Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday

yield exciting blog posts or spread well online. But the Santelli clip did. CNBC fell ass first into the perfect storm of what spreads on the web—humiliation, conspiracy theories, anger, frustration, humor, passion, and possibly the interplay of several or all of these things together.
    As Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.”
    As a manipulator, I certainly encourage and fuel this age. So do the content creators. CNBC doesn’t care how they come off as long as they can sell ads against the traffic it brings. And the audience says they’re okay with it too—voting clearly with their clicks. We’re all feeding that monster.
    This may seem like nothing. It’s just people having fun, right? Sure, my deliberately provocative ads, once caught, quickly do disappear and awareness subsides—just like all viral web content. Roughly 96 percent of the seven thousand articles that made the Most E-mailed list in the New York Times study did so only once. In almost no cases did an article make the list, drop off, and then return. They had a brief, transitory existence and then disappeared. But though viral content may disappear, its consequences do not—be it a toxic political party or an addiction to cheap and easy attention.
    The omission of humanity from the popular slideshows of Detroit is not a malicious choice. There was no person like me behind the scenes hoping to mislead you. There was no censorship. In fact, there are thousands of the other, more realistic photos out there. Yet, all the same, the public is misinformed about a situation that we desperately need to solve. But heartbreaking sadness does not spread well. Through the selective mechanism of what spreads—and gets traffic and pageviews—we get suppression not by omission but by transmission.
    The web has only one currency, and you can use any word you want for it—valence, extremes, arousal, powerfulness, excitement—but it adds up to false perception. Which is great if you’re a publisher but not if you’re someone who cares about the people in Detroit. What thrives online is not the writing that reflects anything close to the reality in which you and I live. Nor does it allow for the kind of change that will create the world we wish to live in.
    It does, however, make it possible for me to do what I do. And people like me will keep doing it as long as that is true.
     
    * Another photo for a much more popular New York Times slideshow says it all. The picture is of the abandoned Michigan Central Station, and in the snow on the floor are dozens of crisscrossing footprints and a door. There are no people. “Don’t worry,” it seems to say. “There’s no reason to feel bad. Everybody left already. Keep gawking.”

VII

    TACTIC #4
     

HELP THEM TRICK THEIR READERS
     

 
    ARE LOADED-QUESTION HEADLINES POPULAR? YOU bet. As Brian Moylan, a Gawker writer, once bragged, the key is to “get the whole story into the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click.”
    Nick Denton knows that being evasive and misleading is one of the best ways to get traffic and increase the bottom line. In a memo to his bloggers he gave specific instructions on how to best manipulate the reader for profit:
When examining a claim, even a dubious claim, don’t dismiss with a skeptical headline before getting to your main argument. Because nobody will get to your main argument. You might as well not bother…. You set up a mystery—and explain it after the link. Some analysis shows a good question brings twice the response of an emphatic exclamation point.
     
    I have my own analysis: When you take away the question mark, it usually turns their headline into a lie. The reason bloggers like to use them is because