Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (41 page)

The burning passion behind such ceremonies, William Hazlitt wrote in his classic essay “On the Pleasure of Hating,” “carries us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs, and the revenge of a barbarous age and people.” You nudge blogs toward those dangerous instincts. They love the excitement of hunting and the rush of the kill without any of the danger. In the throes of such hatred, he writes, “the wild beast resumes its sway within us.”

Ask controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange what it feels like to be the sacrificial victim. In less than a year he went from intriguing web hero to ominous pariah, from a revolutionary to a fool. Assange did not suddenly become an awful, evil, and flawed person overnight. He had not changed. But tempers had. Times had. So when a set of very suspect allegations of sexual misconduct came to light, it was the perfect opportunity for a little of that ol’ time ritualized destruction.

Over a span of just two weeks,
Gawker
’s headlines on Assange went from cute—“What Happened to WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange’s Weird Hair?”—to cutthroat—“Are WikiLeaks Activists Finally Realizing Their Founder Is a Megalomaniac?” Shortly thereafter they launched
WikileakiLeaks.org
, a semiserious site that asked anonymous users to send in embarrassing information about Assange and the inner workings of the WikiLeaks organization. The only reason: “WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Accused then Immediately Un-Accused of Rape.” (Note: “Un-Accused.” Or don’t. Blogs sure didn’t.)

Before
Gawker
decided to go the negative route with the Assange story, they tested another direction. Writing the day after the allegations surfaced: “Is WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange a Nerdy Sex God?” In other words, it wasn’t the allegations that suddenly marked a point of no return; they were just a convenient cover. Blogs needed an exciting new angle about someone they’d already covered a lot. In
Gawker
’s process you can see what happened writ large across popular culture—a brief consideration of the possible narratives before settling on one of complete destruction: Nothing personal, Julian, but you fit the bill.
*

I have no idea whether Assange is guilty or not. But neither do the people who decided to roast him alive for it. I do think there were plenty of reasons to have proceeded cautiously with the story. There’s a long history of government agencies using scandals to discredit enemies, and we do know that Assange had angered nearly every powerful government in the world (some government officials talked of assassination and/or trying him for treason). Having been behind one or two of these kinds of attacks myself, my instinct is to suspect that there may be someone like me out there working the mob. In fact, many blogs initially suspected the same thing. But that didn’t stop them once the ceremony started.

Most important, almost all the “evidence” blogs used in interpretations of Assange’s character to convince themselves of his guilt was available and known before the charges came to light. What were labeled as quirks and endearing, rebellious qualities just weeks before suddenly became “creepy.” His celebrated need for secrecy was now “disingenuous” and “paranoid.” His noble mission for transparency was no longer about freedom but about his own “enormous ego.”

Again, Assange hadn’t changed. Someone had just reframed him. The role blogs needed him to play had shifted. So Assange became a different person, according to the coverage. He was turned into a caricature of himself. As a result, any redeeming value of his work was utterly irrelevant. That is, the very same work that supposedly made him worth talking about in the first place.

At the risk of sounding like a public service announcement: This can happen to you too. After building Assange up, blogs destroyed him, not because he did anything wrong (although he very well may have; let me stress again that this has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence), but because his ascendancy made them feel angry and small, and now they had ammunition to act on those feelings. Assange learned what it feels like when anyone can leak heinous allegations that the media propagates before verifying. He got to experience personally what he had, through WikiLeaks, helped do to many others.

THE COSTS OF SCANDAL HYSTERIA

A few years ago I was part of a high-profile multimillion-dollar lawsuit involving Dov Charney and Woody Allen. After being wrongfully accused in a series of sensationalized (and later disproved) sexual harassment lawsuits, Dov and American Apparel ran two large billboards in New York City and Los Angeles featuring a satirical image of Woody Allen dressed as a Hasidic Jew with the words “The Highest Rabbi” in Yiddish. Allen sued the company for $10 million for wrongfully using his likeness.

You may remember hearing about it. But you probably didn’t know that the billboards—which ran for only a few weeks—were intended to be a statement against the kind of hysterical media-driven destruction talked about here. They were designed to reference the public crucifixion Allen endured during a personal scandal years earlier. Ironically, this was totally because blogs and newspapers were too focused on the lawsuit’s big-name celebrity drama to discuss the intended message.

In response, I helped Dov write a long statement that was eventually turned into an editorial in
The Guardian
. It said, in part:

My intention was to call upon people to see beyond media and lawsuit-inspired scandal, and to consider people for their true value and for their contribution to society.

I feel that the comments of a former friend of Woody Allen, Harvard professor and famous civil rights lawyer Allan Dershowitz, apply to this particular phenomenon: “Well, let’s remember, we have had presidents…from Jefferson, to Roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Clinton, who have been great presidents…. I think we risk losing some of the best people who can run for public office by our obsessive focus on the private lives of public figures.”

I agree that the increasingly obsessive scrutinization of people’s personal lives and their perceived social improprieties has tragically overshadowed the great work of too many artists, scientists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, athletes, and politicians, including Woody Allen.
¹

Today blogs are our representatives in these degradation ceremonies. They level the accusations on the behalf of the “outraged public.” How dare you hold yourself up in front of us as a human being instead of as a caricature, they seem to say. If you don’t feel shame, then we will make you feel shame. The onlookers delight in the destruction and pain. Blogs lock onto targets for whatever frivolous reason, which makes sense, since they often played a role in creating the victim’s celebrity in the first place, usually under equally frivolous pretenses.

You used to have to be a national hero before you got the privilege of the media and the public turning on you. You had to be a president or a millionaire or an artist. Now we tear people down just as we’ve begun to build them up. We do this to our fameballs. Our viral video stars. Our favorite new companies. Even random citizens who pop into the news because they did something interesting, unusual, or stupid. First we celebrate them, then we turn to snark, and then, finally, to merciless decimation. No wonder only morons and narcissists enter the public sphere.

It feels good to be a part of something—to tear down and berate. It’s not surprising to me that the media would want to assume this role. Consider how the ceaseless, staged, and artificial online news chase makes today’s generation of reporters feel. They attended an expensive grad school and live in New York City or San Francisco or Washington, D.C. The wondrous $200,000 a year journalism job is not some myth to them; it was an opportunity dangled in front of them—just as the first generation of reporters after it went extinct. Their life is nothing like that myth. Bloggers must write and film and publish an insurmountable amount of material per day, and only if they’re lucky will any of it be rewarded with a bonus or health insurance. Yet the people they cover are often rich and successful or worse, like idiotic and talentless reality television stars. It’s enough to make anyone bitter and angry. And indeed they are. They grind with the “rage of the creative underclass,” as
New York
magazine called it.

Philosopher Alain de Botton once pointed out that Greek tragedies, though popular entertainment in their day, had a purpose. Despite being gossipy, sometimes salacious, and often violent, they taught the audience to think about how easily an unfortunate situation could befall them, and to be humbled by the flaws of another person. Tragedies could be learned from. But the news of the twenty-first century, he writes, “with its lexicon of perverts and weirdos, failures and losers, lies at one end of the spectrum,” and “tragedy lies at the other.”

There is nothing to be learned from the tragic rise and fall of public men that we see on blogs. That is not their function. Their degradation is mere spectacle that blogs use to sublimate the general anxieties of their readers. To make us feel better by hurting others. To stress that the people we’re reading about are freaks, while we are normal.

And if we’re not getting anything out of it, and nobody learns anything from it, then I don’t see how you can call blogs anything other than a digital blood sport.

*
Blakeley
had
been arrested recently for a domestic dispute, and the story had been covered up. I wanted people to know. He later pled guilty but only to harassment.

*
Nor was he the only vicitim of the capriciousness of this web trial. One former
Jezebel
blogger revealed the identity of Assange’s accusers on her blog for the
Washington City Paper
—in violation of the paper’s strict policy of protecting the anonymity of potential victims.

XXIII

WELCOME TO UNREALITY