowly dodged a bullet with CNN, it was during this incident that I began to understand the web’s sourcing problems from a new perspective. A dubious accusation on a gossip blog nearly became a frighteningly
nongossip
story from the “most trusted name in news.” There had been no overt manipulation, yet something completely untrue had spread from one site to another as though some invisible hand had guided it along. Thankfully, it did not make it to air on CNN, but it could have had I not stepped in.

Henry Blodget, in a revealing onstage interview with reporter Andrew Sorkin, explained the increasingly common cycle like this: “There are stories that will appear on Gawker Media—huge conversations in the blogosphere—everything else. It’s passed all over. Everyone knows about it. Everybody’s clicking on it. Then, finally, an approved source speaks to the
New York Times
or somebody else, and the
New York Times
will suddenly say, ‘Okay now we can report that.’”

This is exactly what happened with the near CNN and
Gawker
debacle. A story that originated on
Gawker
as a controversy was the center of an enormous amount of buzz online. It then grew and grew as it spread from site to site, until the buzz was noticed by CNN, which tried to get me to discuss the story with them on air. CNN, of course, would never have been able to break the story themselves, nor would they have been interested in bothering with something so small as a manager’s anonymous e-mail. But if someone else made it a hot topic first, they were happy to do their own piece on it. It’s the same tactic I abuse when I turn nothing into something. Get a small blog to pick a story up and pass it upward to bigger and more credible outlets, which simply link to the previous report and don’t bother to verify it.

Both the blogs and the mainstream media are shirking their duty—and that makes them ripe for exploitation (or in the case of American Apparel and CNN, a missile that can strike your company at any time). And yet most of the social media elite want this for our future.

THE DELEGATION OF TRUST

This cycle has roots in two journalistic habits—one from the new media world and one from the old. When combined, they become a major danger.

Reporters can hardly be everywhere at once. For most of recent history, media outlets all used the same self-imposed editorial guidelines, so relying on one another’s work was natural. When a fact appeared in the
Chicago Tribune
, it is pretty safe for the
San Francisco Chronicle
to repeat that same fact, since both publications have high verification standards.

These were the old rules:

1. If the outlet is legitimate, the stories it breaks are.

2. If the story is legitimate, the facts inside it are.

3. It can be assumed that if the subject of the story is legitimate, then what people are saying about it probably is too.

These rules allow one journalist to use the facts brought forth by another, hopefully with attribution. This assumption makes researching much easier for reporters, since they can build on the work of those who came before them, instead of starting from the beginning of a story. It’s a process known as the “delegation of trust.”
¹

The web has its own innovation on the delegation of trust, known as “link economy.” Basically it refers to the exchange of traffic and information between blogs and websites. Say the
Los Angeles Times
reports that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are splitting up. Perez Hilton would link to this report on his blog and add his own thoughts. Then other blogs would link to Perez’s account and maybe the original
Times
source as well. This is an outgrowth from the early days of blogging, when blogs lacked the resources to do much original reporting. They relied on other outlets to break stories, which they then linked to and provided commentary on. From this came what is called the link economy, one that encouraged sites to regularly and consistently link to each other. I send you a link now, you send me a link later—we trade off doing the job of reporting.

The phrase “link economy” was popularized by Jeff Jarvis, who you met here earlier. His credentials as a blogger, journalism professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, and author of books such as
What Would Google Do?
have made him incredibly influential. Unfortunately, he’s also an idiot, and the link economy he advocates is a breeding ground for manipulation.

The link economy encourages blogs to point their readers to other bloggers who are saying crazy things, to borrow from each other without verification, and to take more or less completed stories from other sites, add a layer of commentary, and turn it into something they call their own. To borrow a term from computer science, the link economy is recursive—blogs pull from the blogs that came before them to create new content. Think of how a mash-up video relies on other clips to make something new, or how Twitter users retweet messages from other members and add to them.

But as the trading up the chain scam makes it clear, the media is no longer governed by a set of universal editorial and ethics standards. Even within publications, the burden of proof for the print version of a newspaper might differ drastically from what reporters need to go live with a blog post. As media outlets grapple with tighter deadlines and smaller staffs, many of the old standards for verification, confirmation, and fact-checking are becoming impossible to maintain. Every blog has its own editorial policy, but few disclose it to readers. The material one site pulls from another can hardly be trusted when it’s just as likely to have been written with low standards as with high ones.

The conditions on which the delegation of trust and the link economy need to operate properly no longer exist. But the habits remain and have been mixed into a potent combination. The result is often embarrassing and contagious misinformation.

Like the time when
Crain’s New York
e-mailed me to ask if American Apparel would be closing any of its stores in Manhattan because of the financial crisis. No, I replied emphatically.
No
. So they found a real estate agent who didn’t work for American Apparel to say we might. Headline: “American Apparel likely to shed some NY stores” (even though my quote in the article said we wouldn’t). The
Crain’s
story was linked to and used as a source by
Jezebel,
and then by
New York
magazine’s
The Cut
blog, then by
Racked NY.
AOL’s
Daily Finance
blog turned it into a slideshow: “10 Leading Businesses Shuttering Stores Because of Downturn.” None of those sites needed to ask me any questions, since
Crain’s
had asked and answered for them—they could just link.
*
A week later, for unknown reasons,
Crain’s
republished the article under a new headline (“Unraveling American Apparel Could Put NYC Stores on the Block”), which, after showing up on Google Finance, started the same chain over again.
²

More than a year later every one of those stores is still open. The links still point to the same bad story.

A few years back a young Irish student posted a fake quotation on the Wikipedia page of composer Maurice Jarre shortly after the man died. (The obituary-friendly quote said in part, “When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”) At the time, I’m not sure the student understood the convergence of the link economy and the delegation of trust. That changed in an instant, when his fabricated quote began to appear in obituaries for the composer around the world.

It’s difficult to pinpoint where it started, but at some point, a reporter or a blogger saw that quotation and used it in an article. Eventually the quote found its way to
The Guardian
, and from there it may as well have been real. The quote so perfectly expressed what writers wished to say about Jarre, and the fact that it was in
The Guardian
, a reputable and prominent newspaper, made it the source of many links. And so it went along the chain, its origins obscured, and the more times it was repeated, the more real it felt.

This is where the link economy fails in practice. Wikipedia editors may have caught and quickly removed the student’s edit, but that didn’t automatically update the obituaries that had incorporated it. Wikipedia administrators are not able to edit stories on other people’s websites so the quote remained in
The Guardian
until they caught and corrected it too. The link economy is designed to confirm and support, not to question or correct. In fact, the stunt was only discovered after the student admitted what he’d done.

“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”
³

The proponents of the link economy brush aside these examples. The posts can be updated, they say; that’s the beauty of the Internet. But as far as I know there is no technology that issues alerts to each trackback or every reader who has read a corrupted article, and there never will be. The evolution of a news story is a lot like biological evolution. It jumps around, cross contaminates, and occasionally develops at the same time in multiple places. It’s impossible to track or correct.

Senator Eugene McCarthy once compared the journalists covering his 1968 presidential campaign to birds on a telephone wire. When one got up to fly to a different wire, they’d all follow. When another flew back, the rest would too. Today this metaphor needs an update. The birds still follow one another’s leads just as eagerly—but the wire need not always exist. They can be and often are perched on illusions, just as blogs were when they repeated Maurice Jarre’s manufactured remarks.