Trust Me, I'm Lying (media manipulation)

CoastToCoastAM.com (7-22-12), RyanHoliday.net (trustmeimlying.com); Wisdom Quarterly

   

Professional liar and business strategist Ryan Holiday was on C2C recently talking about how media manipulators control and distort the news. He declares, "Look, this is exactly what's happening, and I know that it's happening because I've personally done it."

  

He shared a media manipulation story as a marketer for the film I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. He lacked money and media access, so he manufactured a "controversy" around the film. After buying cheap billboards for the movie, for example, he vandalized his ads and sent anonymous pictures of the handiwork to local news blogs. The story spread throughout the Internet and, "It created this nationwide backlash against the movie that generated millions and millions of advertising impressions," he brags.

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

Holiday also decried the lack of oversight by the mainstream media when it comes to verifying the veracity of their sources. He cited a social network used by journalists to find "sources" to say what they need said for their stories. He then confessed that he spent the last six months on the site posing as an expert on topics he knew nothing about.

  

He was subsequently cited as a source by nearly two dozen media outlets, including ABC News, MSNBC, and even the New York Times. But Holiday is quick to note that he used his real name during his "experiment." Not one of the news organizations investigated his background, which would have quickly shown that he was an author on media manipulation and not the expert he claimed to be.

  

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AP to crack down on use of stories

Text: Richard Perez-Pena (New York Times, July 23, 2009)

Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press (AP) said Thursday that it would add secret software to each article. The aim is to show what limits apply to the rights to use it; the software notifies the AP how the article is used.

Tom Curley, the AP’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article -- a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators, and blogs.

Asked if that stance went further than the AP had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond the AP, a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.

“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of "fair use." Executives at some news organizations have said they are reluctant to test the Internet boundaries of fair use, for fear that the courts would rule against them. More>>

• UNnassociatedpress.net