Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (37 page)

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CHEERING ON OUR OWN DECEPTION

I WAS ONCE INVITED TO A LUNCH AT SPAGO WITH THE CEO of the
Huffington Post
, Eric Hippeau. Some of the site’s editors attended for a bit of a roundtable discussion about the media during lunch. It was 2010, and the Internet and national media were in a frenzy over reports of unintended accelerations in Toyota cars. While we were eating Eric asked the group a question: How could Toyota have better responded to the wildly out of control PR crisis?

Being that this was a room full of Internet folks, as soon as the answers started, the pontification became overwhelming: “I think transparency is critical.” “These companies need to be proactive.” “They needed to get out in front of this thing.” “The key is reaching out to bloggers.” Blah blah blah.

It was a conversation I’d heard a thousand times and seen online almost every day. But to hear Eric Hippeau do it in person, to my face, was unbearable.

Finally I interrupted. “None of you know what you’re talking about,” I said. “None of you have been in a PR crisis. You’ve never seen how quickly they get out of hand. None of you have come to terms with the fact that sites like yours, the
Huffington Post
, pass along rumors as fact and rehash posts from other blogs without checking them. It’s impossible to fight back against that. The Internet is the problem here, not the solution.”

The room was mostly silent after that. When I left I was thanked for my thoughts, but I knew I’d never be invited back, despite spending more than six figures with them that year. I was rude, no question, but I couldn’t get over how inappropriate it was for a news organization to sit down and evaluate someone else’s PR performance instead of evaluating the veracity and quality of its own coverage.

In subsequent months I would be vindicated more than I could have anticipated at the time. First, the
Huffington Post
was hit with a PR crisis and failed miserably at responding by the standards they laid out at lunch. When sued by a cadre of former and current writers for their unpaid contributions, the
Huffington Post
was anything but “transparent.” They clammed up, likely on the advice of their lawyers, and didn’t cover the lawsuit on their own site. It was not until a few days later that Arianna Huffington posted her first—and the only—statement about it on the
Huffington Post
. Hardly “being proactive” or “getting out in front of it.” The lawsuit was clearly a money grab, but the
Huffington Post
had to mostly stand there and take a public beating, watching powerlessly as other blogs gleefully dissected and discussed the lawsuit without a shred of empathy. Just as
Huffington Post
had done to Toyota and other companies during our lunch and countless times on their site.

Second, and most important, Toyota was largely exonerated after a full investigation by NASA, no less. Many of the cases of computer issues supposedly causing unintended acceleration were dismissed entirely, and most were found to be caused by driver error. Drivers had been hammering the accelerator instead of the brakes! And then blamed the car! In other words, the scandal that Toyota was so heavily criticized for not handling right had been baseless. Toyota hadn’t been reckless, the media had. It was the sites like
Huffington Post
, so quick to judge, that had disregarded their duties to their customers and to the truth. As journalist Ed Wallace wrote for
BusinessWeek
in an apology to Toyota, “[A]ll the reasons why the public doesn’t trust the media crystallized in the Toyota fiasco.”

Though I’m proud of what I said in that room, and was ultimately proven right, if I had a chance to do it again I would probably say something different. I would say: “What the fuck are you guys talking about this for?”

Are we seriously discussing how Toyota—a multibillion-dollar corporation, that like all others sells us things we can’t afford and don’t need—should have done a better job marketing to us? Toyota is either making faulty cars or it’s not; the response is meaningless public relations bullshit. Are we actually putting our heads together to come up with advice on how to bait the hook so we’re more likely to bite?

Why are we cheering on our own deception?

Because that’s exactly what we are doing when we have conversations about how marketers and PR specialists could do their job better. Like one blogger who complained that Tiger Woods’s press conference apology had “too many cliches” in it. You’re missing the forest for the trees. The whole thing is a cliché. Yeah, it was fake. So are celebrities. At least we can plainly recognize the press conference as a staged event when we see it.

Users on
BuzzFeed
can actually play a game in which they try to guess if stories will go viral or not, and winners get ranked on a list of “Top Viral Predictors.” Talk about staged—they’re producing content around whether other pieces of content might be read by a lot of other people on the Internet. Nobody online wants to point out how fake and insidious that is because it’s too lucrative.
*
It’s easier to co-opt readers with marketing bullshit than it is to protect their interests or provide worthwhile material.

Online publishers
need
to fill space. Companies
need
coverage of their products. Together blogs, marketers, and publicists cannot help but conspire to meet one anothers’ needs and dress up the artificial and unreal as important. Why? Because that’s how they get paid.

I never got over the shock of discovering that it was basically impossible to burn a blog. No matter how many times I’ve been caught leaking bad info, spinning, spamming, manufacturing news—it never changed anything. The same bloggers continued to cover my stories and bite when I created the news. They don’t mind being deceived, not at all. In fact, it often makes for a bonus “story behind how we got the story wrong” post.

Public relations and marketing are something companies do to move product. It is not meaningful, it is not cool. Yet because it is cheap, easy, and lucrative to cover, blogs want to convince you that it is. And we’ve mostly accepted that, consuming such schlock like it’s news.

ADVERTISING AS CONTENT

Mashable
, the influential tech blog, actually keeps a
Billboard
magazine–style chart called “Top 20 Viral Ads” for each month. Read that again slowly: It’s a chart of popular video advertisements. You know, videos designed to sell viewers more crap.

As the CEO of a viral video agency that did $25 million in billing last year advised me: “Get out there and make your own noise. Advertise the advertising.” The attraction to turning advertisements into content was something I often exploited with American Apparel. Blogs so desperately need material that I would send them screenshots of ads and say, “Here is an exclusive leak of our new controversial ad.” The next day: “Exclusive! American Apparel’s Controversial New Ad.” The chatter about these advertisements always perplexed me: Don’t they know that generally companies have to pay to generate this kind of attention?

It’s the same logic behind the old trick of getting a music video or a commercial banned in order to make it a news story. As in MTV.com reporting “Rihanna’s ‘S&M’ Video Restricted By YouTube, Banned In 11 Countries.” MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore, but they’re still getting attention by writing about the stunts pulled by people who do! Do you think PETA is upset when their proposed Super Bowl commercial is rejected every year? No, that’s the entire point. They get the attention—and they don’t have to pay for the ad space.

But at least the Super Bowl is a big deal. Here’s a tweet from Staci Kramer, editor of
paidContent
: “Lisa Gurry, @bing director, tells @darrenrovell1 search engine will have 2 mins of ad time in LeBron ‘Decision’ on ESPN. #pcbuzz.”
¹
Let me translate that gibberish for you: Staci heard a paid representative of one company tell a different reporter that they planned to
run a television commercial
during a press conference at which an overpaid athlete would announce the team he would play for. Staci felt that was newsworthy buzz and shared it with the world.

I don’t think it’s buzzworthy; I think it is pathetic worship of our own deception.

BLOGGER-SPONSORED CONFERENCES

I love when blogs cover their own conferences as though there was no conflict of interest in hosting an event and loudly proclaiming its newsworthiness to your readers. Blogs often liveblog their own conferences, getting literally dozens of posts out of covering the words that came out of the mouths of the people the site paid to speak. In addition to driving millions of pageviews (and videos and tweets), the real goal of this coverage is to make the conference seem newsworthy enough that people pay to attend next year. The reader who is just browsing headlines sees how many are dedicated to this one event and all the “news” it generates and thinks, “Hey, am I missing something?” No, it’s just an ordinary pseudo-event, with the same hustlers saying things to get attention, only in this case the publisher paid to make it all happen.