So you're cruising around the Internet and
you see a link to an article from some trusted
news source and it's got a really intriguing
title, so you read it. And later you find
out that that whole article was mostly false.
What you thought was news was really just
gossip or conjecture. So we've got Ryan Holiday
here. He's a media manipulator and he explains
how this happens.
So, so what I quickly discovered was that
the media was this sort of hierarchy or chain.
At the bottom you have small blogs who have
small readerships but correspondingly low
threshold for what they will and will not
publish. Say this blog publishes a rumor then
Business Insider or The Huffington Post or
Perez Hilton writes about. And now, because
of the stature of those sites, it becomes
something that people are talking about on
Twitter, on Facebook, on email, they're chattering
about it.
And what happens is producers for CNN, producers
for a right wing talk radio, journalists for
The New York Times -- where do they find out
the news? They're not out pounding the pavement
like it's 100 years ago. No, they're reading
what people are chattering about online.
And that cycle is hijacked by people like
me who say, "Okay, if this blog here has the
power to accidently start a media firestorm
by what it publishes, I'm going to get them
to publish something that benefits me."
I, I've sent them fake anonymous emails and
watched as that turned into front page stories.
The public isn't aware that this is how their
news is being made, but on both sides of the
divide -- on the marketing side and on the
news side -- neither is particularly concerned
with quality. They're concerned with what
will get attention.
And that's because of how blog sites and news
sites make money. First, they get a lot of
viewers to their pages. And then they sell
that view count to advertisers. So to get
more views you do stuff like...
Asking rhetorical untrue questions in a headline;
doing your fact checking after you've published
an article; gossiping; speculating; making
up a story from whole cloth.
But what if I want good, accurate news. I
mean, shouldn't news sites want to give that
to me?
Yeah, look, uh, I think the rule of thumb
is if you're not paying for it they don't
give a shit about you. They're loyal to their
advertisers.
If you aren't paying for it you aren't the
customer, you are really the product.