Trust Me, I’m Lying

What’s it about?: Trust Me, I’m Lying is a breakdown of the economics of online media, and a warning about the dangers of fake news and traffic worship. Drawing on author Ryan Holiday‘s time in marketing, as well as his extensive reading on the field, it details how news stories get “traded up the chain” — starting on small blogs and social networks, until they eventually become headlines in the major publications. We may not always see it, but often there is fertiliser beneath these so-called grassroots movements, and someone like Holiday is usually responsible.

My opinion: People who know me know that I am a big fan of Holiday. His works on Stoicism are awesome, and I will clear my schedule to read any new book of his, but this one really struck a chord, kickstarted my media obsession, and I make an effort to reread it every year.

Growing up, I always knew tabloids like the Herald Sun and the Daily Mail were garbage. I used to roll my eyes when I would stumble on Andrew Bolt’s column, or some other outlet filled with malicious rumours, gossip, sensationalism, and flavour-of-the-month celebrities plucked seemingly from nowhere. The alarmist rhetoric, the emotional appeals, and logical fallacies (mutually inclusive). I just didn’t know how bad things really were, but after reading Holiday, a lot of things started to make sense, and the subject of the media quickly became a rabbit hole. Books by Upton Sinclair, Daniel Boorstin, Neil Postman, Eli Pariser, W. Joseph Campbell, George S. Trow, Neil Gabler, Edward J. Epstein, Harold Holzer, Drew Curtis, Walter Lippmann, Janet Malcolm, Noam Chomsky, and others were devoured, owing to this new obsession with how media manipulation works, the strategies and tactics involved, how to spot bad faith actors in the system, and how to avoid being a prisoner of the mob.

This is important, because we ostensibly live in a democratic society where public opinion is a driving force in civics and governance. Public opinion is informed by the media, so it helps to understand what the media is and how it works. And while I’ve gradually detoxed from this obsession in recent years, I still think it’s vital for people to know what is behind the discourses and stories that shape our view, and I thank Holiday for explaining it all so eloquently.

Trust Me, I’m Lying was first published in 2012, and again in 2017, “revised and updated for the fake news era.” We often use terms like “clickbait” and “fake news” to describe what’s out there, and this is exactly what Holiday discusses in the text. A lot has changed since it first came out. The rise of Trump and various populist movements, COVID and the spread of misinformation, cancel culture, and more.

But then, a lot has stayed the same. We live in a world not only of fake news, but a world where we are inundated with news media around the clock. like hundreds of football highlight reels playing at all times. Headlines exist to grab people’s attention, more than the substance of the article itself. We have a million news blogs scrambling to be heard over a million other news blogs, like a digital throwback to those paperboys on the streets in the old days, shouting, “Extra, extra, read all about it!” Back then, they were trying to get people to buy this tabloid over that, with such intense competition. It wasn’t like the subscription model of the twentieth century, where people would say, “I’m a New York Times subscriber, I get it delivered to my door.” That was a nice contrast, and the headlines were fairly low key, but of course that has all fizzled out with online news being more or less free.

The Spanish-American War was driven largely by sensationalist news coverage, and we have regressed back to that. Only in our media climate do we get sideshow political figures like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders being overrepresented in the news, then everyone acts shocked when one gets elected to office. In any other era, they would have been a minor distraction at best.

Or Andrew Tate. At the turn of the century, his total media presence might have been seven-and-a-half minutes of fame on Jerry Springer or Dr. Phil. But in a media economy where page views rule, he’s front page material, because he generates outrage and titillates the audience.

I’m just grateful that our schools started teaching kids how to spot fake news and propaganda. I have taught such units, and they’re actually pretty good. I tend to invoke Holiday when the opportunity arises, and hopefully, as educators, we can encourage the kids to be vigilant, to step back and be more discriminating about the media they consume. Will it make a difference, or no? Only time can tell.

[Aside: I hate the term “media literacy” and will try to use it sparingly, if at all.]

“When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?” Holiday says. “Most readers have abandoned even pretending to consider this. I imagine it’s because they’re afraid of the answer: There isn’t a thing we can do with it. There is no practical purpose in our lives for most of what blogs produce other than distraction.”

I don’t have it all figured out, but I tend to think my overall quality of life is better when I read, or otherwise consume information, with some sense of purpose. Still, people consume what they want to consume, have done so before the internet, and a lot of so-called “good” content might only reach a marginal amount of people. And it’s not just turbo-normies and stupid people who get taken in by what’s out there, but otherwise intelligent people who get suckered into clicking these sensationalist articles.

Pessimistic maybe, but it is what it is.

I loved Trust Me, I’m Lying when it was first published; it changed the way I saw the internet. I saw it as a guy who learned the dark arts of power and seduction — drawing on the works of Robert Greene, Sun-Tzu, Niccolo Machiavelli, Carl Von Clausewitz, et al — and applied the lessons to marketing and PR. I wouldn’t say I’m as taken with it now as I was then, but the right book at the right time can be pure magic. It really started something, and I’m grateful to have had such an education. For anyone interested in studying the history and economics of the media nightmare we’re living in, I strongly recommend this book as a starting point. I’d also recommend pairing it with Conspiracy, where Holiday takes the deepest of dives into Peter Thiel’s funding of Hulk Hogan’s defamation lawsuit that destroyed Gawker.

Whether it be as part of my media reading odyssey, or just generally, Trust Me, I’m Lying is definitely in my top ten books of all time. Style and substance all in one, you rarely get a nonfiction book like this.