THERE ARE OTHERS
SOMETIMES ONLY A MANIPULATOR CAN SPOT ANOTHER manipulator’s work. In figuring out how to exploit the incentives of blogs, I discovered something pretty stunning: I wasn’t the only one. But where I felt I worked for companies doing good things (selling great books, selling clothes made in America), others wielded influence and power over national debates. They changed politics and upended people’s lives.
By now most everyone has heard the saga of Shirley Sherrod, the black woman who lost her job as a rural director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture after a video of her purportedly making a racist speech surfaced online. Behind it was a manipulator just like me.
This video caused a national shitstorm. Within hours it had gone from one blog to dozens of blogs to cable news websites, and then to the newspapers and back again.* Sherrod was forced to resign shortly after. The man who posted that video was the late Andrew Brietbart.
Of course we now know Sherrod is not a racist. In fact, the speech she was giving was about how not to be racist. But the bloggers and reporters who repeated the story were writing about it iteratively, using only the limited material they had been given by Breitbart. And each report became more extreme and confident than the last—despite the lack of any new evidence to support their stories.
It was an embarrassing moment in modern politics (which says a lot). The fiasco ended with President Obama denouncing his own administration’s premature rush to judgment and apologizing personally to Sherrod. He lamented to Good Morning America: “We now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.”
Breitbart (now deceased) was the master of making people scramble. Whenever I need to understand the mind of blogging, I try to picture Andrew Brietbart sitting down at his computer to edit and publish that video. Because he was not a racist either. Nor was he the partisan kook the Left mistook him for. He was a media manipulator just like me. He understood and embodied the economics of the web better than anyone. And in some ways I envy him, because he was able to do it without the guilt that drove me to write this book.
Breitbart was the first employee of the Drudge Report and a founding employee of the Huffington Post. He helped build the dominant conservative and liberal blogs. He’s wasn’t an ideologue; he was an expert on what spreads—a provocateur.
From his perspective, the wide discrediting of his Sherrod video was not a failure. Not even close. The Sherrod story put him and his blog on the lips—in anger and in awe—of nearly every media outlet in the country. Sherrod was just collateral damage. The political machine was a plaything for Breitbart, and he made it do just what he wanted (dance and give him attention). He’d never confess as much, so I’ll do it for him.
Breitbart teed up the story perfectly. By splitting the edited Sherrod clip into two pieces (two minutes, thirty seconds, and one minute, six seconds, respectively), he made it quick to consume and easy for bloggers to watch and republish. Since the unedited clip is forty-three minutes long, it was doubtful anyone would sit through the whole thing to rain on his parade. The post was titled “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism,” and he spent most of his thirteen hundred words fighting the imaginary foil of efforts to suppress the Tea Party, instead of explaining where the video came from.
For all the complaints from blogs, cable channels, and newspapers about being misled, Breitbart had actually given them a highly profitable gift. In getting to report on his accusations, and then the reversal, and then the discussion “about the Breitbart/Sherrod controversy,” news outlets actually got three major stories instead of one. Most stories last only a few minutes, but the Sherrod controversy lasted nearly a week. It’s still good for follow-ups today. Better than anyone Breitbart understood that the media doesn’t mind being played, because they get something out of it—namely, pageviews, ratings, and readers.
Breitbart, who died suddenly of heart failure in early 2012, might not be with us any longer, but it hardly matters. As he once said, “Feeding the media is like training a dog. You can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns.” Breitbart did plenty of training in his short time on the scene. Today, one of the dog’s masters is gone, sure, but the dog still responds to the same commands.
THE MASTER AND THE STUDENT
More important, the legacy of Brietbart lives on in James O’Keefe. The young O’Keefe, mentored and funded by Breitbart, also knows what spreads, and he uses that knowledge for evil ends. O’Keefe is responsible for stories nearly as big as the Sherrod piece. He posed as a pimp in a set of undercover videos that supposedly show the now defunct community activist group ACORN giving advice to a pimp on how to avoid paying taxes. He recorded NPR seemingly showing its willingness to conceal the source of a large donation from a Muslim group. Once he even planned a bizarre attempt to seduce an attractive CNN correspondent on camera in order to embarrass the station.
Like Breitbart’s clips, O’Keefe’s work is heavily and disingenuously edited—far beyond what the context and actual events would support. His clips spread quickly because they are perfectly designed to suit a specific and vocal group: angry Republicans. By prefitting the narrative to appeal to conservative bloggers, his sensational stories quickly overwhelm the atrophied verification and accountability muscles of the rest of the media and become real stories. And even when they don’t, as was the case with the CNN story, it’s still enough to get their names in the news.
O’Keefe learned from Brietbart that in the blogging market there is a profound shortage of investigative material or original reporting. It’s just too expensive to produce. So rather than bear those costs, O’Keefe’s stories are hollow shells—an edited clip, a faux investigation—that blogs can use as a substitute for the real thing. Then he watches as the media falls over itself to propagate it as quickly as possible. Short, shocking narratives with a reusable sound bite are all it takes.
Because they assume the cloak of the persecuted underdog, the inevitable backlash helps O’Keefe and Brietbart rather than hurting them. Nearly all of O’Keefe’s stories have been exposed as doctored to some extent. When forced to reveal the unedited footage of the NPR and ACORN stunts, most of the main accusations were found to have been amplified or manipulated. But by that point the victims had already lost their jobs or been publicly branded.
For instance, the ACORN clip shows O’Keefe wearing a comical pimp hat, a fur coat, and a cane to the meetings, when in reality he wore a suit and tie. He’d edited in frames with the other costume after the fact. By the time this was exposed six months later, the pimp image was indelibly stuck in people’s minds, and the only effect of the discovery was to put O’Keefe’s name back in the news. Being caught as a manipulator can only help make you more famous.
LEARNING FROM BOTH
Andrew Breitbart did eventually issue a correction for the widely disproved Sherrod story. At the top of the article:
Correction: While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured in the first video featured in this post while she held a federally appointed position, the story she tells refers to actions she took before she held that federal position.
A bullshit correction, to say the least.
Sherrod’s attempt to clear her name and later to sue Breitbart for libel and slander were just other chances for him to bluster. The press release Breitbart issued was an exercise in defiant misdirection: “Andrew Brietbart on Pigford Lawsuit: ‘Bring It On.’” It’s exactly what I would have advised him to do if he’d asked me—in fact, I’ve basically done the exact same thing, only I was a bit more vulgar. Remember, I’m the guy who put out a press release with the headline: “Tucker Max Responds to CTA Decision: ‘Blow Me.’”
I did that because the best way to make your critics work for you is to make them irrationally angry. Blinded with rage or indignation, they spread your message to every ear and media outlet they can find. Breitbart telling his haters to bring it on certainly accomplished this, as did completely side-stepping the Sherrod issue and pretending this was some giant political conspiracy about reparations for slavery. In refusing to acknowledge, even in the slightest, that she may have been innocent of everything he accused her of, Breitbart played it like an old pro.
If you can put aside the unfortunate fate that befell Sherrod, you can see what masterful music Breitbart and O’Keefe are able to play on the instruments of online media. When they sit down to publish on their blogs, they are not simply political extremists but ruthless seekers of attention. From this attention comes fame and profit—a platform for bestselling books, lucrative speaking and consulting gigs, donations, and millions of dollars in online advertising revenue.
Some of you may be able to ignore the morality of it. I wasn’t. Not anymore. I can’t forget that Sherrod, as a randomly selected target, suffered deeply. And that well-meaning employees at various nonprofits lost their jobs after being framed by O’Keefe. I can’t not focus on that.
Those people are the casualties of a media system defined by what spreads—wholly at the mercy of fraud, exaggeration, stunts, and a thousand subtle felonies against the truth.
* According to Media Matters for America, FoxNews.com and the blog Gateway Pundit picked the story up first, followed within minutes by Hot Air and dozens of other blogs (most of which embedded the YouTube video and repeated the “racist” claim). The first television station to repeat the story, later that day, was a CBS affiliate in New York City. Next came the Drudge Report, followed by lead stories on nearly every nighttime cable news show and then morning show in the country. You could say it traded up the chain perfectly.