The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist can flourish only where the public is deprived of independent access to information. But where all news comes at second-hand, where all testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not realities themselves but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses. The whole reference of thought comes to be what somebody asserts and not what actually is.
—WALTER LIPPMANN, LIBERTY AND THE NEWS
IN THIS BOOK I HAVE ILLUSTR ATED THE WAYS IN which bloggers, as they sit down at their computers, are prompted to speculate, rush, exaggerate, distort, and mislead—and how people like me encourage these impulses.
Blogs are assailed on all sides by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimpor tant stories.
To me, many of these individual failings were my opportunities. I was able to get coverage for my clients out of it; I was able to advance ideas that I thought were worthwhile. But when I started to see what this process amounted to collectively—the cumulative effect of tens of thousands of such posts, written and uploaded day in and day out—my pride turned to fear. This is always a good question: What if everyone did what you were doing? What would that world look like? I started not to like the answer.
What is the result of millions of blogs fighting to be heard over millions of other blogs—each hoping for a share of an increasingly shrinking attention span? What happens when people figure out that Reddit or Twitter can be used to get CNN to cover you? What happens when the incentives ripple through every part of the media system? What happens when the “truth” no longer really matters—not to readers or reporters?
These results are unreality. A netherworld between the fake and the real where each builds on the other and they cannot be told apart. This is what happens when the dominant cultural medium—the medium that feeds our other mediums—is so easily corrupted by people like me.
When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals pressure politicians to resign and scuttle election bids or knock millions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about “how the story unfolded”—unreality is the only word for it. It is, as Daniel Boorstin, author of 1962’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, put it, a “thicket . . . which stands between us and the facts of life.”
Let’s start with a basic principle: Only the unexpected makes the news. This insight comes from Robert E. Park, the first sociologist to ever study newspapers. “For the news is always finally,” he wrote, “what Charles A. Dana described it to be, ‘something that will make people talk.’ ” Nick Denton told his writers the same thing nearly one hundred years later: “The job of journalism is to provide surprise.”* News is only news if it departs from the routine of daily life.
But what if most of what happens is expected? Most things do not depart from the routine. Most things are not worth talking about. But the news must be. And so the normal parts of life are omitted from the news by virtue of being normal. I don’t mean to say that the constant search for newness or the unexpected is what distorts the news. That would be unfair, because almost everything blogs do distorts the news. But this one basic need—fundamental to the very business of blogging—inherently puts our newsmakers at odds with reality. It can only show us a version of reality that serves their needs.
What’s known as news is not a summary of everything that has happened recently. It’s not even a summary of the most important things that have happened recently. The news, whether it’s found online or in print, is just the content that successfully navigated the media’s filters. Possibly with my help. Since the news informs our understanding of what is occurring around us, these filters create a constructed reality.
Picture a funnel. At the top we have everything that happens, then everything that happens that comes to be known by the media, then everything that is considered newsworthy, then what they ultimately decide to publish, and finally what spreads and is seen by the public.
The news funnel:
ALL THAT
HAPPENS
ALL THAT’S KNOWN BY THE MEDIA
ALL THAT IS NEWSWORTHY
In other words, the media is in some ways inherently a mechanism for systematically limiting what the public sees.
But we seem to think that the news is informing us! The internet is what technologists call an “experience technology.” The more it is used, the more trust users have in it. The longer a user engages with it, the more comfortable they get and the more they believe in the world it creates.
As we become immersed in blogs, our trust in the information we get from them increases. I saw an example of this very clearly in my own education: I watched “internet sources” go from strictly forbidden in school research to the status quo, and the citing of Wikipedia articles in papers from unacceptable to “okay, but only for really general background information.” Internet culture has done one thing with this trust: utterly abused it.
In April 2011, Business Insider editor Henry Blodget put out an advisory to the PR world. He was drowning in elaborate story pitches and information about new services. He just couldn’t read them all, let alone write about them. So he proposed a solution: The publicists could write about the product launches of their own clients, and Blodget’s site would edit and publish them. “In short,” he concluded, “please stop sending us e-mails with story ideas and just contribute directly to Business Insider. You’ll get a lot more ink for yourself and your clients and you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted work” [emphasis mine].1 His post was seen more than ten thousand times, and each and every view, I can only assume, was followed by a marketer cumming all over their pants.
In Blodget’s overzealous drive to create traffic for his site, he didn’t mind misinforming. He didn’t care who wrote it, so long as it got page views. He was willing to let PR and marketing professionals and people like me write material about their own clients—which he would then pass off as real news and commentary to his readers.
He was early to this trend but hardly the only one to follow it. Today, with almost every major media outlet opening their platform up to self-interested contributors, when all the protections against conflicts of interest or even basic factual inaccuracies have disappeared, the vast majority of the information we find in the media is biased or manipulated. Worse, every major television channel seems to think that campaign surrogates—that is, naked shills for certain politicians—deserve airtime as a means of being balanced. It’s surreal and scary to watch real spin be created in real time, to watch what are supposed to be objective news outlets paying campaign operatives to come up with lies on behalf of candidates right in front of you. And part of the reason they allow this? The outraged response online from partisan websites is good for traffic and branding. The reason CNN lets Scottie Nell Hughes say dumb things is because those dumb things get lots of attention. It’s the same reason they let men and women embarrass themselves on reality television. But at least nobody thinks reality TV is news. We know that it is trash.
The process is simple: Create a pseudo-event, trade it up the chain, elicit real responses and action, and you have altered reality itself. I may understand the consequences of it now, but that doesn’t stop a part of me, even as I write this, from seeing this thirst as an opportunity to insert messages into the discussion online. You can’t count on people to restrain themselves from taking advantage of an absurd system—not with millions of dollars at stake. Not when the last line of defense—the fourth estate, known as the media—is involved in the cash grab too.
From here we get the defining feature of our world today: a blurred line between what is real and what is fake; what actually happens and what is staged; and, finally, between the important and the trivial.* There is no doubt in my mind that blogs and blogging culture were responsible for this final break. When blogs can openly proclaim that getting it first is better than getting it right; when a deliberately edited (fake) video can reach, and within hours require action by, the president of the United States; when the perception of a major city can be shaped by what photographs spread best in an online slideshow; and when someone like me can generate actual outrage over advertisements that don’t actually exist—the unreal becomes impossible to separate from the real.
“The news media is a giant mind, a giant, unquiet, overstimulated mind that won’t let itself rest—and won’t let the rest of us rest,” is how Gavin de Becker put it in Fear Less. That’s the problem. If fake news simply deceived, or if the glut of information only harmlessly distracted, that would be one thing. The problem with unreality and pseudo-events is not simply that they are unreal; it is that they don’t stay unreal. While they may themselves exist in some netherworld between real and fake, the domain in which they are consumed and acted on is undoubtedly real. In being reported, these counterfeit events are laundered and passed to the public as clean bills—to buy real things. The anxiety of the media becomes the anxiety of the world, and it becomes the weakness by which the powerful are able to control and direct us.
The news might be fake, but the decisions we make from it are not. As Walter Lippmann wrote, the news constitutes a sort of pseudo-environment, but our responses to that environment are not pseudo but actual behavior. In 1922, Lippmann warned us “about the worldwide spectacle of men”—government officials, bankers, executives, artists, ordinary people, and even other reporters—“acting upon their environment moved by stimuli from their pseudo-environment.”
That world is exactly what we have now. It’s a world where, in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney leaked bogus information to an attention-hungry reporter for the New York Times, and then mentioned his own leak on Meet the Press to help convince us to invade Iraq.2 “There’s a story in the New York Times this morning, and I want to attribute the Times,” Cheney said, citing himself, using something he had planted in the press as proof that untrue information was now “public” and accepted fact. He used his own pseudo-event to create pseudo-news. It’s a world where Trump becomes president by getting the media to repeat his dystopian paranoia and negativity enough times that people start to really believe that things are terrible—they substitute objective reality for the narrative they hear online and on TV.
I used unreality to get free publicity. Cheney used his media manipulations to drive the public toward war. Trump used it to stir tensions with our neighbors and to slander entire races and regions. And no one was able to stop it. By the time they did the facts had been established, the fake made real by media chatter, and real wars had been waged. From the pseudo-environment came actual behavior.
Welcome to unreality, my friends. It’s fucking scary.
*Remember Bennett as well, trying “not to instruct, but to startle.”
*An actual TechCrunch headline: RUMORS OF APPLE RUMORS NOW LEADING TO RUMORS OF COUNTER-RUMORS.