Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (35 page)

It’s a vicious cycle. The lead bum steer of an iterative story starts a stampede. And after so many of these stampedes, the audience is conditioned to expect an endless parade of bigger and bigger scoops that no reporter could ever deliver. What spread yesterday—drove tweets of “Holy shit, did you hear?”—is hardly enough to spread the same way today. So it must be newer, faster, crazier. Now they must maintain it constantly by reporting on even more tenuous material and making crazier conclusions from it. And why shouldn’t they? They can just apologize later.

Our friends Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington like to use the metaphor of beta to explain this new form of journalism—like how Google rolls out their new services with software bugs still in it.
It’s just like that
, they say. They forget we’re not dealing with software or ones and zeros; we’re dealing with the news and information, and those things affect people’s lives. Or more likely, Jarvis and Arrington know this and don’t care, content to advocate a concept with painful consequences for everyone but them. It’s made them wealthy and influential; what does it matter if the metaphor is wrong?

What Google says when they release a product in beta is that the fundamentals are strong but the superficialities are a work in progress—aesthetics, feature additions, nagging issues. The iterative journalism reporting model suggests the opposite—the structure, the headline, the links, and the picture slideshows are there, but the
facts
are suspect. What kind of process is that?

If there is a coding mistake, I won’t get an incorrect view of the market or an industry. I won’t begin to wrongly think that So-and-So is a racist or some restaurant is filled with cockroaches when it actually isn’t. Software as beta means the risk of small glitches; the news as beta means the risk of a false reality.

The poet Hesiod once wrote that rumor and gossip are a “light weight to lift up, but heavy to carry and hard to put down.” Iterative journalism is much the same. Its practices come easily, almost naturally, given the way blogs are designed and the way the web operates. It
seems
cheaper, but it’s not. The costs have just been externalized, to the readers and the subjects of the stories, who write down millions each year in falsely damaged reputations and perceptions. Iterative journalism makes the news cheap to produce but expensive to read.

*
From an
SB Nation
sports post about the NFL lockout: “There are 382 more updates to this story. Read most recent updates.”

*
I imagine these repeated and exhausting rumors of Jobs’s death made it all the more painful for his family when they were eventually placed in the position, three years later, of announcing that he had actually passed away. No family should have to worry: Are people going to believe us? Or, Will he get less than his proper due because the public’s patience has been wasted through so many premature reports?

*
Urbahn got more than that one message out before the president’s announcement; he got several. He wrote, of his own breaking news: “Don’t know if it’s true, but let’s pray it is” and “Ladies, gents, let’s wait to see what the President says. Could be misinformation or pure rumor.”

*
See Evgeny Morozov’s
The Net Delusion
for a discussion of blogs’ premature and overblown coverage of the 2009–2010 Iranian revolution and the subsequent crackdown on activists and social media in Iran.

XIX

THE MYTH OF CORRECTIONS

ITERATIVE JOURNALISM IS POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF A belief in the web’s ability to make corrections and updates to news stories. Fans of iterative journalism acknowledge that while increased speed may lead to mistakes, it’s okay because the errors can be fixed easily. They say that iterative journalism is individually weak but collectively strong, since the bloggers and readers are working together to improve each story—iteratively.

As someone who has been both written about as a developing story and worked with people who are written about this way all the time, I can assure you that this is bullshit.
Corrections online are a joke
. All of the justifications for iterative journalism are not only false—they are literally the opposite of how it works in practice.

Bloggers are no more eager to seek out feedback that shows they were wrong than anyone else is. And they are understandably reluctant to admit their mistakes publicly, as bloggers must do. The bigger the fuckup, the less likely people want to cop to it. It’s called “cognitive dissonance.” We’ve known about it for a while.

Seeing something you know to be untrue presented in the news as true is exasperating. I don’t know what it feels like to be a public figure (I realize it’s hard to be sympathetic to their feelings), but I have had untruths spread about me online, and I know that it sucks. I know that as a press agent, having seen that many of these mistakes bloggers make are easily preventable, it is extra infuriating. And they feel absolutely no guilt about making them.

If you want to get a blogger to correct something—which sensitive clients painfully insist upon—be prepared to have to be an obsequious douche. You’ve got to flatter bloggers into thinking that somehow the mistake wasn’t their fault. Or be prepared to be an asshole. Sometimes the resistance is so strong, and the entitlement so baked in, that you have to risk your friendly to each other’s face relationship by calling the blogger out to their publisher boss.

Sometimes it has to get even more serious than that. One of my favorite all-time blogger corrections stories involves Matt Drudge, the political blogger sainted in the history of blogging for breaking the Monica Lewinsky story. But few people remember the big political “scandal” Drudge broke before that one. Based on an unnamed source, Drudge accused prominent journalist and Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal of a shocking history of spousal abuse—and one covered up by the White House, no less.

Except none of it was true. Turns out there was no evidence that Blumenthal had ever struck his wife, nor was there a White House cover-up. The story quickly fell apart after it became clear an anonymous Republican source had whispered into Drudge’s ear to settle a political score against Blumenthal. Drudge eventually admitted it to the
Washington Post
: “[S]omeone was using me to try to go after [him]…. I think I’ve been had.”

Yet Drudge’s posted correction on the story said only, “I am issuing a retraction of my information regarding Sidney Blumenthal that appeared in the
Drudge Report
on August 11, 1997.” He refused to apologize for the pain caused by his recklessness, even in the face of a $30 million libel suit. And four years later, when the ordeal finally ended, Drudge
still
defended iterative journalism: “The great thing about this medium I’m working in is that you can fix things fast.”
¹

There’s only one word for someone like that: dickhead.

I deal with people like him every day. Why do they get to be this way? They’re the ones who were wrong—and it was their job to be right, wasn’t it? Nope. Not according to their philosophy. Remember, the onus for pointing out inaccuracy falls on basically everybody but the person who gets paid to report facts for a living.

CORRECTING PEOPLE WHO ARE WRONG FOR A LIVING

I once gave the show
The Price is Right
a five-hundred-dollar American Apparel gift card to use as a prize. We thought it’d be funny, since the show is television’s longest-running guilty pleasure. (Honestly, I was just excited as a fan.) The episode aired in September and was quickly posted by one of my employees on the company’s YouTube account. Everyone loved it and got the irony—a cool brand slumming it on a show only old people care about. Well, everyone got it except the popular advertising blog
Brand Channel
, which posted a nonironic piece titled “American Apparel Taps Drew Carey for Image Turnaround.”
²
With excruciating obliviousness they proceeded to discuss the merits of my “surprising choice” to film a “back-to-school commercial, featuring a mock version of classic US game show
The Price is Right
hosted by an all-American TV personality Drew Carey.”

How does one begin to correct that? Where would you even start? We’re not dealing with the same reality. If I had even known how to communicate to that idiot that Drew Carey was, in fact, the actual host of
The Price Is Right
, and that the video the blogger watched was a clip from an actual episode and not a commercial, I still would have to convince the writer to retract the
entire thing
, because an update couldn’t have fixed how wrong it was. Since I no longer foolishly hope for miracles, I didn’t even try to correct it, even as other blogs repeated the claims. I just had to sit there and watch as people believed something so stupid was true; the writer was wrong to the point of it actually working to their advantage.

If I’d wanted to try to get a correction, however, it would not have made much of a difference. Getting a correction posted takes time, often hours or days, occasionally weeks, because bloggers deliberately drag their feet. Posts do most of their traffic shortly after going live and being linked to. By the time your correction or update happens, there is hardly much of an audience. I recall sending e-mails to
Gawker
and
Jezebel
on several occasions over matters of factual errors and not receiving a response. Only after e-mailing again (from the same device) was I told, “Oh, I never got your e-mail.” Sure, guys, whatever you say. My anonymous tips seem to arrive in their inboxes just fine—it’s the signed corrections that run into issues.

My experience is not uncommon. A friend, a car blogger earnestly passionate about his job, once e-mailed the writer of a less than reputable car site after they published a rumor that turned out to be false.