Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

INTRODUCTION

• It is a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain— from a tiny blog to a website of a local news network to Reddit to the Huffington Post to the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real.* Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I "leak" a document. Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that. Really, it can be anything, from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video. However the play starts, the end is the same: The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception— and sell product.
• We can't even talk to each other anymore, each of us running our own polarized little world on Facebook.
• I didn't write this book for free, of course, and no narrator is fully trustworthy, myself included. I'm simply speaking personally and frankly about what I know, and I know this space well. Some have tried to claim that I was lying even in this book but my reply remains the same: Why would I bother?
• We live in a world of many hustlers, and you are the mark. The con is to build a brand off the backs of others. Your attention and your credulity are being stolen.
• you. Sure, I am explaining how to take advantage of these weaknesses, but mostly I am saying that these vulnerabilities exist.

BOOK ONE | FEEDING THE MONSTER: HOW BLOGS WORK

• Blogs make the news
• By "blog" I'm referring collectively to all online publishing. That's everything from Twitter accounts to major newspaper websites to web videos to group blogs with hundreds of writers. I don't care whether the owners consider themselves blogs or not.
• Most people don't understand how today's 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.
• In short, blogs are vehicles from which mass media reporters—and your most chatty and "informed" friends—discover and borrow the news.
• 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. That's a fact.
• 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. That's all it takes to control public opinion.
• The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events.
• The economics of the internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth.

TRADING UP THE CHAIN: HOW TO TURN NOTHING INTO SOMETHING IN THREE WAY-TOO-EASY STEPS

• In the introduction explained a scam call "trading up the chain." It's a strategy developed that manipulates the media through recursion. can turn nothing into something by placing a story with a small blog that has very low standards, which then becomes the source for a story by a larger blog, and that, in turn, for a story by larger media outlets. create, to use the words of one media scholar, a "self-reinforcing news wave." People like me do this every day.
• "sources." Online publications compete to get stories first, newspapers compete to "confirm" it, and then pundits compete for airtime to opine on it. The smaller sites legitimize the newsworthiness of the story for the sites with bigger audiences. Consecutively and concurrently, this pattern inherently distorts and exaggerates whatever they cover.
• It's bloggers informing bloggers informing bloggers all the way down.
• social media, for research. Recklessness, laziness, however you want to categorize it, the attitude is openly tolerated and acknowledged.
• Having registered multiple stories from multiple sources firmly onto the radar of both local and midlevel outlets, you can now leverage this coverage to access the highest level of media: the national press.
• Certain blogs are read very heavily by the New York City media set. You can craft the story for those sites and automatically set yourself up to appeal to the other reporters reading it—without ever speaking to them directly. A media example: Katie Couric claims she gets many story ideas from her Twitter followers, which means that getting a few tweets out of the seven hundred or so people she follows is all it takes to get a shot at the nightly national news.
• It's a simple illusion: Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter (or the music supervisor or celebrity stylist) is doing is popularizing it. They rarely bother to look past the first impressions.
• Every person in the media ecosystem (with the exception of a few at the top layer) is under immense pressure to produce content under the tightest of deadlines. Yes, you have something to sell. But more than ever they desperately, desperately need to buy. The flimsiest of excuses is all it takes. It freaked me out when

THE BLOG CON: HOW PUBLISHERS MAKE MONEY ONLINE

• Blogs are built to be sold. Though they make substantial revenues from advertising, the real money is in selling the entire site to a larger company for a multiple of the traffic and earnings. Usually to a rich sucker.
• This is really why they need scoops and acquire marquee bloggers—to build up their names for investors and to show a trend of rapidly increasing traffic. The pressure for this traffic in a short period of time is intense. And desperation, as a media manipulator knows, is the greatest quality you can hope for in a potential victim.
• Professional blogging is done in the boiler room, and it is brutal.
• a pageview-based compensation system that gave bonuses to writers based on their monthly traffic figures.

IV | TACTIC #1: THE ART OF THE BRIBE

V | TACTIC #2: TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR

• Once during a lawsuit needed to get some information into the public discussion of it, so dashed off a fake internal memo explaining the company's position, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to a bunch of blogs as if were an employee leaking a "memo we just got from our boss." The
• truth: Blogs love press releases. It does every part of their job for them: The material is already written; the angle laid out; the subject newsworthy; and, since it comes from an official newswire, they can blame someone else if the story turns out to be wrong.
• press releases through services like PRWeb are deliberately search-engine optimized to show up well in Google results indefinitely.
• 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. As mentioned in the preface, there is a site called HARO (Help a Reporter Out),
• While HARO essentially encourages journalists to look for sources who simply confirm what they were already intending to say, the practice spreads far beyond that singularly bad platform.

V| TACTIC #3: GIVE 'EM WHAT SPREADS

• If you make it threaten people's 3 Bs—behavior, belief, or belongings—you get a huge virus-like dispersion.
• The advice that MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins gives publishers and companies is blunt: "If it doesn't spread, it's dead."
• Every blog, publisher, and oversharer in your Facebook feed is constantly looking to post things that will take on a life of their own and get attention, links, and new readers with the least work possible. Whether that content is accurate, important, or helpful doesn't even register on their list of priorities.
• An ordinary blog post is only one page long, so a thousand-word article about Detroit would get one pageview per viewer. A slideshow about Detroit gets twenty per user, hundreds of thousands of times over, while premium advertising rates are charged against the photos. [An article gets one page view per user but a slide show, which asks users to click through a deck, will get as many views as in the deck per user, or there abouts. People get tired of slideshows.]
• "if something is a total bummer, people don't share it." And since people wouldn't share it, blogs won't publish it.
• Simple narratives like the haunting ruins of a city spread and live, while complicated ones like a city filled with real people who desperately need help don't.
• The problem is that the truth—your response—is often much less interesting than the accusations.
• "Look, if your response isn't more interesting than the allegations, no one is going to care. You might as well not bother."
• According to the study, "the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes" [emphasis mine].
• extremes in any direction have a large impact on how something will spread, but certain emotions do better than others.
• The angrier an article makes the reader, the better. But happy works too.
• A powerful predictor of whether content will spread online is valence, or the degree of positive or negative emotion a person is made to feel.
• The problem is that facts are rarely clearly good or bad. They just are. The truth is often boring and complicated. Navigating this quandary forces marketers and publishers to conspire to distort this information into something that will register on the emotional spectrum of the audience. To turn it into something that spreads and to drive clicks. Behind the scenes work to crank up the valence of articles, relying on scandal, conflict, triviality, titillation, and dogmatism. Whatever will ensure transmission.
• Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair—these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy—those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, laughter, and outrage—these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation.
• Manufacture chatter by exploiting emotions of high valence: arousal and indignation.
• As Rob Walker wrote for the Atlantic in an analysis of the event, a core principle of our new viral culture: "Humiliation should not be suppressed. It should be monetized." Instead of being ashamed of its crappy television journalism, CNBC was able to make extra money from the millions of views it generated.
• What spreads on the web—humiliation, conspiracy theories, anger, frustration, humor, passion, and possibly the interplay of several or all of these things together.
• As Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, "In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion."
• Though viral content may disappear, its consequences do not—be it a toxic political party or an addiction to cheap and easy attention.
• Through the selective mechanism of what spreads—and gets traffic and pageviews—we get suppression not by omission but by transmission.

V | TACTIC #4: HELP THEM TRICK THEIR READERS

• As Brian Moylan, a former Gawker writer, once bragged, the key is to "get the whole story into the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click."
• being evasive and misleading is one of the best ways to get traffic and increase the bottom line.
• When I want someone to write about my clients, I might intentionally exploit their ambivalence about deceiving people. If I am giving them an official comment on behalf of a client, I leave room for them to speculate by not fully addressing the issue. If I am creating the story as a fake tipster, I ask a lot of rhetorical questions: Could [some preposterous misreading of the situation] be what's going on? Do you think that [juicy scandal] is what they're hiding? And then I watch as the writers pose those very same questions to their readers in a click-friendly headline. The answer to my questions is obviously "No, of course not," but I play the skeptic about my own clients—even going so far as to say nasty things—so the bloggers will do it on the front page of their site.
• For blogs, practical utility is often a liability. It is a traffic killer. So are other potentially positive attributes. It's hard to get trolls angry enough to comment while being fair or reasonable.
• of these obviously positive attributes is avoided, because they don't bait user engagement. And engaged users are where the money is.
• "The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people's moods and behaviour. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site."
• Nobody involved actually cares what any of these people think or are feeling—not even a little bit. They just care about the reaction and the attention.
• A click is a click and a pageview is a pageview. A blogger doesn't care how they get it. Their bosses don't care. They just want
• the customer along as long as possible, to deliberately not be helpful, is to turn simple readers into pageview-generating machines. Publishers know they have to make each new headline even more irresistible than the last, the next article even more inflammatory or less practical to keep getting clicks. It's a vicious cycle in which, by screwing the reader and getting screwed by me, they must screw the reader harder next time to top what they did before.
• As Juvenal joked, "What's infamy matter if you can keep your fortune?"

TACTIC 5 #: SELL THEM SOMETHING THEY CAN SELL (TO BE IN THE NEWS, MAKE NEWS)

• When news is sold on a one-off basis, publishers can't sit back and let the news come to them. There isn't enough of it, and what comes naturally isn't exciting enough. So they must create the news that will sell their papers. When reporters were sent out to cover spectacles and events, they knew that their job was to cover the news when it was there and to make it up when it was not.*
• As Benjamin Day put it: "We newspaper people thrive best on the calamities of others."
• often felt I could take media criticism written one hundred years ago, change a few words, and describe exactly how blogs work.
• headlines. A subscription model—whether it's music or news—offers necessary subsidies to the nuance that is lacking in the kind of stories that flourish in one-off distribution. Opposing views can now be included. Uncertainty can be acknowledged. Humanity can be allowed.
• With Ochs's move, reputation began to matter more than notoriety. Reporters started social clubs, where they critiqued one another's work. Some began talk of unionizing. Mainly they began to see journalism as a profession, and from this they developed rules and codes of conduct.
• 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.
• The death of subscription means that instead of attempting to provide value to you, the longtime reader, blogs are constantly chasing Other Readers—the mythical reader out in viral land.
• Whereas subscriptions are about trust, single-use traffic is all immediacy and impulse—even if the news has to be distorted to trigger it. Our news is what rises, and what rises is what spreads, and what spreads is what makes us angry or makes us laugh.
• Our media diet is quickly transformed into junk food, fake stories engineered by people like me to be consumed and passed around. It is the refined and processed sugars of the information food pyramid—out of the ordinary, unnatural, and deliberately sweetened.
• Daniel Boorstin called these things pseudo-events.
• Why does a movie have a premiere? So the celebrities will show up and the media will cover it. Why does a politician hold a press conference? For the attention. A quick run down the list of pseudo-events shows their indispensability to the news business: press releases, award ceremonies, red-carpet events, product launches, anniversaries, grand openings, "leaks," the contrite celebrity interview after a scandal, the sex tape, the tell-all, the public statement,

TACTIC # 6: MAKE IT ALL ABOUT THE HEADLINE

• For media that lives and dies by clicks (the One-Off Problem) it all comes down to the headline. It's what catches the attention of the public—yelled by a newsboy or seen on a search engine.
• You make up the news; blogs make up the headline.
• Outside of the subscription model, headlines are intended not to represent the contents of articles but to sell them
• Come up with the idea and let them think they were the ones who came up with it. Basically, write the headline—or hint at the options—in your e-mail or press release or whatever you give to the blogger and let them steal it.
• Is there a great headline here?
• They'll be so happy to have the headline that they won't bother to check whether it's true or not.

TACTIC # 7: KILL 'EM WITH PAGEVIEW KINDNESS

• Low-tracking articles are removed; heat-seeking articles get moved up.
• Bloggers publish constantly in order to hit their pageview goals or quotas, so when you can give them something that gets them even one view closer to that goal, you're serving their interests while serving yours.
• To understand bloggers, rephrase the saying as "Simplistic measurements matter." Like, did a shitload of people see it? Must be good. Was there a raging comments section going? Awesome! Did the story get picked up on Media Redefined? It made the Drudge Report? Yes! In practice, this is all blogs really have time to look for, and it's easy to give it to them.
• I exploit these pseudo-metrics all the time.
• Pageview journalism is about scale. Sites have to publish multiple stories every few minutes to make a profit, and why shouldn't your story be one of them?
• leaving fake comments to articles about you or your company from blocked IP addresses—good and bad to make it clear that there is a hot debate. Send fake e-mails to the reporter, positive and negative.
• all "we'd have ended up with was a faster horse." Pageview journalism treats people by what they appear to want—from data that is unrepresentative to say the least—and gives them this and only this until they have forgotten that there could be anything else. It takes the audience at their worst and makes them worse.

TACTIC #8: USE THE TECHNOLOGY AGAINST ITSELF

• The way news is found online more or less determines what is found. The way the news must be presented—in order to meet the technical constraints of the medium and the demands of its readers—determines the news itself.
• as media critic Eric Alterman explained in Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy. TV is a visual medium, he said, so to ask the audience to think about something it cannot see would be suicide. If it were possible to put an abstract idea to film, producers would happily show that instead of pithy sound bites. But it isn't, so conflict, talking heads, and B-roll footage are all you'll get. The values of television, Alterman realized, behave like a dictator, exerting their rule over the kind of information that can be transmitted across the channels.
• Since content is constantly expiring, and bloggers face the Sisyphean task of trying to keep their sites fresh, creating a newsworthy event out of nothing becomes a daily occurrence.
• The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging has a simple rule of thumb: Unless readers can see the end of your post coming around eight hundred words in, they're going to stop.
• This gives writers around eight hundred words to make their point—a rather tight window.

TACTIC #9: JUST MAKE STUFF UP (EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT)

• Shit becomes sugar.
• If there is one special skill that journalists can claim, it is the ability to find the angle on any story. That the news is ever chosen over entertainment in the fight for attention is a testament to their skill. High-profile bloggers rightly take great pride in this ability.
• They need to find not only the angle but the click-driving headline, an eye-catching image; generate comments and links; and in some cases, squeeze in some snark. And they have to do it up to a dozen times a day without the help of an editor.
• Since bloggers must find an angle, they always do. Since you know how hard they're looking, it's easy to leave crumbs, fragments, or stray gems that you know will be impossible for them to resist picking up and turning into full-fledged stories. Small news is made to look like big news. Nonexistent news is puffed up and made into news. The result is stories that look just like their legitimate counterparts, only their premise is wrong and says nothing. Such stories hook with false pretenses, analyze false subjects, and inform falsely.
• Whatever will be more exciting, get more pageviews, that is what blogs will say happened.
• practice and showed how bad things were. He orchestrated a study that collected loads of random data and then, finding simply a correlation between dieting and eating chocolate, created a fake institute to announce his monumental but absurdly unscientific findings: You can lose weight by eating chocolate! And bam, everyone from the Huffington Post to the Daily Mail was cheering the news. Of course you can't seriously lose weight that way. The institute didn't exist. The science was junk. The whole thing was a prank. Yet millions of people were given this fake news.
• Set up your own think tank. Call it the Millennial Entrepreneurs Foundation and put out "research" that really just makes companies think they need to hire you as a consultant. Don't think climate change is real? Have a business interest in making people think it isn't? Fund "studies" that confirm what you want and then blast the internet with them. Want to invent some ridiculous new trend? Hire experts to say it's correlated with higher sex drive or that it's all the rage with celebrities. Sadly, no one is going to question you.
• Cooley, the products of our imagination become the solid facts of society.

  BOOK TWO | THE MONSTER ATTACKS: WHAT BLOGS MEAN

  IRIN CARMON, THE DAILY SHOW, AND ME: THE PERFECT STORM OF HOW TOXIC BLOGGING CAN BE

  • Emily Gould, a former editor of Gawker, later wrote a piece for Slate entitled "How Feminist Blogs Like Jezebel Gin Up Page Views by Exploiting Women's Worst Tendencies," in which she explained the motivations behind such a story: It's a prime example of the feminist blogosphere's tendency to tap into the market force of what I've come to think of as "outrage world"—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like Jezebel and also, to a lesser degree, Slate's own XX Factor and Salon's Broadsheet. They're ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism. These firestorms are great for page-view-pimping bloggy business.7
  • make enough accusations, and eventually get enough mainstream media attention that some people began to think it was real.
  • The tactic has come to be called "concern trolling"—acting like you're upset and offended in order to exploit the ethics and empathy of your opponent.
  • The manipulators are indistinguishable from the publishers and bloggers.

  THERE ARE OTHERS: THE MANIPULATOR HALL OF FAME

  • 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 wasn't simply an ideologue; he was an expert on what spreads—a provocateur.
  • the media doesn't mind being played, because they get something out of it—namely, pageviews, ratings, and readers.
  • the best way to make your critics work for you is to make them irrationally angry. Blinded by rage or indignation, they spread your message to every ear and media outlet they can find.
  • Their subtle felonies against the truth are deliberate and premeditated. The way to beat them is not by freaking out. It's by beating them at their own game. And sooner is better—because every day we wait there is more collateral damage.

    SLACKTIVISM IS NOT ACTIVISM: RESISTING THE TIME AND MIND SUCK OF ONLINE MEDIA

    • James Fenimore Cooper presciently observed in the nineteenth century, "If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own."
    • The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. Everything you consume online has been "optimized" to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found—like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you. Blogs are out to game you—to steal your time from you and sell it to advertisers—and they do this every day.
    • You see a link to a video in a YouTube search that makes it look like a hot girl is in it, so you click. You watch, but she's nowhere to be found. Welcome to the art of "thumbnail cheating." It's a common tactic YouTube publishers use to make their videos more tantalizing than the competition.
    • Be discerning. Be cynical. Don't let "close enough" be your standard for truth and opinion. Insist on accuracy and on getting it right.
    • Psychologists call this the "narcotizing dysfunction," when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge, and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something.

    JUST PASSING THIS ALONG: WHEN NO ONE OWNS WHAT THEY SAY

    • Apparently we live in a world where at even the highest and most sensitive level information is passed on without being vetted, where the final judgment of truth or falsity does not fall on the outlet reporting it or the person spreading it but on the readers themselves.
    • In the link economy, the blue stamp of an html link seems like it will support weight. This link could go to anything—it could go to a dictionary definition of "felonious acts," or it could go to a pdf of the entire penal code for the state of Virginia, or it could just go to a gif that when you click it says, "Ha! You shouldn't have trusted me!" But by linking to something, I have vaguely complied with the standards of the link economy. I have rested my authority on a source and linked to it, and now the burden is on the reader to disprove the validity of that link. Online links look like citations but rarely are. If readers give sites just seconds for their headlines, how much effort will they expend weighing whether a blog post meets the burden of proof? As Jeff Jarvis put it: "Online, we often publish first and edit later. Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning."
    • Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, put it more bluntly: "Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap."*
    • as a way of avoiding ever being embarrassingly off base, blogs couch their claims in qualifiers: "We're hearing . . ."; "I wonder . . ."; "Possibly . . ."; "Lots of buzz that . . ."; "Chatter indicates that . . ."; "Sites are reporting . . ."; "Might . . ."; "Maybe . . ."; "Could . . . , Would . . . , Should . . ."; and so on. In other words, they toss the news narrative into the stream without taking full ownership and pretend to be an impartial observer of a process they began.
    • The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what "other people are saying" and link to it instead of doing their own reporting and standing behind it. This changes the news from what has happened into what someone said the news is. Needless to say, these are not close to the same thing.

    CYBERWARFARE: BATTLING IT OUT ONLINE

    • Afghan warlords have a name for this strategy: ghabban, which means to demand protection from a threat that you create.
    • The Russian tactic of kompromat—releasing controversial information about public figures—is real and only more dangerous in an era where blogs publish first and verify second (if at all).
    • The essence of kompromat is that it doesn't matter if the information is true or not, or whatever disturbing means it was acquired, it just matters that it can intimidate and embarrass. And the media enables this tactic—they thrive on it. The real trick in this game is to repeat something enough times that it begins to sound true. One of the things I noticed during the 2016 election was anytime I said something negative about Trump, I would suddenly get hit with tweets from accounts with no followers. By that I mean literally zero followers. How hard is it to get one friend? Hard when you're a fake account. Increasingly, smart media manipulators have realized that one way to make things seem real is by straight up gaslighting.
    • Iterative journalism is possible because of a belief in the web's ability to make corrections and updates to news stories. While fans of iterative journalism acknowledge that increased speed may lead to mistakes, they say it's okay because the errors can be fixed easily. They say that iterative journalism is individually weak but collectively strong, since the bloggers and readers are working together to improve each story—iteratively.

    THE MYTH OF CORRECTIONS

    • The reality is that while the internet allows content to be written iteratively, the audience does not read or consume it iteratively. Each member usually sees what he or she sees a single time—a snapshot of the process—and draws his or her conclusions from that.
    • It turns out that the more unbelievable headlines and articles readers are exposed to, the more it warps their compass—making the real seem fake and the fake seem real.
    • comments section. It is clear to me that the online media cycle is a process not for developing truth but for performing a kind of cultural catharsis. These acts of ritualized destruction are known by anthropologists as "degradation ceremonies." Their purpose is to allow the public to single out and denounce one of its members. To lower their status or expel them from the group. To collectively take out its anger at them by stripping them of their dignity. It is a we-versus-you scenario with deep biological roots.
    • New Yorker critic David Denby came closest to properly defining snark in his book Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. He didn't succeed entirely, but "[s]nark attempts to steal someone's mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness [with] the nasty, insidious, rug-pulling, teasing insult, which makes reference to some generally understood

    THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY DEGRADATION CEREMONY: BLOGS AS MACHINES OF MOCKERY, SHAME, AND PUNISHMENT

    • Snark is the grease of the wheels of the web. Discussing issues fairly would take time and cognitive bandwidth that blogs just don't have. Snark is the style of choice because it's click-friendly, cheap, and fast.
    • To be called a douche or a bro or any such label is to be branded with all the characteristics of what society has decided to hate but can't define. It's a way to dismiss someone entirely without doing any of the work or providing any of the reasons. It says, "You are a fool, and everyone thinks so."
    • These results are unreality. A netherworld between the fake and the real where each builds on the other and they cannot be told apart. This is what happens when the dominant cultural medium—the medium that feeds our other mediums—is so easily corrupted by people like me.
    • Let's start with a basic principle: Only the unexpected makes the news. "For the news is always finally," ‘something that will make people talk.'" "The job of journalism is to provide surprise."* from the routine of daily life. But what if most of what happens is expected? Most things do not depart from the routine. Most things are not worth talking about. But the news must be.
    • The news, whether it's found online or in print, is just the content that successfully navigated the media's filters. Possibly with my help. Since the news informs our understanding of what is occurring around us, these filters create a constructed reality.

    WELCOME TO UNREALITY

    • Today, with almost every major media outlet opening their platform up to self-interested contributors, when all the protections against conflicts of interest or even basic factual inaccuracies have disappeared, the vast majority of the information we find in the media is biased or manipulated. Worse, every major television channel seems to think that campaign surrogates—that is, naked shills for certain politicians—deserve airtime as a means of being balanced.
    • The process is simple: Create a pseudo-event, trade it up the chain, elicit real responses and action, and you have altered reality itself.
    • As Walter Lippmann wrote, the news constitutes a sort of pseudo-environment, but our responses to that environment are not pseudo but actual behavior.
    • When you see a blog begin with "According to a tipster . . . ," know that the tipster was someone like me tricking the blogger into writing what I wanted.
    • Words like "developing,""exclusive," and "sources" are incongruent with our long-held assumptions about what they mean or what's behind them. Bloggers use these "substance words" (like Wikipedia's weasel words) to give status to their flimsy stories. They use the language of Woodward and Bernstein but apply it to a media world that would make even Hearst queasy.
    • And so fictions pass as realities. Everyone is selling and conning, and we hardly even know it. Our emotions are being triggered by simulations—unintentional or deliberate misrepresentations—of cues we've been taught were important. We read some story and it feels important, believing that the news is real and the principles of reporting took place, but it's not.

    CONCLUSION: SO . . . WHERE TO FROM HERE?

  • More than twenty-five years ago, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that the needs of television, then our culture's chief mode of communicating ideas, had come to determine the very culture it was supposed to represent. The particular way that television stages the world, he wrote, becomes the model for how the world itself is to be staged