Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (5 page)

BLOGS MAKE THE NEWS

I CALL TO YOUR ATTENTION AN ARTICLE IN THE
NEW York Times
written at the earliest of the earliest junctures of the 2012 presidential election, nearly two years before votes would be cast.
¹

It told of a then obscure figure, Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota. Pawlenty was not yet a presidential candidate. He had no campaign director, no bus, few donors, and little name recognition. In fact, he did not even have a campaign. It was January 2011, after all. What he did have was a beat reporter from the blog
Politico
following him from town to town with a camera and a laptop, reporting every moment of his noncampaign.

It’s a bit peculiar, if you think about it. Even the
New York Times
, the newspaper that spends millions of dollars a year for a Baghdad bureau, which can fund investigative reports five or ten years in the making, didn’t have a reporter covering Pawlenty. Yet
Politico
, a blog with only a fraction of the resources of a major newspaper, did. The
Times
was covering
Politico
covering a noncandidate.

It was a little like a Ponzi scheme, and like all such schemes, it went from boom to bust. Pawlenty became a candidate, coverage of him generated millions of impressions online, then in print, and finally on television, before he flamed out and withdrew from the race. Despite all of this, his candidacy’s impact on the election was significant and real enough that the next Republican front-runner courted Pawlenty’s endorsement.

There’s a famous twentieth-century political cartoon about the Associated Press that was, at the time, the wire service responsible for supplying news to the majority of the newspapers in the United States. In it an AP agent is pouring different bottles into a city’s water supply. The bottles are labeled “lies,” “prejudice,” “slander,” “suppressed facts,” and “hatred.” The image reads: “The News—Poisoned At Its Source.”

I think of blogs as today’s newswires.

BLOGS MATTER

By “blog,” I’m referring collectively to all online publishing. That’s everything from Twitter accounts to major newspaper websites to web videos to group blogs with hundreds of writers. I don’t care whether the owners consider themselves blogs or not. The reality is that they are all subject to the same incentives, and they fight for attention with similar tactics.
*

Most people don’t understand how today’s information cycle really works. Many have no idea of how much their general worldview is influenced by the way news is generated online. What begins online ends offline.

Although there are millions of blogs out there, you’ll notice some mentioned a lot in this book:
Gawker
,
Business
Insider, Politico, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Drudge Report,
and the like. This is not because they are the most widely read, but instead because they are mostly read by the media elite, and their proselytizing owners, Nick Denton, Henry Blodget, Jonah Peretti, and Arianna Huffington, have an immense amount of influence. A blog isn’t small if its puny readership is made up of TV producers and writers for national newspapers.

Radio DJs and news anchors once filled their broadcasts with newspaper headlines; today they repeat what they read on blogs—certain blogs more than others. Stories from blogs also filter into real conversations and rumors that spread from person to person through word of mouth. In short, blogs are vehicles from which mass media reporters—and your most chatty and “informed” friends—discover and borrow the news. This hidden cycle gives birth to the memes that become our cultural references, the budding stars who become our celebrities, the thinkers who become our gurus, and the news that becomes our news.

When I figured this out early in my career in public relations I thought what only a naive and destructively ambitious twentysomething would have: If I master the rules that govern blogs, I can be the master of all they determine. It was, essentially, access to a fiat over culture.

It may have been a dangerous thought, but it wasn’t hyperbole. In the Pawlenty case, the guy could have become the president of the United States of America. One early media critic put it this way: We’re a country governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the press, so isn’t it critical to understand what governs the press? What rules over the media, he concluded, rules over the country. In this case, what rules over
Politico
literally almost ruled over everyone.

To understand what makes blogs act—why
Politico
followed Pawlenty around—is the key to making them do what you want. Learn their rules, change the game. That’s all it takes to control public opinion.

SO,
WHY DID
POLITICO FOLLOW PAWLENTY?

On the face of it, it’s pretty crazy. Pawlenty’s phantom candidacy wasn’t newsworthy, and if the
New York Times
couldn’t afford to pay a reporter to follow him around,
Politico
shouldn’t have been able to.

It wasn’t crazy. Blogs need things to cover. The
Times
has to fill a newspaper only once per day. A cable news channel has to fill twenty-four hours of programming 365 days a year. But blogs have to fill an
infinite
amount of space. The site that covers the most stuff wins.

Political blogs know that their traffic goes up during election cycles. Since traffic is what they sell to advertisers, elections equal increased revenue. Unfortunately, election cycles come only every few years. Worse still, they end. Blogs have a simple solution: change reality through the coverage.

With Pawlenty,
Politico
was not only manufacturing a candidate, they were manufacturing an entire leg of the election cycle purely to profit from it. It was a conscious decision. In the story about his business,
Politico
’s executive editor, Jim VandeHei, tipped his hand to the
New York Times
: “We were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly. Now we’re a 200-person production, with a precise feel and plan. We’re trying to take a leap forward in front of everyone else.”

When a blog like
Politico
tried to leap in front of everyone else, the person they arbitrarily decided to cover was turned into an actual candidate. The campaign starts gradually, with a few mentions on blogs, moves on to “potential contender,” begins to be considered for debates, and is then included on the ballot. Their platform accumulates real supporters who donate real time and money to the campaign. The campaign buzz is reified by the mass media, who covers and legitimizes whatever is being talked about online.

Pawlenty’s campaign for elected office may have failed, but for blogs and other media, it was profitable success. He generated millions of pageviews for blogs, was the subject of dozens of stories in print and online, and had his fair share of television time. When
Politico
picked Pawlenty they made the only bet worth making—where they had the power to control the outcome.

In case you didn’t catch it, here’s the cycle again:

Political blogs need things to cover; traffic increases during election

Reality (election far away) does not align with this

Political blogs create candidates early; move up start of election cycle