Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday (English

Description: Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday As blogs control the news, the job of a media manipulator, like Holiday, is to control blogsNas much as any one person can. Tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, and reckless journalists spread lies, he explains exactly how the media really works. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Youve seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you dont know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me.Im a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs-as much as any one person can.IN TODAYS CULTURE... Blogs like Gawker, BuzzFeed, and The Huffington Post drive the media agenda. Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines. Manipulators wield these levers to shape everything you read, see, and hear- online and off.Why am I giving away these secrets? Because Im tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. Im going to explain exactly how the media really works. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.%%%Youve seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you dont know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me.Im a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs-as much as any one person can.IN TODAYS CULTURE... Blogs like Gawker, BuzzFeed, and The Huffington Post drive the media agenda. Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines. Manipulators wield these levers to shape everything you read, see, and hear- online and off.Why am I giving away these secrets? Because Im tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. Im going to explain exactly how the media really works. What you choose to do with this information is up to you. Author Biography Ryan Holiday is a media strategist for notorious clients such as Tucker Max and Dov Charney. After dropping out of college at nineteen to apprentice under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, he went on to advise many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians. He is currently the director of marketing at American Apparel, where his work is internationally known. His campaigns have been used as case studies by Twitter, YouTube, and Google and written about in AdAge, the New York Times, Gawker, and Fast Company. He currently lives in New Orleans. Review "Holiday effectively maps the news media landscape. . . . Media students and bloggers would do well to heed Holidays informative, timely, and provocative advice." -- Publishers Weekly "This book will make online media giants very, very uncomfortable." -- Drew Curtis, founder, Fark.com "Ryan Holidays brilliant expos of the unreality of the Internet should be required reading for every thinker in America." -- Edward Jay Epstein, author of How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft "[Like] Upton Sinclair on the blogosphere." -- Tyler Cowen, MarginalRevolution.com, author of Average Is Over "Ryan Holiday is the internets sociopathic id." -- Dan Mitchell, SF Weekly "Ryan Holiday is a media genius who promotes, inflates, and hacks some of the biggest names and brands in the world." -- Chase Jarvis, founder and CEO, CreativeLive "Ryan has a truly unique perspective on the seedy underbelly of digital culture." -- Matt Mason, former director of marketing, BitTorrent "While the observation that the internet favors speed over accuracy is hardly new, Holiday lays out how easily it is to twist it toward any end. . . . Trust Me, Im Lying provides valuable food for thought regarding how we receive-- and perceive-- information." -- New York Post Review Quote "Holiday is part Machiavelli, part Ogilvy, and all results...this whiz kid is the secret weapon youve never heard of." --Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek Promotional "Headline" Youve seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. Excerpt from Book I BLOGS MAKE THE NEWS It is not news that sells papers, but papers that sell news. --BILL BONNER, MOBS, MESSIAHS, AND MARKETS I call to your attention an article in the New York Times written at the earliest of the earliest junctures of the 2012 presidential election, nearly two years before votes would be cast.11 It told of a then obscure figure, Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota. Pawlenty was not yet a presidential candidate. He had no campaign director, no bus, few donors, and little name recognition. In fact, he did not even have a campaign. It was January 2011, after all. What he did have was a beat reporter from the blog Politico following him from town to town with a camera and a laptop, reporting every moment of his noncampaign. Its a bit peculiar, if you think about it. Even the New York Times, the newspaper that spends millions of dollars a year for a Baghdad bureau, which can fund investigative reports five or ten years in the making, didnt have a reporter covering Pawlenty. Yet Politico, a blog with only a fraction of the resources of a major newspaper, did. The Times was covering Politico covering a noncandidate. It was a little like a Ponzi scheme, and like all such schemes, it went from boom to bust. Pawlenty became a candidate, coverage of him generated millions of impressions online, then in print, and finally on television, before he flamed out and withdrew from the race. Despite all of this, his candidacys impact on the election was significant and real enough that the next Republican front-runner courted Pawlentys endorsement. As off-putting as it is, that story seems quaint in light of the 2016 election. Im 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 wouldnt have actually run if he didnt think things were different, if he didnt 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 hadnt yet realized: that the culture of Twitter, the economics of online content, had swallowed everything else in the world. Theres 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 citys 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 todays newswires. Theyre what poisoned the debate and the clarity of a nation of some 325 million people. Theyre how we fell for one of the greatest cons in history. BLOGS MATTER By "blog" Im referring collectively to all online publishing. Thats everything from Twitter accounts to major newspaper websites to web videos to group blogs with hundreds of writers. I dont 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.2 Most people dont understand how todays 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, youll notice some mentioned a lot in this book: Gawker Media, Business Insider, Breitbart, 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 isnt small if its puny readership is made up of TV producers and writers for national newspapers. It doesnt 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. Thats 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 twentysomething 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 wasnt 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: Were a country governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the press, so isnt 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. Thats all it takes to control public opinion. SO, WHY DID POLITICO FOLLOW PAWLENTY? On the face of it, its pretty crazy. Pawlentys phantom candidacy wasnt newsworthy, and if the New York Times couldnt afford to pay a reporter to follow him around, Politico shouldnt have been able to. It wasnt 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, Politicos executive editor, Jim VandeHei, tipped his hand to the New York Times: "We were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly. Now were a 200-person production, with a precise feel and plan. Were 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. Pawlentys 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 thi Details ISBN1591846285 Author Ryan Holiday Pages 288 Publisher Portfolio Language English Year 2013 ISBN-10 1591846285 ISBN-13 9781591846284 Format Paperback Publication Date 2013-06-25 Short Title TRUST ME IM LYING Media Book DEWEY 659.202 Subtitle Confessions of a Media Manipulator Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom Imprint Penguin Books Ltd Audience General/Trade UK Release Date 2013-09-26 NZ Release Date 2013-08-20 AU Release Date 2013-08-20 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:52804916;

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