Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (12 page)

TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR

THE PROBLEM OF JOURNALISM, SAYS EDWARD JAY Epstein in his book
Between Fact and Fiction
, is simple. Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn’t witness it personally. They are “entirely dependent on self-interested ‘sources’” to supply their facts. Every part of the news-making process is defined by this relationship; everything is colored by this reality.

Who are these self-interested sources? Well, anyone selling a product, a message, or an agenda. People like me.

When the
New York Times
publishes leaked documents there is an implicit understanding that they have at least attempted to verify their validity. The same goes for the identity of the source who gave it to them. Online, anonymous means something else entirely. Quotes and tips are drawn from unsolicited, untraced e-mails or angry comments pulled from comments sections, or sent in by people who have something to gain from it. I know, because I have been this kind of source dozens of times, and it was never for anything important. My identity is never verified.

Today, the online-driven news cycle is going a million miles a minute in a million directions. The
New York Times
may still
try
to verify their sources, but it hardly matters, because no one else does. This creates endless opportunities for people like me to slip in and twist things to my liking. As Epstein said, the discrepancy between what actually happened and the version of what happened provided by sources is an enormous gray area. Of all such areas, it’s where I have the most fun and direct influence.

THE DELIBERATE LEAK

Once during a lawsuit I needed to get some information into the public discussion of it, so I dashed off a fake internal memo, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to a bunch of blogs as if I were an employee leaking a “memo we’d just gotten from our boss.” The same bloggers who were uninterested in the facts when I informed them directly gladly put up
EXCLUSIVE!
and
LEAKED!
posts about it. They could tell my side of the story because I told it to them in words they wanted to hear. More people saw it than ever would have had I issued an “official statement.”

Another time I had some promotional images for a Halloween campaign I also couldn’t use, because of copyright concerns. I still wanted them seen, so I had one of my employees e-mail them to
Jezebel
and
Gawker
and write, “I shouldn’t be doing this but I found some secret images on the American Apparel server and here they were.” The post based on this lie did ninety thousand views. The writer wrote back a helpful tip: No need to leak me info from your company e-mail address; you might get caught. I thought, but how else could she be sure they were real?

It was funny at the time. Then a few months later, a U.S. congressman allegedly exchanged e-mails with a girl on craigslist and sent her a shirtless photo of himself. The girl forwarded this photo and the incriminating e-mail correspondence that supposedly occurred along with them to
Gawker
(which owns
Jezebel
).
Gawker
posted it, and the congressman immediately resigned.

Knowing now that an anonymous tip to
Gawker
has the power to end the career of a United States congressman took a little of the fun out of it for me. Scratch that—now my personal knowledge of
Gawker
’s sourcing standards scares me shitless.

PRESS RELEASE 2.0

When I first started in PR all of the leading web gurus were proclaiming the death of the press release. Good riddance, I thought. Journalists
should
care too much about what they write to churn out articles and posts based on press releases.

I could not have been more wrong. Before long I came to see 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.

As a 2010 study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found:

As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear
word for word
in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.
¹
[emphasis mine]

So I started putting out press releases all the time. Open a new store? Put out a press release. Launch a new product? Put out a press release. Launch a new
color
of a new product? Press release. A blogger might pick it up. And even if no outlets do, press releases through services like PRWeb are deliberately search-engine optimized to show up well in Google results indefinitely. Most important, investing sites like Google Finance, CNN Money, Yahoo! Finance, and Motley Fool all automatically syndicate the major release wires. If you’re a public company with a stock symbol, the good news in any release you put out shows up right in front of your most important audience: stockholders. Minutes after you put it out, it’s right there on the company’s stock page in the “Recent News” section, eagerly being read by investors and traders.

I quickly learned that not everyone saw this as harmless, low-hanging media fruit. My instinct is not illegal profit, but for those who have it, blogs’ blind faith in press releases presents opportunities. It did for New York stockbroker Lambros Ballas: He was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for issuing fake online press releases about the stocks of companies like Google, Disney, and Microsoft and seeding them on blogs and finance forums. On the fake news of an acquisition offer from Microsoft, shares of
Local.com
jumped 75 percent in one day, after which he and other traders dumped all their shares and moved on to pumping other stocks on fake news.
²

It’s stunning how much news is now driven by such releases—reputable or otherwise. A LexisNexis search of major newspapers for the words “in a press release” brings back so many results that the service actually attempts to warn you against trying, saying, “This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 3,000 results. If you continue with this search it may take some time to return this information.” Same goes for the phrase “announced today” and “told reporters.” In other words, newspapers depended on marketing spam literally too many times to count in the last year.

A Google blog search for “said in a press release” (meaning they quoted directly from a release) brings back 307,000 results for the same period as the LexisNexis search, and more than 4 million for all time. “Announced today” brings up more than 32,000 articles for a single week. If you get specific, an internal search of
TechCrunch
brings up more than 5,000 articles using “announced today” and 7,000 attributed citations to press releases. This pales in comparison to the
Huffington Post
, whose bloggers have written the words “announced today” more than 50,000 times and cited press releases more than 200,000 times. And, of course, there is also
talkingpointsmemo.com
, whose name unintentionally reveals what most blogs and newspapers carelessly pass on to their readers: prewritten talking points from the powers that be.

Anyone can now be that power. Anyone can give blogs their talking points. To call it a sellers’ market is an understatement. But it’s the only thing I can think of that comes close to describing a medium in which dominant personalities like tech blogger Robert Scoble can nostalgically repost things on his Google+ account like the “original pitch” for publicity that the iPad start-up Flipboard had sent him.
³
It’s a great time to be a media manipulator when your marks actually love receiving PR pitches.

NOT EVEN NEEDING TO BE THE SOURCE

Bloggers are under incredible pressure to produce, leaving little time for research or verification, let alone for speaking to sources. In some cases, the story they are chasing is so crazy that they don’t want to risk doing research, because the whole facade would collapse.

From my experience, bloggers operate by some general rules of thumb: If a source can’t be contacted by e-mail, they probably can’t be a source. I’ve talked to bloggers on the phone only a few times, ever—but thousands of times over e-mail. If background information isn’t publicly or easily available, it probably can’t be included. Writers are at the mercy of official sources, such as press releases, spokesmen, government officials, and media kits. And these are for the instances they even bother to check anything.

Most important, they’re at the mercy of Wikipedia, because that’s where they do their research. Too bad people like me manipulate that too. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of a man who, as a joke, changed the name of comedian and actor Russell Brand’s mother on Wikipedia from Barbara to Juliet. When Brand took his mother as his date to the Academy Awards shortly after, the
Los Angeles Times
ran the online headline over their picture: “Russell Brand and His Mother Juliet Brand …”