Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday
Authors: Ryan Holiday
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written, and presented. For the first time, it created a sense of obligation, not just to the paper and circulation, but also to the audience.
Just as Bennett had his imitators, so did Ochs. In fact, the press has imitated the principles he built into the New York Times since he took it over. Even now, when someone buys a paper at a newsstand, they don’t survey the headlines and buy the most sensational. They buy the paper they trust—the same goes for what radio stations they listen to and television news they watch. This is the subscription model, the brand model, invented by Ochs, internalized. It is selling on subscription and not by the story.
I’m not saying it is a perfect system by any means. I don’t want to imply that newspapers in the twentieth century were paragons of honesty or accuracy or embraced change immediately. As late at the 1970s, papers like the New Orleans Times-Picayune were still heavily dependent on street and newsstand sales, and thus continued to play up and sensationalize crime stories.
The subscription model may have been free of the corruptive influence of the masses, but that didn’t spare it from corruption from the top. As the character Philip Marlowe observed in Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye :
Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition—hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners.
This was incisive media criticism (in fiction, no less) that was later echoed with damning evidence by theorists such as Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian. A friend put it more bluntly: “Each generation of media has a different cock in its mouth.”
At least there was once an open discussion about the problems of the media. Today, the toxic economics of blogs are not only obscured, but tech gurus on the take actually defend them. We have the old problems plus a host of new ones.
THE DEATH OF SUBSCRIPTION, REBIRTH OF MEDIA MANIPULATION
For most of the last century, the majority of journalism and entertainment was sold by subscription (the third phase). It is now sold again online à la carte—as a one-off. Each story must sell itself, must be heard over all the others, be it in Google News, on Twitter, or on your Facebook wall. This One-Off Problem is exactly like the one faced by the yellow press a century or more ago, and it distorts today’s news just as it did then—only now it’s amplified by millions of blogs instead of a few hundred newspapers. As Eli Pariser put it in The Filter Bubble, when it comes to news on the Internet:
Each article ascends the most-forwarded lists or dies an ignominious death on its own…. The attention economy is ripping the binding, and the pages that get read are the pages that are frequently the most topical, scandalous, and viral.
People don’t read one blog. They read a constant assortment of many blogs, and so there is little incentive to build trust. Competition for readers is on a per-article basis, taking publishers right back to the (digital) street corner, yelling, “War Is Coming!” to sell papers. It takes them back to making things up to fill the insatiable need for new news.
Instead of being a nineteenth-century press agent manipulating newspapers, I am a twenty-first-century press agent manipulating blogs. The tactics are the same, but I ply my trade with more influence, less oversight, and faster results than ever imagined. I got all sorts of great inspiration (and ideas) for the job by reading old books like The Harder They Fall and All the King’s Men , which are about press agents and media fixers for powerful politicians and criminals of many years ago. You want to know how to con bloggers today? Look at media hoaxes from before your grandparents were born. The same things will play. They may even play better now.
Think
Just as Bennett had his imitators, so did Ochs. In fact, the press has imitated the principles he built into the New York Times since he took it over. Even now, when someone buys a paper at a newsstand, they don’t survey the headlines and buy the most sensational. They buy the paper they trust—the same goes for what radio stations they listen to and television news they watch. This is the subscription model, the brand model, invented by Ochs, internalized. It is selling on subscription and not by the story.
I’m not saying it is a perfect system by any means. I don’t want to imply that newspapers in the twentieth century were paragons of honesty or accuracy or embraced change immediately. As late at the 1970s, papers like the New Orleans Times-Picayune were still heavily dependent on street and newsstand sales, and thus continued to play up and sensationalize crime stories.
The subscription model may have been free of the corruptive influence of the masses, but that didn’t spare it from corruption from the top. As the character Philip Marlowe observed in Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye :
Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition—hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners.
This was incisive media criticism (in fiction, no less) that was later echoed with damning evidence by theorists such as Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian. A friend put it more bluntly: “Each generation of media has a different cock in its mouth.”
At least there was once an open discussion about the problems of the media. Today, the toxic economics of blogs are not only obscured, but tech gurus on the take actually defend them. We have the old problems plus a host of new ones.
THE DEATH OF SUBSCRIPTION, REBIRTH OF MEDIA MANIPULATION
For most of the last century, the majority of journalism and entertainment was sold by subscription (the third phase). It is now sold again online à la carte—as a one-off. Each story must sell itself, must be heard over all the others, be it in Google News, on Twitter, or on your Facebook wall. This One-Off Problem is exactly like the one faced by the yellow press a century or more ago, and it distorts today’s news just as it did then—only now it’s amplified by millions of blogs instead of a few hundred newspapers. As Eli Pariser put it in The Filter Bubble, when it comes to news on the Internet:
Each article ascends the most-forwarded lists or dies an ignominious death on its own…. The attention economy is ripping the binding, and the pages that get read are the pages that are frequently the most topical, scandalous, and viral.
People don’t read one blog. They read a constant assortment of many blogs, and so there is little incentive to build trust. Competition for readers is on a per-article basis, taking publishers right back to the (digital) street corner, yelling, “War Is Coming!” to sell papers. It takes them back to making things up to fill the insatiable need for new news.
Instead of being a nineteenth-century press agent manipulating newspapers, I am a twenty-first-century press agent manipulating blogs. The tactics are the same, but I ply my trade with more influence, less oversight, and faster results than ever imagined. I got all sorts of great inspiration (and ideas) for the job by reading old books like The Harder They Fall and All the King’s Men , which are about press agents and media fixers for powerful politicians and criminals of many years ago. You want to know how to con bloggers today? Look at media hoaxes from before your grandparents were born. The same things will play. They may even play better now.
Think
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