Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Authors: Ryan Holiday
- Publish Date: July 19, 2012
- Language: English
- Genre: Money, Memorial, Business
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Pages: 259
- Price: Free
- ISBN: 159184553X
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.
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