Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Kindle
$8.99

Available instantly

Audiobook
$0.00
with membership trial

Hardcover
$37.11

Paperback
$14.15

List Price: $18.00 Details

Save: $3.85 (21%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Thursday, April 25 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Or fastest delivery Tuesday, April 23. Order within 22 hrs 38 mins

Select delivery location

In Stock

$$14.15 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Thursday, April 25 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Or fastest delivery Tuesday, April 23. Order within 22 hrs 38 mins

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Zoom Books Company

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (101) from $6.00 & FREE Shipping

Trust Me I'm LyingMerchant Video

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

2 VIDEOS

Follow the author

Ryan Holiday

Follow

Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator Paperback – July 2, 2013

by Ryan Holiday (Author)

2,124

See all formats and editions

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

View Kindle Edition

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$14.15","priceAmount":14.15,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"14","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"15","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"uiOYlPyqqCtqF85U88GpWVc0VN5tG0fNuElkExhfefQ3aslIdp1U0hE7zO5Y%2FVHxC7X277QcKKGmxXxquKGGlnvJZoQZXLcz59jSw7fDqDORqLedC%2FuHZ6%2BtkRNfaXLbffTg%2FD%2F3DglZ65%2BcIwApSA%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$10.97","priceAmount":10.97,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"10","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"97","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"uiOYlPyqqCtqF85U88GpWVc0VN5tG0fNRdFoF14dNfLnPL8l9Fe%2BrZbFuGD5TiZVZaliqFbhiWhAx6tdKGTaNKd8OWHCg1Jips0I8Belidemx6hzYJW8nepOXn54yxx5TwtHHc32A9oKFH0DqUBk3kHbjOY0nunFypP2uo0RESPte9Xta%2FTMXGGhbnUnzHci","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

The cult classic that predicted the rise of fake news—revised and updated for the post-Trump, post-Gawker age.

Hailed as "astonishing and disturbing" by the Financial Times and "essential reading" by TechCrunch at its original publication, former American Apparel marketing director Ryan Holiday’s first book sounded a prescient alarm about the dangers of fake news. It's all the more relevant today.

Trust Me, I’m Lying was the first book to blow the lid off the speed and force at which rumors travel online—and get "traded up" the media ecosystem until they become real headlines and generate real responses in the real world. The culprit? Marketers and professional media manipulators, encouraged by the toxic economics of the news business.

Whenever you see a malicious online rumor costs a company millions, politically motivated fake news driving elections, a product or celebrity zooming from total obscurity to viral sensation, or anonymously sourced articles becoming national conversation, someone is behind it. Often someone like Ryan Holiday.

As he explains, “I wrote this book to explain how media manipulators work, how to spot their fingerprints, how to fight them, and how (if you must) to emulate their tactics. Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I’m tired of a world where trolls hijack debates, marketers help write the news, opinion masquerades as fact, algorithms drive everything to extremes, and no one is accountable for any of it. I’m pulling back the curtain because it’s time the public understands how things really work. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.”

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Portfolio
Publication date

July 2, 2013
Dimensions

5.55 x 0.97 x 8.44 inches
ISBN-10

1591846285
ISBN-13

978-1591846284
See all details

Frequently bought together

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

$14.15

Get it as soon as Thursday, Apr 25

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

$13.19

Get it as soon as Thursday, Apr 25

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

$15.99

Get it as soon as Thursday, Apr 25

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

Choose items to buy together.

Ryan Holiday
3,907
Paperback
121 offers from $1.85
Edward Bernays
2,831
Paperback
66 offers from $7.56
Ryan Holiday
1,754
Hardcover
61 offers from $25.66
Ryan Holiday
2,526
Hardcover
75 offers from $8.89
Keith Ferrazzi
1,841
Hardcover
125 offers from $6.28
Jonah Berger
7,219
Paperback
163 offers from $2.00

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Holiday effectively maps the news media landscape. . . . Media students and bloggers would do well to heed Holiday’s informative, timely, and provocative advice.”
— Publishers Weekly

“This book will make online media giants very, very uncomfortable.”
— Drew Curtis, founder, Fark.com

“Ryan Holiday’s brilliant exposé of the unreality of the Internet should be required reading for every thinker in America.”
— Edward Jay Epstein, author of How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft

“[Like] Upton Sinclair on the blogosphere.”
— Tyler Cowen, MarginalRevolution.com, author of Average Is Over

“Ryan Holiday is the internet’s sociopathic id.”
— Dan Mitchell, SF Weekly

“Ryan Holiday is a media genius who promotes, inflates, and hacks some of the biggest names and brands in the world.”
— Chase Jarvis, founder and CEO, CreativeLive

“Ryan has a truly unique perspective on the seedy underbelly of digital culture.”
— Matt Mason, former director of marketing, BitTorrent

“While the observation that the internet favors speed over accuracy is hardly new, Holiday lays out how easily it is to twist it toward any end. . . . Trust Me, I’m Lying provides valuable food for thought regarding how we receive— and perceive— information.”
— New York Post

About the Author

Ryan Holiday is one of the world's bestselling living philosophers. His books like The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Stillness Is the Key appear in more than 40 languages and have sold more than 5 million copies. Together, they've spent over 300 weeks on the bestseller lists. He lives outside Austin with his wife and two boys...and a small herd of cows and donkeys and goats. His bookstore, The Painted Porch, sits on historic Main St in Bastrop, Texas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I

BLOGS MAKE THE NEWS

It is not news that sells papers, but papers that sell news.

—BILL BONNER, MOBS, MESSIAHS, AND MARKETS

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.11    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.    As off-putting as it is, that story seems quaint in light of the 2016 election. I’m not a Tim Pawlenty fan, but he was at least a legitimate politician who conceivably could have run for president. Donald Trump had “considered” a presidential run for as long as I have been alive. His subsequent election actually obscures the extent to which this was all a publicity stunt—clearly he was not too serious about politics or he might have spent at least a few months over thirty years trying to acquire a passing knowledge of policy. At the very least one assumes he might have said fewer dumb, unguarded things when there were microphones around. As late as 2012, he was still playing this publicity game, toying with running because it always made for good headlines. And what became of all this? Nothing. Because there was enough discretion, enough unity within the media that there was still some semblance of a line. Politics was at least partly serious business—and so was reporting the news.    But by 2015, when Trump declared his candidacy once again, that was no longer true. He wouldn’t have actually run if he didn’t think things were different, if he didn’t at least subconsciously realize that his incendiary, provocative, and unpredictable personality would be traffic and attention gold online and offline. The man clearly sensed something that most politicians hadn’t yet realized: that the culture of Twitter, the economics of online content, had swallowed everything else in the world.    There’s a famous twentieth-century political cartoon about the Associated Press, which 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 and social media as today’s newswires. They’re what poisoned the debate and the clarity of a nation of some 325 million people. They’re how we fell for one of the greatest cons in history.

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.2    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 Media, Business Insider, Breitbart, Politico, Vox, BuzzFeed, Vice, the Huffington Post, Medium, 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. Not only that, but their proselytizing founders, Nick Denton, Henry Blodget, Jonah Peretti, and Arianna Huffington, have an immense amount of influence as thought leaders. A blog isn’t small if its puny readership is made up of TV producers and writers for national newspapers. It doesn’t matter how many followers someone has if what they produce ends up going viral.    Radio DJs and news anchors once filled their broadcasts with newspaper headlines; today they repeat what they read online—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.    Think about it: Where do people find stuff today? They find it online. This is just as true for normal people as it is for the so-called gatekeepers. If something is being chatted about on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, it will make its way through all other forms of media and eventually into culture itself. That’s a fact.    When I figured this out early in my career in public relations, I had a thought that 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. Donald Trump did become president. 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 ruled over Politico literally almost ruled over everyone.    To understand what makes blogs act—why Politico followed Pawlenty around, why the media ended up giving Trump something like $4.6 billion worth of free publicity—is the key to making them do what you want (or stopping this broken system). 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.” Today, a few election cycles later, Politico has three hundred employees. It has spawned countless competitors, some of whom are even bigger.    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 may have failed, but for blogs and other media, it was a 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 journalists first covered Trump, they loved him because they thought he was a joke. They loved how he polarized the audience and how each crazy thing he said or did made for better headlines. Over time, he became a serious candidate—repeated, incessant media coverage can do that—and despite the supposed liberal bias of the media, they continued to shower him with attention. He was great for business.    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, gravitating toward the absurd and controversial; election cycle starts earlier

The person they cover, by virtue of coverage, becomes actual candidate (or president)

Blogs profit (literally); the public loses    You’ll see this cycle repeated again and again in this book. It’s true for celebrity gossip, politics, business news, and every other topic blogs cover. The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events.    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.    Blogs need traffic, being first drives traffic, and so entire stories are created out of whole cloth to make that happen. This is just one facet of the economics of blogging, but it’s a critical one. When we understand the logic that drives these business choices, those choices become predictable. And what is predictable can be anticipated, redirected, accelerated, or controlled—however you or I choose.    Later in the 2012 election, Politico moved the goalposts again to stay on top. Speed stopped working so well, so they turned to scandal to upend the race once more. Remember Herman Cain, the preposterous, media-created candidate who came after Pawlenty? After surging ahead as the lead contender for the Republican nomination, and becoming the subject of an exhausting number of traffic-friendly blog posts, Cain’s candidacy was utterly decimated by a sensational but still strongly denied scandal reported by . . . you guessed it: Politico.3    And so another noncandidate was created, made real, and then taken out. Another one bit the dust so that blogs could fill their cycle. In some ways the reliability of this cycle—in which despite all the absurdity eventually a normal candidate would win out (be it Mitt Romney or whoever)—was the worst thing that could have happened to us. Because it meant we thought Trump would eventually lose. He’ll eventually come crashing back down to earth. Eventually people will see who he is. He can’t avoid this forever.    Except none of that was true. That’s what happens when you feed the monster. It defies all expectations and rules.       II

TRADING UP THE CHAIN: HOW TO TURN NOTHING INTO SOMETHING IN THREE WAY-TOO-EASY STEPS

Some people in the press, I think, are just lazy as hell. There are times when I pitch a story and they do it word for word. That’s just embarrassing. They’re adjusting to a time that demands less quality and more quantity. And it works to my advantage most of the time, because I think most reporters have liked me packaging things for them. Most people will opt for what’s easier, so they can move on to the next thing. Reporters are measured by how often their stuff gets on Drudge. It’s a bad way to be, but it’s reality.

—KURT BARDELLA, FORMER PRESS SECRETARY FOR REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN DARRELL ISSA

In the introduction I explained a scam I call “trading up the chain.” It’s a strategy I developed that manipulates the media through recursion. I can turn nothing into something by placing a story with a small blog that has very low standards, which then becomes the source for a story by a larger blog, and that, in turn, for a story by larger media outlets. I create, to use the words of one media scholar, a “self-reinforcing news wave.” People like me do this every day.    The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause.    A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally.    Following the strategy I helped lay out, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e?mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this, he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site.

1 See my column “Electile Dysfunction: Why the Media Turned a Foregone Conclusion into a Horse Race” in the New York Observer for a complete account of the 2012 election.

2 I have never been a fan of the word “blogosphere” and will use it only sparingly.

3 To paraphrase Budd Schulberg, from his memoir Moving Pictures: “It is not only a case of the tail wagging the dog, they were trying to take over the bark too.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Portfolio; unabridged edition (July 2, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1591846285
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1591846284
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.55 x 0.97 x 8.44 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #48,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in Public Relations (Books)
- #88 in Communication & Media Studies
- #208 in Communication Skills

Customer Reviews:
2,124

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Ryan Holiday

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Ryan Holiday is one of the world's bestselling living philosophers. His books like The Obstacle Is the Way,Ego Is the Enemy,The Daily Stoic, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Stillness Is the Key appear in more than 40 languages and have sold more than 5 million copies. Together, they've spent over 300 weeks on the bestseller lists. He lives outside Austin with his wife and two boys...and a small herd of cows and donkeys and goats. His bookstore, The Painted Porch, sits on historic Main St in Bastrop, Texas.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

2,124 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all photos

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Tremble the Devil

an Economic Hitman plays Liar's Poker

Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2012

Verified Purchase

Since 2008 you've probably gathered that Wall Street and the entire economic system that props it up is horribly corrupt and broken, in "Trust Me, I'm Lying" Ryan Holiday follows in the footsteps of Lewis and Perkins, painstakingly and yet engagingly laying bare a systemic case of dangerous and soulless hypocrisy. In Holiday's case it's the deception and immorality that's fueled the rise of Huff-Po, Gawker, and every other website that's cashed in on the rise of the Cthulhuian blogosphere. It does for the new era of social media and internet marketing what "Liar's Poker" did for the rise of Wall Street back in the 1980s, and "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" did for American foreign policy a decade later. And not only is it just as readable and impossible to put down as those largely autobiographical premiere books, but it may run the risk of serving as a siren-song instead of heeded as a warning in just the same way - at least if you put any credence into the initial reviews the book is getting.

Although to a much greater extent than Lewis, Holiday falls more in line with Perkins and goes out of his way to decry his old way of life and attempts to implode the whole rotten house of crap-stained cards in on itself before it impacts the discourse of the mainstream media anymore than it already has.

On Wall Street it was the trade of empty derivatives, bets about the results of other bets, none of which were rooted in the actual production of capital. Bernie Madoff may be the most recognizable name associated with Ponzi schemes, but in a sense just about everyone working in the financial trade of derivatives, CDOs, and default swaps was pushing their own version of Ponzi marketing. And so it goes on the web, as online "each blog is its own mini-Ponzi scheme, for which traffic growth is more important than solid financials, brand recognition more important than trust, and scale more important than business sense. Blogs are built so someone else will want it - one stupid buyer cashing out the previous ones - and millions of dollars are exchanged for essentially worthless assets."

And in the same way that Wall Street's malfeasance cost people their homes and their livelihoods, the intentional manipulation of mass market blogs has driven companies to ruin, lead to deadly riots abroad, and helped march America off to war with Iraq. In both cases, there's much more at stake than simply doing the Right Thing. As you read, it's hard not to imagine the startled and shameful look on a cannibalistic serial killer's face after you stumble onto him tearing into a pile of dead babies, limbs and viscera spread across the table - I never meant for it to get this far, Oh God what have I done?

At times Holiday's logic is a touch circuitous, not too long after boasting about artificially rallying negative media coverage for Tucker Max's failed movie, he notes that making viewers feel uncomfortable is not solid marketing, that "unsettling images are not conducive to sharing" and asks "why would anyone - bloggers or readers - want to pass along bad feelings?" And although he carefully lays out how he "leaked" fake American Apparel ads in an effort to cheaply drive sales, he later laments that they were later used by blogs to case the company in a negative light - despite later observing that in the blogosphere the line between real and unreal is continuously blurred into oblivion. But these small slips don't detract from his arguments, if anything they bolster them - Holiday was submerged so deep into the cesspool for so long that he doesn't seem to have been able to shake off its last remaining tendrils just yet.

Holiday's utterly compelling book uses a mix of anecdote, history, and philosophy to peel back the veneer of legitimacy that mass market blogs swath themselves in. Their cloak of "iterative journalism" which supposedly breaks and refines news faster and better than traditional journalism is shown to be nothing more than a Vegas pastie, meant only to help turn a cheap buck and having nothing to do with decency or service.

"Trust Me, I'm Lying" is an immensely entertaining and informative read, Holiday's brutal honesty and impressive intellect combine into a thrilling and startling confessional that you won't be able to put down. Not, at least, until that blog page you have open right now refreshes itself with an EXCLUSIVE story about Kim Kardashian smuggling Suri Cruise out of the country by clenching the little tyke firmly between her butt-cheeks as she makes her way to the Paris premiere of "The Jersey Shore" movie.

(And to see what Holiday did to mass market blogs done to international terrorism, check out: Tremble the Devil: "the story of terrorism as Jesus Christ, James Bond, and Osama bin Ladin would tell it."

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

LenZen

Trading Up the Chain: Blogs, Bias, and the Dilemma of Delegated Trust

Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2023

Verified Purchase

In "Trust Me, I'm Lying," Ryan Holiday pulls back the curtain to reveal what is going on behind the scenes of online “blogs." For the book, Holiday defines a blog as any online site, from single-person operations up to the New York Times, which either purports to report current news or provides commentary. Holiday discusses how easy he found it to manipulate the blogosphere and how it ultimately creates a world of unreality, which, unfortunately, does intersect with the real world enough to cause destruction to the individual lives and businesses in the news.

Summary of Contents

Holiday's central thesis is that the blogosphere suffers from two major and interrelated problems:

The first problem is that blogs suffer from fierce competition for table scraps of revenue. Since there is so little money to be made for most in blogging, bloggers race to publish first, most sensationally, and with complete disregard for the time required to ensure even reasonable veracity of their stories.

The second related problem is that blogs seem to operate on a "delegated trust" model. Holiday argues that before blogs, news media had developed editorial standards that were about the same from publication to publication. This meant that if one outlet was reporting something, others had some confidence that the first had done their due diligence regarding the story's veracity. Holiday shows that there is now a wide variety of editorial standards, including, in many cases, none, that break this model.

Holiday relates numerous cases showing how he exploited the weaknesses in the blogosphere to feed false information into the monster and then "trade it up the chain." For instance, starting with the lowest level blogs, hungry for any traffic that could go viral, he could get them to publish wholly made-up "leaks" from "anonymous sources" that he says were never verified. From this, a buzz would be created on low-level blogs that he would then mention to higher-level blogs, asking, "How can you not be covering this?" Holiday claims that by using this basic method, he and others could get publications all the way up to the New York Times to report on information completely manufactured out of whole cloth.

Along with relating numerous instances of garbage information entering the system at the lowest levels and percolating up to the top, Holiday examines some of the underlying social science explaining why the system is so vulnerable to manipulation.

Evaluation of the Book

Given the amount of misinformation out there, which only continued to explode after the publication of the revised edition in 2017, this is the kind of book that any citizen of a democracy who interacts with online media or is affected by it (a long way of saying everyone) should read. Indeed, this book is now mandatory in many journalism schools and is required reading for new employees entering the news media to help their outlet avoid being victims of these manipulations.

Although this book was a highly worthwhile read, it leaned a little too heavily toward numerous case studies instead of spending time on the underlying theory for me. In the preface, Holiday makes it clear, however, that this was a deliberate choice as he wanted to write a book on this critical topic that would be read instead of an academic treatise that would be ignored. Holiday used all the techniques he learned from the blogosphere, including heavy media manipulation, to have the book reach as extensive an audience as possible. Some of this is clearly demonstrated in the organization of the book. The chapters are short. Each is further broken down into multiple short sections with very few blocks of text longer than even a couple of pages. It is all designed to be exceptionally easy to consume.

Although presenting much interesting theory, for example, research on how little time viewers spend reading an article and how likely they are to immediately "bounce" from a page, the tilting toward case studies came at the expense of making the stories repetitive after a while. I often read a story and wondered what new principle it was trying to establish versus what had already been established by previous stories.

The second significant weakness of the book is that although it does delve somewhat into politics, it could have gone much deeper into underlying theories, such as "my side bias," of why people are so prone to political bias and how the media seems just as affected by these biases or, perhaps, even more so, than everyone else. Although the book's conclusion is already bleak, Holiday underestimated just how extreme political polarization would become, a situation that events since 2020, especially, have laid bare.

In addition to these two weaknesses, it was unclear how everything described comes together in some cases. For example, Holiday mentions that there are a number of low readership blogs that are read by some very important people and thus have influence far beyond what their reader count would suggest. At the same time, Holiday says that since these blogs are tiny and do not get much traffic, they are easily manipulated by manipulations offering them more traffic. This claim did not make much sense to me. First, how does Holiday know where these low-traffic but influential blogs are? Second, it seems that the only way that important, and presumably at least somewhat intelligent, people would pay attention is if they were publishing high-quality content, as opposed to any junk that would generate traffic.

Conclusion

Despite the weaknesses mentioned, I understand that the book was written the way it was for a reason: to make it as accessible as possible. Given that many feel, looking back at historical examples, that online misinformation is following a pattern that has a high chance of becoming a risk to American democracy, this book provides an excellent look behind the scenes at how the online misinformation sausage is made.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Maria Javadd

Danificado

Reviewed in Brazil on February 8, 2024

Verified Purchase

O livro veio sem plástico de proteção, com a capa amassada e danificada. Claramente sofreu algumas quedas. Nunca tive problemas com livros na Amazon e por isso fiquei surpresa. Decidi não devolver pois comprei esse livro para ler durante o carnaval e é impossível receber um novo até amanhã kk

One person found this helpful

Translate review to English

Juan Aceves

Buen libro

Reviewed in Mexico on May 2, 2021

Verified Purchase

Si te gusta el marketing, este libro es increíble porque se sale de lo convencional y te muestra cómo las campañas o estrategias que vemos muchas veces están manipuladas.
La primera mitad que es de enseñanzas está muy buena. A partir de la segunda mitad que son puras anecdotas, se vuelve un poco pesado

One person found this helpful

Translate review to English

Joelle

A must read

Reviewed in France on January 14, 2023

Verified Purchase

Disturbing but interesting, it will totally change your point of view about online news

Fabrizio Cucciniello

Un super testo che vi aprirà un mondo ancora attualissimo

Reviewed in Italy on March 13, 2021

Verified Purchase

che dire un vero e proprio capolavoro. Un libro che tutti non solo chi fa marketing, dovrebbe avere nella propria libreria. è un testo che fa luce su uno dei settori più influenti e complicati di questo secolo. conoscere è importante per capire e orientare le proprie scelte in un mondo sempre più connesso e tecnologico, dove le informazioni che vengono condivise e girano rapidamente nella rete possono provocare risultati che influiscono sulla vita di milioni di persone punto un testo da divorare leggere e rileggere. Straconsigliato

Translate review to English

cafeGabriel

Great insight and revelation!

Reviewed in Canada on November 5, 2018

Verified Purchase

The truth shall set you free and that is indeed what this book does. Kudos to Ryan for exposing what really goes on in the world of media and giving people a chance to decide on what news and information they choose to invest in.

One person found this helpful

See more reviews

Return this item for free

Image Unavailable

Follow the author