Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (26 page)

On another note, one thing we’re taking very seriously is the disposal of the bottles we had in the stores. Even though our polish was DBP-, toluene-, and formaldehyde-free, we don’t want our stores just tossing it in the trash. We’re using our internal shipping and distribution line to arrange a pickup and removal of the polish to make sure it gets done right.

I felt this was a great—and ethical—response. But it was too late. Carmon copied and pasted my statement to the bottom of the article and left the headline exactly as it was, adding only “Updated” to the end of it. Even though the statement disproved the premise of her article, Carmon’s implication was that she was mostly right and was just adding a few new details. She wasn’t—she’d been totally wrong, but it didn’t matter, because the opportunity to change the readers’ minds had passed. The facts had been established.

To make matters worse, Carmon replied to my last e-mail with a question about
another
trumped-up story she planned to write about the company. She ended again with:

By the way, just FYI—I’d love to be able to include your responses in my initial post, but unfortunately I won’t be able to wait for them, so if this is something you can immediately react to, that would be great.

The controversy eventually meant the undoing of the nail polish company we’d worked so hard to support. Had these blogs not rushed to print a bogus story, the problem could have been handled privately. The massive outcry that followed Carmon’s post necessitated an immediate and large-scale response that the cosmetic company could not handle. No question, they’d made mistakes, but nothing remotely close to what was reported. Overwhelmed by the controversy and the pressure from the misplaced anger of the blogger horde, the small manufacturer fell behind on their orders. Their operations fell into disarray, and the company was later sued by American Apparel for $5 million in damages to recover various losses. As the lawyers would say, while the nail polish company is responsible for their manufacturing errors, if not for Carmon’s needless attack and rush to judgment—the proximate cause—it all could have been worked out.

Carmon is a media manipulator—she just doesn’t know it. She may think she is a writer, but everything about her job makes her a media manipulator. She and I are in the same racket. From the twisting of the facts, the creation of a nonexistent story, the merciless use of attention for profit—she does what I do. The system I abused was now abusing me and the people I cared about. And nobody had any idea.

A PATTERN OF MANIPULATION

Did you know that
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
hates women? And that they have a long history of discriminating against and firing women? Sure, one of its cocreators is female, and one of its best-known and longest-running correspondents is a woman, and there really isn’t any evidence to prove what I just claimed, but I assure you, I’d never lie.

This was the manufactured scandal that
Jezebel
slammed into
The Daily Show
in June 2010. Irin Carmon’s piece blindsided them just as her
Jezebel
nail polish story had blindsided us. It began when Carmon posted an article titled, “
The Daily Show
’s Woman Problem.”
²
Relying on some juicy quotes from people no longer with the show, Carmon claimed that the show had a poor record of finding and developing female comedic talent. She was also determined to make a name for herself. In order to accomplish this, she didn’t actually speak to anyone who still worked for
The Daily Show
. It was much easier to use a collection of anonymous and off-the-record sources—like an ex-employee who hadn’t worked there for eight years. As you should expect by now, the article was a sensation.

The cluster of stories that followed were read more than five hundred thousand times. The story was picked up by ABC News, the
Huffington Post
, the
Wall Street Journal
, E!,
Salon
, and others. In a memo to his staff, Carmon’s boss and the publisher of
Gawker
, Nick Denton, commended the story for getting the kind of publicity that can’t be bought. Denton wrote, “It was widely circulated within the media, spawned several more discussions, and affirmed our status as both an influencer and a muckraker.” Jon Stewart was even forced to respond to the story on air. The
New York Times
rewarded Carmon and the website with a glowing profile: “A Web Site That’s Not Afraid to Pick a Fight.”
²

For a writer like Carmon, whose pay is determined by the number of pageviews her posts receive, this was a home run. And for a publisher like Denton, the buzz the story generated made his company more attractive to advertisers and increased the valuation of his brand.

That her story was a lie didn’t matter. That it was part of a pattern of manipulation didn’t matter.

The women of
The Daily Show
published an open letter on the show’s website a few days after the story hit.
³
Women accounted for some 40 percent of the staff, the letter read, from writers and producers to correspondents and interns, and had over a hundred years’ experience on the show among them. The letter was remarkable in its clarity and understanding of what the blogger was doing. They addressed it, “Dear People Who Don’t Work Here” and called Carmon’s piece an “inadequately researched blog post” that clung “to a predetermined narrative about sexism at
The Daily Show
.”

If I hadn’t experienced the exact situation myself, the letter would have made me hopeful that the truth would win out. But that’s not how it works online. The next day the
New York Times
ran an article about their response. “‘The Daily Show’ Women Say the Staff Isn’t Sexist” the headline blared.
⁴

Think about how bullshit that is: Because the
Jezebel
piece came first, the letter from
The Daily
Show
women is shown merely as a response instead of the refutation that it actually was. No matter how convincing, it only reasserts, in America’s biggest newspaper, Carmon’s faulty claim of sexism on the show. They could never undo what they’d be accused of—no matter how spurious the accusation—they could only deny it. And denials don’t mean anything online.

Kahane Cooperman, a female co–executive producer at the show, told the
New York Times
: “No one called us, no one talked to us. We felt like, we work here, we should take control of the narrative.” She didn’t know how it works.
Jezebel
controls the narrative. Carmon made it up; no one else had a right to it.

The day after the story ran, but before the women of
The Daily Show
could respond, Carmon got another post out of the subject: “5 Unconvincing Excuses for
Daily Show
Sexism,” as she titled it—dismissing in advance the criticism leveled by some concerned and skeptical commenters. It was a preemptive strike to marginalize anyone who doubted her shaky accusations and to solidify her pageview-hungry version of reality.
⁵

In the titles of her first and second articles, you can see what she is doing.
The Daily Show
’s “Woman Problem” from her first post became their “Sexism” in her second. One headline bootstraps the next; the what-ifs of the first piece became the basis for the second. Her story proves itself.

When the
New York Times
asked Carmon to respond to the women of
The Daily Show
’s claim that they were not interviewed or contacted for the story (which restated the allegations), she “refused to comment further.” Yet when
The Daily Show
supposedly invoked this right by not speaking to Carmon it was evidence that they were hiding something. A double standard? I wouldn’t expect anything different.

Did Carmon update her piece to reflect the dozens of comments released by
Daily Show
women? Or at least give their response a fair shake? No, of course not. In a forty-word post (forty words!) she linked their statement with the tag “open letter” and whined that she just wished they spoken up when she was writing the story. She didn’t acknowledge the letter’s claim that they actually
had
tried to speak with her and neglected to mention that it’s
her job
to get their side of the story before publishing, even if that’s difficult or time-consuming.
⁶

How many
Jezebel
readers do you think threw out their original impression for a new one? Or even saw the update? The post making the accusation did 333,000 views. Her post showing the
Daily Show
women’s response did 10,000 views—3 percent of the impressions of the first shot.

Did Carmon really send repeated requests for comment to
The Daily Show
? A major television show like that would get hundreds of requests a week. Who did she contact? Did she provide time for them to respond? Or is it much more likely that she gave the show a cursory heads-up minutes before publication? In my experience, the answers to these questions are appalling. No wonder she wouldn’t explain her methods to the
Times
. All I have to go on is my personal history with Carmon, and it tells me that at every juncture she does whatever will benefit her most. I’ve seen the value she places on the truth—particularly if it gets in the way of a big story.

There is something deeply twisted about an arrangement like this one. Carmon’s accusation received five times as many views as the post about
The Daily Show
women’s response, even though the latter undermines much of the former. There is something wrong with the way the writer is compensated for both pieces—as well as the third, fourth, or fifth she managed to squeeze out of the topic (again, more than five hundred thousand pageviews combined). Finally, there is something wrong with the fact that Denton’s sites benefit merely by going toe-to-toe with a cultural icon like Jon Stewart—even if their reports are later discredited. They know this; it’s why they do it.

This is how it works online. A writer finds a narrative to advance that is profitable to them, or perhaps that they are personally or ideologically motivated to advance, and are able to thrust it into the national consciousness before anyone has a chance to bother checking if it’s true or not.

Emily Gould, one of the original editors of
Gawker
, later wrote a piece for
Slate.com
entitled “How Feminist Blogs Like
Jezebel
Gin Up Page Views by Exploiting Women’s Worst Tendencies” in which she explained the motivations behind such a story:

It’s a prime example of the feminist blogosphere’s tendency to tap into the market force of what I’ve come to think of as “outrage world”—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like
Jezebel
and also, to a lesser degree,
Slate
’s own
XX Factor
and
Salon
’s
Broadsheet.
They’re ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism. These firestorms are great for page-view-pimping bloggy business.
⁷

Let me go a step further. Writers like Irin Carmon are driven more by shrewd self-interest and disdain for the consequences than they are by jealousy. It’s a pattern for Carmon, as we’ve seen. She’s not stopping, either.

Just a few months later, needing to reproduce her previous success, she saw an opportunity for a similar story, about producer and director Judd Apatow. After spotting him at a party, she tried to recapture the same outrage that had propelled her
Daily Show
piece into the public consciousness by again accusing a well-liked public figure of something impossible to deny.

The actual events of the evening: Director Judd Apatow attended a party hosted by a friend. Carmon attempted to corner and embarrass him for story she wanted to write but failed. Yet in the world of blogging, this becomes the headline: “Judd Apatow Defends His Record on Female Characters.” It did about thirty-five thousand views and a hundred comments.
⁸

Carmon tried to “get” him, and did. I guess I have to give her credit, because this time she actually talked to the person she hoped to make her scapegoat. But still, you can actually see, as it happens, her effort to trap Apatow with the same insinuations and controversy that she did with Stewart. In the interview, Carmon repeatedly presented criticism of Apatow’s movies as generally accepted fact that she was merely the conduit for, referring to his “critics” as though she wasn’t speaking for herself.