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

Author:Holiday, Ryan [Holiday, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101583715
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2012-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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