Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (31 page)

THE LINK ILLUSION

In the link economy, the blue stamp of an html link
seems
like it will support weight. (As had the links to
The Guardian
story containing the false quote.) If I write on my blog that “Thomas Jefferson, by his own remarks, admitted to committing acts considered felonious in the State of Virginia,” you’d want to see some evidence before you were convinced. Now imagine that I added a link to the words “acts considered felonious.” This link could go to anything—it could go to a dictionary definition of “felonious acts” or it could go to a pdf of the entire penal code for the state of Virginia. Either way, I have vaguely complied with the standards of the link economy. I have rested my authority on a source and linked to it, and now the burden is on the reader to disprove the validity of that link. Bloggers know this and abuse it.

Blogs have long borrowed on the principle that links imply credibility. Even Google exploits this perception. The search engine, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford students, copies a standard practice from academia in which the number of citations a scientific paper gets is an indicator of how influential or important it is. But academic papers are reviewed by peers and editorial boards—shaky citations are hard to get away with.

Online links look like citations but rarely are. Through flimsy attribution blogs are able to assert wildly fantastic claims that will spread well and drive comments. Some might be afraid to make something up outright, so the justification of “I wasn’t the first person to say this” is very appealing. It’s a way of putting the burden all on the other guy, or on the reader.

People consume content online by scanning and skimming. To use the bird metaphor again, they are what William Zinsser called “impatient bird[s], perched on the thin edge of distraction.” Only 44 percent of users on Google News click through to real the actual article. Meaning:
Nobody clicks links
, even interesting ones. Or if they do they’re not exactly rigorous in pouring over it to make sure it proves the point in the
last
article they read.

If readers give sites just seconds for their headlines, how much effort will they expend weighing whether a blog meets the burden of proof? The number of posts we read conscientiously, like some amateur copy editor and fact-checker rolled into one, are far outpaced by the number of articles we just assume are reliable. And the material from one site quickly makes its way to others. Scandalous statements get traction wider and faster—and their dubious nature is more likely to be obscured by the link economy when it’s moving at viral speed. Who knows how many times you and I have passed over spurious assertions made to look legitimate through a bright little link?

A BROKEN PHILOSOPHY

May
becomes
is
becomes
has
, I tell my clients. That is, on the first site the fact that someone “may” be doing something becomes the fact that they “are” doing something by the time it has made the rounds. The next time they mention your name, they look back and add the past tense to their last assertion, whether or not it actually happened. This is recursion at work, officially sanctioned and very possible under the rules of the link economy.

Under these circumstances it is far too easy for mistakes to pile on top of mistakes or for real reporting to be built on lies and manipulations—for analysis to be built on a foundation of weak support. It becomes so easy, as one reporter has put it, for things to become an amalgam of an amalgam.

The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what “other people are saying” and link to it instead of doing their own reporting and standing behind it. This changes the news from what has happened into what someone said the news is. Needless to say, these are not close to the same things.

One of my favorite books is Kathryn Schulz’s
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
. Though media mistakes are not the subject of the book, Schulz does do a good job of explaining why the media so regularly gets it wrong. Scientists, she says, replicate each other’s experiments in order to prove or disprove their findings. Conversely, journalists replicate one another’s conclusions and build on top of them—often when they are not correct.

The news has always been riddled with errors, because it is self-referential instead of self-critical. Mistakes don’t occur as isolated incidents but ripple through the news, sometimes with painful consequences. Because blogs and the media have become so interdependent and linked, a lapse of judgment or poor analysis in one place affects many places.

Science essentially pits the scientists against each other, each looking to disprove the work of others. This process strips out falsehoods, mistakes, and errors. Journalism has no such culture. Reporters look to one-up each other on the same subjects, often adding new scoops to existing stories. Meanwhile, people like Jeff Jarvis explicitly advise online newspapers and aspiring blogs not to waste their time trying “to replicate the work of other reporters.” In the age of the link, he says, “this is clearly inefficient and unnecessary.” Don’t waste “now-precious resources matching competitors stories” or checking and verifying them like a scientist would. Instead, pick up where they left off and see where the story takes you. Don’t be a perfectionist, he’s saying; join the link economy and delegate trust.

When I hear people preach about interconnectedness and interdependence—like one reporter who suggested he and his colleagues begin using the tag NR (neutral retweet) to preface the retweets on Twitter that they were posting but not endorsing—I can’t help but think of the subprime mortgage crisis. I think about one bank that hands off subprime loans to another, which in turn packages them and hands them to another still.
Why are you retweeting things you don’t believe in?!
I think about the rating agencies whose job was to monitor the subprime transactions but were simply too busy, too overwhelmed, and too conflicted to bother doing it. I think of falling dominoes. I wonder why we would do that to ourselves again—multiplied many times over in digital.

Of course replication is expensive. But it is a known cost, one that should be paid up front by the people who intend to profit from the news. It is a protection and a deterrent all at once. The unknown cost comes from failure—of banks or of trust or of sources—and it is borne by everyone, not just the businesses themselves.

When Jarvis and others breathlessly advocate for new concepts they do not understand, it is both comical and dangerous. The web gurus try to tell us that this distributed, crowd-sourced version of fact-checking and research is more accurate, because it involves more people. But I side with Descartes and have more faith in a scientific approach, in which every man is responsible for his own work—in which everyone is questioning the work of everyone else, and this motivates them to be extra careful and honest.

The old media system was a long way from perfect, but their costly business model, so derided by these web gurus, pushed for at least a semblance of scientific replication. It found independent confirmation wherever possible. It advocated editorial independence instead of risky interdependence. It is expensive, sure, and definitely unsexy, but it is a step above the pseudo-science of the link economy. It was certainly better than what we have online, where blogs do nothing but report what “[some other blog] is reporting …” where blogs pass along unverified information using the excuse, “but I linked to where I stole it from.”

To simply know where something came from, or just the fact that it came from somewhere else, does not alleviate the problems of the delegation of trust. In fact, this is the insidious part of the link economy. It creates the appearance of a solution without solving anything. Some other blog talked to a source (don’t believe them; here’s the link)
so now they don’t have to
. That isn’t enough for me. We deserve better.

I happened to get lucky that CNN decided not to run their poorly sourced story. I appealed to their reason and humanity and it worked. Nearly two years have passed since then. To this day I consider the incident a fluke, and I assume I will never be so lucky again. And neither will anyone else.

*
One blogger from
AnnArbor.com
did e-mail me. He asked, “Since AA was closing stores in NYC, would we be closing in Ann Arbor too?” No.
No!
It didn’t stop him, either.

XVII

EXTORTION VIA THE WEB

FACING THE ONLINE SHAKEDOWN

IN BYGONE DAYS A COMPANY MIGHT HIRE A PR MAN TO make sure people talked about their company. Today, even a company with little interest in self-promotion must hire one, simply to make sure people
don’t
say untrue things about their company. If it was once about spreading the word, now it’s as much about stopping the spread of inaccurate and damaging words.

When the entire system is designed to quickly repeat and sensationalize whatever random information it can find, it makes sense that companies would need someone on call 24/7 to put out fires before they start. That person is often someone like me.