Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (8 page)

THE MEDIA: DANCING WITH ITSELF

Trading up the chain relies on a concept created by crisis public relations expert Michael Sitrick. When attempting to turn things around for a particularly disliked or controversial client, Sitrick was fond of saying, “We need to find a lead steer!” The media, like any group of animals, gallops in a herd. It takes just one steer to start a stampede. The first level is your lead steer. The rest is just pointing everyone’s attention to the direction it went in.

Remember: Every person (with the exception of a few at the top layer) in this ecosystem 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 I began to see this sort of thing happen
without
the deliberate prodding of a promoter like myself. I saw media conflagrations set off by internal sparks. In this networked, interdependent world of blogging, misinformation can spread even when no one is consciously pushing or manipulating it. The system is so primed, tuned, and ready that often it doesn’t need people like me. The monster can feed itself.

Sometimes just a single quote taken out of context can set things off. In early 2011, a gossip reporter for an AOL entertainment blog asked former quarterback Kurt Warner who he thought would be the next ex-athlete to join the show
Dancing with the Stars
. Warner jokingly suggested Brett Favre, who was then embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal. Though the show told him they wanted nothing to do with Favre, the reporter still titled the post “Brett Favre Is Kurt Warner’s Pick to Join ‘Dancing’: ‘Controversy Is Good for Ratings,’” and tagged it as an exclusive. The post made it clear that Warner was just goofing around.

Two days later the blog
Bleacher Report
linked to the piece but made it sound as though Warner was seriously urging Favre to join the show (which, remember, had just told AOL they wanted nothing to do with Favre).

After their story, the rumor started to multiply rapidly. A reporter from a local TV-news website, KCCI Des Moines, caught the story and wrote a sixty-two-word piece titled “Brett Favre’s Next Big Step?” and mentioned the “rumors” discussed on
Bleacher Report
. From there the piece was picked up by
USA Today
—“Brett Favre Joining ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Season 12 Cast?”—
ProFootballTalk
, and others, making the full transition to the national stage.
⁷

To recap what happened: a gossip blog manufactured a scoop by misrepresenting, deliberately or not, a joke. That scoop was itself misrepresented and misinterpreted as it traveled up the chain, going from a small entertainment blog to a sports site to a CBS affiliate in Iowa and eventually to the website of one of the biggest newspapers in the country.
*
What spread was not even a rumor, which at least would have been logical. It was just an empty bit of nothing.

The fake Favre meme spread almost exactly along the lines of my fake outrage campaign for Tucker’s movie—only there was no me involved! The media is hopelessly interdependent. Not only is the web susceptible to spreading false information, but it can also be the source of it.

For a gossip story, it’s not a big deal. But the same weakness creates the opportunity for dangerous, even deadly, abuses of the system.

A TRUE FOOL FEEDING THE MONSTER

I am obviously jaded and cynical about trading up the chain. How could I not be? It’s basically possible to run anything through this chain, even utterly preposterous and made-up information. But for a long time I thought that fabricated media stories could only hurt feelings and waste time. I didn’t think anyone could
die
because of it.

I was wrong. Perhaps you remember Terry Jones, the idiotic pastor whose burning of the Koran in March 2011 led to riots that killed nearly thirty people in Afghanistan. Jones’s bigotry happened to trade up the chain perfectly, and the media unwittingly allowed it.

Jones first made a name for himself in the local Florida press by running offensive billboards in front of his church. Then he stepped it up, announcing that he planned to stage a burning of the Koran. This story was picked up by a small website called Religion News Service. Yahoo linked to their short article, and dozens of blogs followed, which led CNN to invite Jones to appear on the network. He was now a national story.

Yet the media and the public, aware of the potential implications of airing video of his act, began to push back. Many decided they would not air such a video. Some five hundred people attended a protest in Kabul where they burned Jones in effigy. At the last second Jones, under pressure, backed down, and the crisis was averted.

But Terry Jones was back a few months later, announcing for the second time that he planned to burn the Koran. Each blog and outlet that covered the lead-up to the burning made the story—and the media monster that was Terry Jones—that much bolder and bigger. Reporters asked if a direct request from President Obama would stop him, which of course meant that the president of the United States of America would have to negotiate with a homegrown terrorist (he traded up the chain to the
most powerful man in the world
).

This circus was what finally pushed Jones over the edge. In March 2011, he went through with the burning, despite the threatened media blackout.

He called their bluff and it worked. The blackout fell apart when a college student named Andrew Ford, freelancing for the wire service Agence France-Presse, took advantage of a story too dirty and dangerous for many journalists to touch in good conscience.
*

Agence France-Presse, Ford’s publisher, is syndicated on Google and Yahoo! News. They immediately republished his article. The story began to go up the chain, getting bigger and bigger. Roughly thirty larger blogs and online news services had picked up Ford’s piece or linked to it in the first day. It made the story too big for the rest of the media—including the foreign press—to continue to resist. So the news of Jones’s Koran burning, a calculated stunt to extract attention from a system that could not prevent itself from being exploited, became known to the world. And it was a deadly monster of a story.

Within days, twenty-seven people were killed during riots in Afghanistan, including seven UN workers; forty more were injured. Christians were specifically targeted, and Taliban flags were flown in the streets of the Kabul. “It took just one college student to defeat a media blackout and move a story halfway around the globe within twenty-four hours,” the Poynter Institute wrote in an analysis of the reporting. This was, as
Forbes
journalist Jeff Bercovici put it, truly an example of “when Journalism 2.0 kills.”
⁸

One kook, one overeager young journalist, unintentionally show why trading up the chain—feeding the monster—can be so dangerous (though for Jones, very effective). They weren’t just turning nothing into something. The beast these blogs built up was set off needless bloodshed.

You can trade up the chain for charity or you can trade up it to create funny fake news—or you can do it to create violence, hatred, and even incidentally, death. I’ve done the first two, while others, out of negligence or malice, have done the latter. At the end of the day, intentions are not a justification I’m going to hide behind. There is more than enough blame to go around.

*
Proving this theory unnervingly correct,
Newsweek
picked up the Lindsay’s advice from her tiny personal blog and reposted it on the the official
Newsweek
Tumblr.

*
It is standard practice in journalism that the identity of anonymous sources must be shared with the editor so that they know the person is real and the writer hasn’t been tricked. I have been used as an anonymous source for blogs dozens of times. No one has ever asked my identity, I’ve never been verified, and I have never spoken to an editor.

*
In fact, a few years later one of the sites we exploited repeatedly while promoting the movie wrote a post titled: “Are traditional news media stealing scoops from bloggers?,” which accused the
Chicago Tribune
of stealing article ideas from her blog
Chicago Now.
She was right, they were stealing, and that’s exactly how we got coverage into the editorial page of the
Tribune
.

*
This was excellently caught and detailed by
Quickish
in its post “‘Brett Farve on Dancing With the Stars?’ No. Not Even a Rumor”; their research was promptly stolen and reposted by the oft-guilty
Deadspin
for an easy twenty-five thousand pageviews.

*
This happens in politics all the time, as Democratic consultant Christian Grantham told
Forbes,
“Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won’t print. So they’ll give those stories to the blogs.” (Daniel Lyons, “Attack of the Blogs,” last modified November 14, 2005,
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/1114/128_3.html
).

III

THE BLOG CON

HOW PUBLISHERS MAKE MONEY ONLINE