Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (27 page)

From the interview:

Q: So you think that’s unfair that you’ve gotten that criticism?

A: Oh, I definitely think that it’s unfair…. But that’s okay.

Q: I wonder if you could elaborate on your defense a little bit.

A: I’m not defensive about it.

Q: Do the conversation and the criticism change the way you work?

A: I don’t hear any of the criticism when I test the movies and talk to thousands of people. I think the people who talk about these things on the Internet are looking to stir things up to make for interesting reading, but when you make movies, thousands of people fill out cards telling you their intimate feelings about the movies, and those criticisms never came up, ever, on any of the movies.

In other words, there is nothing to any of her claims. But the post went up anyway. And she got paid just the same. Notoriety from events of 2010 and 2011 worked very nicely for Carmon—in the form of a staff position at
Salon.com
and a spot on the
Forbes
“30 Under 30” list.

Honestly, her tactics may have once impressed me. I have no problem when people get their piece of the profits—particularly when the whole scene is such a farce. The problem is when they get too greedy. The problem is when they stop being able to see anything
but
the need for their own gain.

Today, I’m not impressed anymore. I am depressed. Because the corrupt system I helped build is no longer in anyone’s control. The manipulators are indistinguishable from the publishers and bloggers—the people we were supposed to be manipulating. Everyone is now a victim, including me and the companies I work for. And the costs are incredibly high.

XIV

THERE ARE OTHERS

THE MANIPULATOR HALL OF FAME

SOMETIMES ONLY A MANIPULATOR CAN SPOT ANOTHER manipulator’s work. In figuring out how to exploit the incentives of blogs, I discovered something pretty stunning: I wasn’t the only one. But where I felt I worked for companies doing good things (selling great books, selling clothes made in America), others wielded influence and power over national debates. They changed politics and upended people’s lives.

By now most everyone has heard the saga of Shirley Sherrod, the black woman who lost her job as a rural director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture after a video of her purportedly making a racist speech surfaced online. Behind it was a manipulator just like me.

This video caused a national shitstorm. Within hours it had gone from one blog to dozens of blogs to cable news websites, and then to the newspapers and back again.
*
Sherrod was forced to resign shortly after. The man who posted that video was the late Andrew Brietbart.

Of course we now know Sherrod is not a racist. In fact, the speech she was giving was about how
not
to be racist. But the bloggers and reporters who repeated the story were writing about it iteratively, using only the limited material they had been given by Breitbart. And each report became more extreme and confident than the last—despite the lack of any new evidence to support their stories.

It was an embarrassing moment in modern politics (which says a lot). The fiasco ended with President Obama denouncing his own administration’s premature rush to judgment and apologizing personally to Sherrod. He lamented to
Good Morning America
: “We now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.”

Breitbart (now deceased) was the master of making people scramble. Whenever I need to understand the mind of blogging, I try to picture Andrew Brietbart sitting down at his computer to edit and publish that video. Because he was not a racist either. Nor was he the partisan kook the Left mistook him for. He was a media manipulator just like me. He understood and embodied the economics of the web better than anyone. And in some ways I envy him, because he was able to do it without the guilt that drove me to write this book.

Breitbart was the first employee of the
Drudge Report
and
a founding employee of the
Huffington Post
. He helped build the dominant conservative and liberal blogs. He’s wasn’t an ideologue; he was an expert on what spreads—a provocateur.

From his perspective, the wide discrediting of his Sherrod video was not a failure. Not even close. The Sherrod story put him and his blog on the lips—in anger and in awe—of nearly every media outlet in the country. Sherrod was just collateral damage. The political machine was a plaything for Breitbart, and he made it do just what he wanted (dance and give him attention). He’d never confess as much, so I’ll do it for him.

Breitbart teed up the story perfectly. By splitting the edited Sherrod clip into two pieces (two minutes, thirty seconds, and one minute, six seconds, respectively), he made it quick to consume and easy for bloggers to watch and republish. Since the unedited clip is forty-three minutes long, it was doubtful anyone would sit through the whole thing to rain on his parade. The post was titled “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism,” and he spent most of his thirteen hundred words fighting the imaginary foil of efforts to suppress the Tea Party, instead of explaining where the video came from.

For all the complaints from blogs, cable channels, and newspapers about being misled, Breitbart had actually given them a highly profitable gift. In getting to report on his accusations, and then the reversal, and then the discussion “about the Breitbart/Sherrod controversy,” news outlets actually got three major stories instead of one. Most stories last only a few minutes, but the Sherrod controversy lasted nearly a week. It’s still good for follow-ups today. Better than anyone Breitbart understood that the media doesn’t mind being played, because they get something out of it—namely, pageviews, ratings, and readers.

Breitbart, who died suddenly of heart failure in early 2012, might not be with us any longer, but it hardly matters. As he once said, “Feeding the media is like training a dog. You can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns.” Breitbart did plenty of training in his short time on the scene. Today, one of the dog’s masters is gone, sure, but the dog still responds to the same commands.

THE MASTER AND THE STUDENT

More important, the legacy of Brietbart lives on in James O’Keefe. The young O’Keefe, mentored and funded by Breitbart, also knows what spreads, and he uses that knowledge for evil ends. O’Keefe is responsible for stories nearly as big as the Sherrod piece. He posed as a pimp in a set of undercover videos that supposedly show the now defunct community activist group ACORN giving advice to a pimp on how to avoid paying taxes. He recorded NPR seemingly showing its willingness to conceal the source of a large donation from a Muslim group. Once he even planned a bizarre attempt to seduce an attractive CNN correspondent on camera in order to embarrass the station.

Like Breitbart’s clips, O’Keefe’s work is heavily and disingenuously edited—far beyond what the context and actual events would support. His clips spread quickly because they are perfectly designed to suit a specific and vocal group: angry Republicans. By prefitting the narrative to appeal to conservative bloggers, his sensational stories quickly overwhelm the atrophied verification and accountability muscles of the rest of the media and become real stories. And even when they don’t, as was the case with the CNN story, it’s still enough to get their names in the news.

O’Keefe learned from Brietbart that in the blogging market there is a profound shortage of investigative material or original reporting. It’s just too expensive to produce. So rather than bear those costs, O’Keefe’s stories are hollow shells—an edited clip, a faux investigation—that blogs can use as a substitute for the real thing. Then he watches as the media falls over itself to propagate it as quickly as possible. Short, shocking narratives with a reusable sound bite are all it takes.

Because they assume the cloak of the persecuted underdog, the inevitable backlash helps O’Keefe and Brietbart rather than hurting them. Nearly all of O’Keefe’s stories have been exposed as doctored to some extent. When forced to reveal the unedited footage of the NPR and ACORN stunts, most of the main accusations were found to have been amplified or manipulated. But by that point the victims had already lost their jobs or been publicly branded.

For instance, the ACORN clip shows O’Keefe wearing a comical pimp hat, a fur coat, and a cane to the meetings, when in reality he wore a suit and tie. He’d edited in frames with the other costume after the fact. By the time this was exposed six months later, the pimp image was indelibly stuck in people’s minds, and the only effect of the discovery was to put O’Keefe’s name back in the news. Being caught as a manipulator can only help make you more famous.