Confessions of a Media Manipulator

Reviewing the book “Trust Me, I’m Lying” by Ryan Holiday

This book took me by surprise. Somehow I had never heard of it before, even though I was familiar with the author, and I wasn’t quite sure what it was going to argue. The book is about media, more specifically internet media, and how it is manipulated. This isn’t told from an outside perspective. As stated in the title, Ryan Holiday considers himself a “media manipulator”, and has vast experience in the field.

I was expecting very general explanations of how media gets things wrong, especially when it comes to politics. But it was more interesting than that. For one, it had incredibly detailed and concrete examples of how media manipulation works. Some from Holiday himself, others from other people. This part was my favourite. It explores the mechanics that led to false news ending up on big websites that should have known better.

The one I found most insightful was how news tends to travel upwards, beginning in very small blogs. And because small blogs don’t have as much expertise or resources, they’re more easily manipulated. But as soon as a story “exists”, they are likely to be picked up by a slightly bigger blog, which rests on some authority of already being covered previously by someone else. As little by little, the news travels to bigger and bigger websites, sometimes with no substance at all.

Other examples I also found really interesting are supposedly “banned” ads, which were meant to be banned all along for free publicity, “leaked” documents that sometimes are completely fabricated, or “anonymous” leads that are completely made up. They are a bit obvious post hoc, but it’s not something I thought about. The fact that Ryan Holiday himself did these types of things really allows him to go into incredible detail and give specific examples which added a lot of depth to the explanations and gives it credibility.

There were a couple of things I disliked. For one, I listened to this on Audible, and his voice is a bit monotonous. It took me a while to adjust. If you’re picky with voice authors on audiobooks, go for a paperback instead. Second, the latter part of the book felt a little bit like a rant and wasn’t as interesting.

Despite that, I really enjoyed the book. In some sense, it is about “fake news”, before the term was as popular as it is now. But it’s not fake news in a political aspect, it goes well beyond politics. It affects everything, and it is caused by how the news in our internet age operates. This is why he wrote the book, hoping that by exposing some of these pathological mechanics, maybe we can reduce its damage.

I also really liked how the author clearly takes this problem seriously. This has horrible consequences. The fact that “news” may sometimes have inaccurate information may sound a bit trivial, but it directly affects our reality, whether you want it or not.

As the author repeatedly states:

“Until the unreal becomes real”.

It is an important book that I think everyone should read. Even if the fact that the media gets manipulated sounds very obvious to you, I think understanding the mechanics under which that happens is very valuable.

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