Auteur: Holiday, Ryan

Nombre de pages: 288

Éditeur: Portfolio Penguin

Date de sortie: 26-09-2013

Détails: Présentation de l’éditeur You’ve seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don’t know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me.I’m a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs-as much as any one person can.IN TODAY’S CULTURE… Blogs like Gawker, BuzzFeed, and The Huffington Post drive the media agenda. Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines. Manipulators wield these levers to shape everything you read, see, and hear- online and off.Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I’m tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I’m going to explain exactly how the media really works. What you choose to do with this information is up to you. Extrait 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