Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (33 page)

I’ve even done this myself, by advising a friend who needed to strike back at a very famous talent agent (with a legendary bad temper and a reputation for screwing people over) how to have a lawyer draft a letter announcing his intention to file an embarrassing lawsuit, which he could then leak to gossip blogs. Not a real lawsuit, mind you, but the
illusion
of one through an intention letter. The threat made it on
TMZ,
ESPN
, and a host of other blogs.

I ran into the friend recently and learned the outcome of the tactic: They paid him five hundred thousand dollars to go away. I think about this often. They may have stolen from my friend, but I still shook someone down. What strikes me is not that it was some elaborate, orchestrated con—I don’t feel like I discovered some criminal instinct inside myself either—it’s that the tools were so accessible and easy to use, it was almost difficult not to do so. In fact, it came so effortlessly that I didn’t even remember doing it until he reminded me.

The way someone can be exploited through both the legal system (anyone can be sued for anything) and the media, when they cover it (libel of public figures generally requires malicious intent or reckless disregard of the truth), reminds me of the gruesome accident in
Meet Joe Black
in which Brad Pitt’s character is hit by a car, tossed up in the air, and hit by another car going in the other direction.

To not be petrified of a shakedown, a malicious lie, or an unscrupulous rival planting stories is to be unimportant. You only have nothing to fear if you’re a nobody. And even then, well, who knows?

*
I heard an even more anguished version of this cry from the family of a celebrity who contacted me after their son’s death. They wanted help with Wikipedia users who were inserting speculative and untrue information about his tragic accident.

XVIII

THE ITERATIVE HUSTLE

ONLINE JOURNALISM’S BOGUS PHILOSOPHY

IN THIS BOOK I HAVE WRITTEN A LOT ABOUT THE ECOnomics of blogs. I’ve done my best to point my finger at the forces behind the medium rather than at bloggers themselves. It’s how I have always tried to look at this problem, even while I was besieged by unfair controversies or stabbed in the back in public. But that attitude breaks down and becomes impossible when it comes to a certain style of blogging: Iterative Journalism.

Not satisfied merely to have their naked greed accepted as a motivation, publishers and media gurus had to invent a pseudo-philosophy. And after hearing them blather on about it long enough, I have to expose it for the scam that it is.

Iterative journalism, process journalism, beta journalism—whatever name you use, it’s stupid and dangerous. It calls for bloggers to publish first and then verify what they wrote
after
they’ve posted it. Publishers actually believe that their writers need to do every part of the newsmaking process, from discovery to fact-checking to writing and editing in
real time
. It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds why that is a bad thing—but they buy the lie that iterative journalism improves the news.

Having observed this process in action many times, I know that this isn’t true. It’s the reason I now spend my time playing defense instead of offense. I end up stuck putting out fires that never needed to start in the first place. It’s why I get e-mails at 6:00
A.M.
from writers like Irin Carmon asking for a comment on a story of the most dubious origins that they already had decided to “break.”

Why would bloggers do anything else? Erik Wemple, a blogger for the
Washington Post
, writes: “The imperative is to pounce on news when it happens and, in this case, before it happens. To wait for another source is to set the table for someone who’s going to steal your search traffic.” So by the time I’ve woken up in the morning too much misinformation has been spread around the web to possibly be cleaned up. The “incentives are lined up this way,” Tommy Craggs of
Deadspin
tells us, so we better get used to it.
¹

WHAT IS ITERATIVE JOURNALISM?

First, let’s start with what iterative journalism is
not
. It is not saying, “This is what we don’t know or need to know for this story to be important.” It is not saying: “Everybody stop! I am going to get to the bottom of this for you.” Instead, iterative journalists throw up their hands, claim to be knowledge-less, and report whatever they’ve heard as the news.

Seeking Alpha
practiced it perfectly on one recent story: “If the newspaper is correct, and I have no way of verifying it, then this stock is in big trouble.” Really?
No way at all?
At its best, iterative journalism is what
TechCrunch
does: rile up the crowd by repeating sensational allegations and then pretend that they are waiting for the facts to come in. They see no contradiction between publishing a post with the headline “Paypal Shreds Ostensibly Rare Violin Because It Cares” and then writing, “Now a lot of this story isn’t out yet and I have a line in to Paypal about this, so before we get out the pitchforks lets discuss what happened.”
²

Iterative journalists follow blindly wherever the wisps of the speculation may take them, do the absolute minimum amount of research or corroboration, and then post this suspect information immediately, as it is known, in a continuous stream. As Jeff Jarvis put it: “Online, we often publish first and edit later. Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.”

This “learning process” is not some epistemological quest. Dropping the ruse, Michael Arrington of
TechCrunch
put it more bluntly: “Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.” And by extension, since it doesn’t cost him anything to be wrong, he presumably doesn’t bother trying to avoid it. It’s not just less costly; it makes more money, because every time a blog has to correct itself, it gets another post out of it—more pageviews.
*

The iterative approach sells itself as flexible and informative, but much more realistically, it manifests in the forms of rumors, half-truths, shoddy reporting, overwhelming amounts of needless information, and endless predictions and projections. Instead of using slow-to-respond official sources or documents, it leans on rumors, buzz, and questions. Events are “liveblogged” instead of filtered. Bloggers post constantly, depending on others to point out errors or send in updates, or for sources to contact them.

Iterative journalism is defined by its jumpiness. It is as jumpy as reporters can get without outright making things up. Only the slightest twitch is needed for a journalist to get a story live. As a result, stories claiming massive implications, like takeover talks, lawsuits, potential legislation, pending announcements, and criminal allegations, are often posted despite having minuscule origins. A tweet, a comment on a blog, or an e-mail tip might be enough to do the trick. Bloggers don’t fabricate news, but they do suspend their disbelief, common sense, and responsibility in order to get to big stories first. The pressure to “get something up” is inherently at odds with the desire to “get things right.”

A blog practicing iterative journalism would report they are hearing that Google is planning to buy Twitter or Yelp, or break the news of reports that the president has been assassinated (all falsely reported online many times now). The blog would publish the story as it investigates these facts—that is, publish the rumor first while they see if there is anything more to the story. Hypothetically, a media manipulator for Yelp would be behind the leak, knowing that getting the rumors of the acquisition out there could help them jack up the price in negotiations. I personally wouldn’t kick off reports about the president’s death, because I wouldn’t get anything from it, but plenty of pranksters would.

If a blog is lucky, the gamble it took on a sketchy iterative tip will be confirmed later by events. If they are unlucky, and this is the real insidious part of it, the site simply continues to report on the
reaction
to the news, as though they had nothing to do with creating it. This is what happened to
Business Insider
when they wrongly made the shocking claim that New York governor David Paterson would resign. The end of the headline was simply updated from “NYT’s Big David Paterson Bombshell Will Break Monday, Governor’s Resignation To Follow” to “NYT’s Big David Paterson Bombshell Will Break Monday,
Governor’s Office Denies Resignation In Works
”
³
[emphasis mine].

They should have learned their lesson months earlier, after falling for a similar hoax. A prankster posted on CNN’s online iReport platform that a “source” had told them that Steve Jobs had had a severe heart attack.
*
It was the user’s first and only post. It was posted at 4:00
A.M
. It was obviously a hoax. Even the site MacRumors.com, which
writes about nothing but rumors
, knew this post was bogus and didn’t write about it. Nonetheless, following its iterative instincts,
Business Insider
’s sister blog,
Silicon Alley Insider
, rushed to advance the story as a full-fledged post. Apple’s stock price plummeted. Twenty-five minutes later, the story in tatters—the fake tip deleted by iReport; the rumor denied by Apple—
Business Insider
rewrites the lead with a new angle: “‘Citizen journalism’…just failed its first significant test.”
⁴
Yeah, that’s who failed here. You know who didn’t? Those who were shorting Apple stock.