Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (7 page)

It’s bloggers informing bloggers informing bloggers all the way down. This isn’t anecdotal observation. It is fact. In a media monitoring study done by Cision and George Washington University,
89 percent of journalists
reported using blogs for their research for stories. Roughly half reported using Twitter to find and research stories, and more than two thirds use other social networks, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, in the same way.
²
The more immediate the nature of their publishing mediums (blogs, then newspapers, then magazines), the more heavily a journalist will depend on sketchy online sources, like social media, for research.

Recklessness, laziness, however you want to categorize it, the attitude is openly tolerated and acknowledged. The majority of journalists surveyed admitted to knowing that their online sources were less reliable than traditional ones. Not a single journalist said they believed that the information gathered from social media was “a lot more reliable” than traditional media! Why? Because it suffers from a “lack of fact-checking, verification or reporting standards.”
³

For the sake of simplicity, let’s break the chain into three levels. I know these levels as one thing only: beachheads for manufacturing news. I don’t think someone could have designed a system easier to manipulate if they wanted to.

Level 1: The Entry Point

At the first level, small blogs and hyperlocal websites that cover your neighborhood or particular scene are some of the easiest sites to get traction on. Since they typically write about local, personal issues pertaining to a contained readership, trust is very high. At the same time, they are cash-strapped and traffic-hungry, always on the lookout for a big story that might draw a big spike of new viewers. It doesn’t have to be local, though; it can be a site about a subject you know very well, or it can be a site run by a friend.

What’s important is that the site is small and understaffed. This makes it possible to sell them a story that is only loosely connected to their core message but really sets you up to transition to the next level.

Level 2: The Legacy Media

Here we begin to see a mix of online and offline sources. The blogs of newspapers and local television stations are some of the best targets. For starters, they share the same URL and often get aggregated in Google News. Places like the
Wall Street Journal
,
Newsweek
, and CBS all have sister sites like
SmartMoney.com
,
Mainstreet.com
,
BNet.com
, and others that feature the companies’ logos but have their own editorial standards not always as rigorous as their old media counterparts’. They seem legitimate, but they are, as
Fark.com
founder Drew Curtis calls them, just “Mass Media Sections That Update More Often but with Less Editorial Oversight.”

Legacy media outlets are critical turning points in building up momentum. The reality is that the bloggers at
Forbes.com
or the
Chicago Tribune
do not operate on the same editorial guidelines as their print counterparts. However, their final output can be made to look like they carry the same weight. If you get a blog on
Wired.com
to mention your startup, you can smack “‘A revolutionary device’—
Wired
” on the box of your product just as surely as you could if
Wired
had put your CEO on the cover of the magazine.

These sites won’t write about just anything, though, so you need to create chatter or a strong story angle to hook this kind of sucker. Their illusion of legitimacy comes at the cost of being slightly more selective when it comes to what they cover. But it is worth the price, because it will grant the bigger websites in your sights later the privilege of using magic words like: “NBC is reporting …”

Level 3: National

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. Getting to this level usually involves less direct pushing and a lot more massaging. The sites that have already taken your bait are now on your side. They desperately want their articles to get as much traffic as possible, and being linked to or mentioned on national sites is how they do that. These sites will take care of submitting your articles to news aggregator sites like Digg, because making the front page will drive tens of thousands of visitors to their article. Mass media reporters monitor aggregators for story ideas, and often cover what is trending there, like they did with the charity story after it made the front page of Reddit. In today’s world even these guys have to think like bloggers—they need to get as many pageviews as possible. Success on the lower levels of the media chain is evidence that the story could deliver even better results from a national platform.

You just want to make sure that such reporters notice the story’s gaining traction. Take the outlet where you’d ultimately like to receive coverage and observe it for patterns. You’ll notice that they tend to get their story ideas from the same second-level sites, and by tailoring the story to those smaller sites (or site), it sets you up to be noticed by the larger one. The blogs on
Gawker
and
Mediabistro
, for instance, 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. An 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.

News anchors aren’t the only people susceptible to this trick. Scott Vener, the famous hit maker responsible for picking the songs that go into HBO’s trendiest shows, like
Entourage
and
How to Make It in America
, has a reputation for discovering “unknown artists.” Really, he admits, most of the music he finds is just “what is bubbling up on the Internet.”
⁴
Since Vener monitors conversations on Twitter and the comments on trendy music blogs, a shot at a six-figure HBO payday and instant mainstream exposure is just a few manufactured bubbles away.

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.

LEVELS 1, 2, 3:
HOW I TRADED UP THE CHAIN

My campaign for
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
began by vandalizing the billboards. The graffiti was designed to bait two specific sites,
Curbed Los Angeles
and
Mediabistro
’s
FishbowlLA
. When I sent them photos of my work under the fake name Evan Meyer, they both quickly picked it up.
⁵
(For his contributions as a tipster, Evan earned his own
Mediabistro
profile, which still exists. According to the site he has not been “sighted” since.)

Curbed LA
began their post by using my e-mail verbatim:

A reader writes: “I saw these on my way home last night. It was on 3rd and Crescent Heights, I think. Good to know Los Angeles hates him too.”
Provocateur Tucker Max’s new movie “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” opens this weekend
[emphasis mine].

Thanks for the plug!

In creating outrage for the movie, I had a lot of luck getting local websites to cover or spread the news about protests of the screenings we had organized through anonymous tips.
*
They were the easiest place to get the story started. We would send them a few offensive quotes and say something like “This misogynist is coming to our school and we’re so fucking pissed. Could you help spread the word?” Or I’d e-mail a neighborhood site to say that “a controversial screening with rumors of a local boycott” was happening in a few days.

Sex, college protesters, Hollywood—it was the definition of the kind of local story news producers love. After reading about the growing controversy on the small blogs I conned, they would often send camera crews to the screenings. The video of the story would get posted on the station’s website, and then get covered again by the other, larger blogs in that city, like those hosted by a newspaper or companies like the
Huffington Post
. I was able to get the story to register, however briefly, by using a small site with low standards of newsworthiness. Other media outlets might be alerted to this fact, and in turn cover it, giving me another bump. At this point I now have something to work with. Three or four links are the makings of a trend piece, or even a controversy—that’s all major outlets and national website need to see to get excited. Former
Slate.com
media critic Jake Shafer called such manufactured online controversy “frovocation”—a portmanteau of faux provocation. It works incredibly well.

The key to getting from the second to the third level is the soft sell. I couldn’t very well e-mail a columnist at the
Washington Post
and say, “Hey, will you denounce our movie so we can benefit from the negative PR?” So I targeted the sites that those kinds of columnists were likely to read.
Gawker
and
Mediabistro
are very media-centric, so we tailored stories to them to queue ourselves up for outrage from their audiences—which happen to include reporters at places like the
Washington Post.
*
And when I want to be direct, I would register a handful of fake e-mail addresses on Gmail or Yahoo and send e-mails with a collection of all the links gathered so far and say, “How have you not done a story about this yet?” Reporters rarely get substantial tips or alerts from their readers, so to get two or even three legitimate tips about an issue is a strong signal.

So I sent it to them. Well, kind of. I actually just did more of the same fake tips from fake e-mail addresses that worked for the other sites—only this time I had a handful of links from major blogs that made it clear that everyone was talking about it. At this point something amazing happened: The coverage my stunts received began helping the twenty-thousand-dollar-a-month publicist the movie had hired. Rejections from late-night television, newspaper interviews, and morning radio turned into callbacks. Tucker did Carson Daly’s NBC late-night show for the first time. By the end of this charade, hundreds of reputable reporters, producers, and bloggers had been swept up into participating. Thousands more had eagerly gobbled up news about it on multiple blogs. Each time they did, views of the movie trailer spiked, book sales increased, and Tucker became more famous and more controversial. If only people had known they were promoting the offensive Tucker Max brand for us, just as we’d planned.

With just a few simple moves, I’d taken his story from level 1 to level 3—not just once but several times, back and forth. Ultimately the movie did not do nearly as well at release as we’d hoped—this supplementary guerrilla marketing ended up being the entirety of the movie’s advertising efforts rather than a small part of it for reasons outside of my control—but the attention generated by the campaign was overwhelming and incredibly lucrative. Eventually the movie became a cult hit on DVD.

Once you get a story like this started it takes on a life of its own. That’s what happened after I vandalized Tucker’s billboards. Exactly one week later, inspired by my example, sixteen feminists gathered in New York City late at night to vandalize
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
posters all over Manhattan.
⁶
Their campaign got even more coverage than my stunt, including a 650-word, three-picture story on a
Village Voice
blog with dozens of comments (I posted some comments under fake names to get people riled up, but looking at them now I can’t tell which ones are fake and which are real). From the fake came real action.