Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (13 page)

I remember sitting on the couch at Tucker Max’s house one January a few years ago when something occurred to me about his then on-and-off-again bestseller. “Hey Tucker, did you notice your book made the
New York Times
list in 2006, 2007, and 2008?” (Meaning the book had appeared on the list at least once in all three years,
not
continuously.) So I typed it up, sourced it, and added it to Wikipedia, delineating each year.
*
Not long after I posted it, a journalist cribbed my “research” and did us the big favor of having poor reading comprehension. He wrote: “Tucker Max’s book has spent over 3 years on the
New York Times
Bestseller List.” Then we took this and doubled up our citation on Wikipedia to use this new, more generous interpretation.

This is a cycle I have watched speed up but also descend into outright plagiarism. I can’t divulge my specifics, but I commonly see uniquely worded or selectively edited facts that paid editors inserted into Wikipedia show up later in major newspapers and blogs with the exact same wording (you’ll have to trust me on when and where).

Wikipedia acts as a certifier of basic information for many people, including reporters. Even a subtle influence over the way that Wikipedia frames an issue—whether criminal charges, a controversial campaign, a lawsuit, or even a critical reception—can have a major impact on the way bloggers write about it. It is the difference between “So-and-so released their second album in 2011” and “So-and-so’s first album was followed by the multiplatinum and critically lauded hit …” You change the descriptors on Wikipedia and reporters and readers change their descriptors down the road.

A complete overhaul of one high-profile starlet’s Wikipedia page was once followed less than a week later by a six-page spread in a big tabloid that so obviously used our positive and flattering language from Wikipedia that I was almost scared it would be its own scandal.

It’s why you have to control your page. Or you risk putting yourself in the awkward position a friend found himself in when profiled by a reporter at a national newspaper, who asked: “So, according to Wikipedia you’re a failed screenwriter. Is that true?”

TRUST ME, I’M AN EXPERT

It’s not a stretch to convince anyone that it’s easy to become a source for blogs. Cracking the mainstream media is much harder, right? Nope. There’s actually a tool designed expressly for this purpose.

It’s called HARO (Help a Reporter Out), and it is a site that connects hundreds of “self-interested sources” to willing reporters every day. The service, founded by PR man Peter Shankman, is a wildly popular tool that connects journalists working on stories with people to quote in them. It is the de facto sourcing and lead factory for journalists and publicists. According to the site, nearly thirty thousand members of the media have used HARO sources, including the
New York Times
, the Associated Press, the
Huffington Post
, and everyone in-between.

What do these experts get out of offering their services? Free publicity, of course. In fact, “Free Publicity” is HARO’s tagline. I’ve used it myself to con reporters from ABC News to Reuters to the
Today Show
, and yes, even the vaunted
New York Times
. Sometimes I don’t even do it myself. I just have an assistant pretend to be me over e-mail or on the phone.

The fact that my eyes light up when I think of how to use HARO’s services to benefit myself and my clients should be illustrative. If I was tasked with building someone’s reputation as an “industry expert,” it would take nothing but a few fake e-mail addresses and speedy responses to the right bloggers to manufacture the impression. I’d start with using HARO to get quoted on a blog that didn’t care much about credentials, then use that piece as a marker of authority to justify inclusion in a more reputable publication. It wouldn’t take long to be a “nationally recognized expert who has been featured in _____, _____, and _____.” The only problem is that it wouldn’t be real.

Journalists say HARO is a research tool, but it isn’t. It is a tool that manufactures self-promotion to look like research. Consider alerts like

URGENT: [E-mail
redacted]@aol.com
needs NEW and LITTLE known resources (apps, Websites, etc.) that offer families unique ways to save money.
*

This is not a noble effort by a reporter to be educated but an all too common example of a lazy blogger giving a marketer an opportunity to insert themselves into their story. Journalists also love to put out bulletins asking for sources to support stories they are already writing.

[E-mail
Redacted]@gmail.com
needs horror story relating to mortgages, student loans, credit reports, debt collectors, or credit cards.

URGENT: [E-mail
Redacted]@abc.com
is looking for a man who took on a new role around the house after losing his job.

There you have it—how your bogus trend-story sausage is made. In fact, I even saw one HARO request by a reporter hoping “to speak with an expert about how fads are created.” I hope whoever answered it explained that masturbatory media coverage from people like her has a lot to do with it.

What HARO encourages—and the site is filled with thousands of posts asking for it—is for journalists to look for sources who simply confirm what they were already intending to say. Instead of researching a topic and communicating their findings to the public, journalists simply grab obligatory—but artificial—quotes from “experts” to validate their pageview journalism. To the readers it appears as legitimate news. To the journalist, they were just reverse engineering their story from a search engine–friendly premise.

HARO also helps bloggers create the false impression of balance. Nobody is speaking to sources on both sides. They’re providing token space to the opposition and nothing else. It is a sham. I constantly receive e-mails from bloggers and journalists asking me to provide “a response” to some absurd rumor or speculative analysis. They just need a quote from me denying the rumor (which most people will skip over) to justify publishing it.

Most stories online are created with this mind-set. Marketing shills masquerade as legitimate experts, giving advice and commenting on issues in ways that benefit their clients and trick people into buying their products. Blogs aren’t held accountable for being wrong or being played, so why should they avoid it?

FORGETTING MY OWN BULLSHIT

As I was gathering up press done on me personally over the years, I came across an article I’d forgotten. I’d posted a question on my blog: “What is the classic book of the ’80s and ’90s?” It was a discussion I’d had with several friends; we were wondering what book teachers would assign to students to learn about this era fifty years from now. This discussion was picked up and featured by
Marginal Revolution
, a blog by the economist Tyler Cowen, which does about fifty thousand pageviews a day. His post said:

What is the classic book of the ’80s and ’90s?

BY TYLER COWEN ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2008 AT 6:42 PM IN BOOKS | PERMALINK

That’s
Ryan Holiday’s
query
. This is not about quality, this is about “representing a literary era” or perhaps just representing the era itself. I’ll cite
Bonfire of the Vanities
and
Fight Club
as the obvious picks. Loyal
MR
reader Jeff Ritze is thinking of Easton Ellis (“though not
American Psycho
”). How about you? Dare I mention John Grisham’s
The Firm
as embodying the blockbuster trend of King, Steele, Clancy, and others? There’s always Harry Potter and graphic novels.

Coming across this struck me not only because I am a big Tyler Cowen fan but because I am
also
Jeff Ritze. Or was, since that’s one of the fake names I used to use, and had apparently e-mailed my post as a tip to
Marginal Revolution
. Of course Jeff Ritze was thinking about Bret Easton Ellis—he’s one of my favorite authors. I even answered a variant of that question as me—Ryan Holiday—a few years later for a magazine that was interviewing me.

I had been the source of this article and totally forgotten about it. I wanted traffic for my site, so I tricked Tyler, and he linked to me. (Sorry, Tyler!) It paid off too. A blog for the
Los Angeles Times
picked up the discussion from Cowen’s blog and talked positively about “twentysomething Ryan Holiday.”
Marginal Revolution
is a widely read and influential blog, and I never would have popped up on the
Los Angeles Times
’s radar without it. Best of all, now, when I write my bio, I get to list the
Los Angeles Times
as one of the places I’ve gotten coverage. Score.

*
On occasion I have instructed a client to say something in an interview, knowing that once it is covered we can insert it into Wikipedia, and it will become part of the standard media narrative about them. We seek out interviews in order to advance certain “facts,” and then we make them doubly real by citing them on Wikipedia.

*
Ten days later the reporter generously gave a second marketer a chance at the same story, with this request: “URGENT: [E-mail
redacted]@aol.com
needs NEW or LITTLE known app or website that can help families with young kids save money.”

VI

TACTIC #3