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

It’s enough to make anyone bitter and angry. And indeed they are. They grind with the “rage of the creative underclass,” as New York magazine called it.

I feel that the comments of a former friend of Woody Allen, Harvard professor and famous civil rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz, apply to this particular phenomenon: “Well, let’s remember, we have had presidents . . . from Jefferson, to Roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Clinton, who have been great presidents. . . . I think we risk losing some of the best peo

The great Daniel Boorstin called these things pseudo-events. Why does a movie have a premiere? So the celebrities will show up and the media will cover it. Why does a politician hold a press conference? For the attention. A quick run down the list of pseudo-events shows their indispensability to the news business: press releases, award ceremonies,

When the blogger Andrew Sullivan switched his site to a subscription model a few years ago, his analysis of the situation was striking. He called subscription the “purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews . . . just a concept designed to mak

Remember: Every person in the media ecosystem (with the exception of a few at the top layer) is under immense pressure to produce content under the tightest of deadlines. Yes, you have something to sell. But more than ever they desperately, desperately need to buy. The flimsiest of excuses is all it takes.

Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter (or the music supervisor or celebrity stylist) is doing is popularizing it. They rarely bother to look past the first impressions.

The economics of the internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth. With the mass media—and today, mass culture—relying on the web for the next big thing, it is a set of incentives with massive implications.

The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events.

“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair once said, “when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”