Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

The first review I saw for this book said it could be finished in an afternoon implying that it's consideration as whole need not more than a full day. That kind of casual consumption is the cancer this book fully explores. I had to put Trust Me I'm Lying down several times over the first couple of chapters. The words were so heavy, pregnant with the weight that can only come from a true exposé that I wanted time to actually digest what I was reading. At 24 I've been on the Internet for 16 years. My very first memory is of my then 13-year-old sister lying to strangers in an online chat room. Lying was a hallmark of the Internet for so long that growing up I was treated with adults constantly reminding the younger generation that, "If you've read it on the Internet, it's simply not true." Surely when companies started throwing billions of dollars at online publishing as newspaper subscriptions all but dried up there was a policy shift right? According to this book, no. At least where the author is a blogger and the blogger's full time employment comes from "writing". Ryan paints the entire online publishing industry with a wide brush, but backs up his claims not just with relevant anecdotes, quotes from prominent names, but also and more importantly the philosophy that drives these people and the business at large. As much time Ryan spent writing, manipulating, and toying with blogs I've spent reading them. Luckily the industry that concerns me didn't concern him, and I think that's where some lines needed to be drawn which Ryan doesn't actually acknowledge in his book, but it's not necessarily in his interest to do so. My review actually ends here: The Internet is full of liars. Ryan Holiday played the part for a while, discovered how easy it is to do, did it for what he amounted to believe was a good purpose, placed some bad bets, and overall decided that this isn't where online media should be today. His knack for being a very accomplished liar or "troll" as Internet syntax goes shouldn't in any way malign his message. You are being lied to, all the time, the Internet is not safer than Fox News or CNBC. In fact in many ways it's far, far worse. You shouldn't be comfortable or complicit with news this way. His reputation is actually stellar, in fact I've known him for five years and I look up to him not just for his professional acumen but for who he is as a person. He will probably have to play out his role for a few more months while his message is propagated because people like the scandal more than they ought to right now. They should be hearing the actual message, that the Internet is a dredge of corruption, and barring a huge, huge change, it will continue to be. If the messenger was a 20 something intelligent thoughtful individual that was hardworking and honest, well, he'd be boring. His book would by extension probably be boring. It's a weird, dark and twisted kind of comedy that when I Google his name the top articles are basically sleights, unfounded accusations and snarky disparagement of his name and work. If you're reading the book and stumble upon this review. You should be asking, how many of these articles, how many of these bloggers actually flew out to New Orleans and tried to write a real story? How many people sat in his living room and marveled at the sheer volume of books that one kid could possibly read, let alone understand? No, they probably realized it's just as easy to say he got this book deal, his job at American Apparel through connections, he's a liar, he's just making shit up, and everything is fine the way it is. Now. I did have some problems with the book which I will outline here. I don't think a lack of thoroughness was the problem but there were a couple of angles which Ryan doesn't consider and I'd like to point them out here. Here's an example. Holiday stumbles upon the realization that blogs absolutely love Press Releases. In my industry (computer science) this is a given. My fellow techies eat up official Press Releases because you can't lie about a chip size or a gigahertz. Watching Engaget uncover over a six month period 300 phones that are all using a certain technology is vital to how not just my company reacts, but how thousands and thousands of small and large tech companies react. Let's look at how Apple went out of it's way to create a perfect mobile browser experience in it's first generation of phones. Instead of a quiet panic to catch up, what if the industry at large focussed on text-message based communication instead? Would you still enjoy browsing the Internet on your phone if only 1 out of every 100 websites was optimized for your 3″ screen? Meanwhile all of your friends have instant communication with banks, stock trading, travel deals, and sports scores? What takes them a half second on their non-Apple Taxed phone takes you several minutes. Luckily it didn't turn out to be the case. While both were viable technologies at solving a single problem (making information available at your actual finger tip touches), but both hardware and software trended towards the mobile browser and eventually apps. How? Could media manipulation have played a part? Most assuredly not. Networks like AT&T quickly churned out 3G and then 4G networks, processors shrunk drastically, and within 36 months mobile websites found a standard and stuck to it. No amount of reality distortion from Steve Jobs or Ryan Holiday could have changed the arch that this industry followed. But while it was happening blog coverage was one of the most important facets to how quickly everything moved. All of a sudden you didn't need to spend $20,000 annually to attend tech events from around the country. Shoddy journalism might get the details wrong online, but this was easily remedied at the water cooler where discussion about what you just interpreted online happens to meet the thick high wall of reality that is a Project Manager, Sys Admin, or even your average code monkey. Some things just don't work in computing, engineers know these limits, and this is more of a blessing than a curse. Unfortunately not every industry behaves as mine. Ryan does go into depth about how real companies and extremely important events like electing a President are all shaped by standards which have set the bar so low that responsibility doesn't exist in any form. `Trust Me' talks about the immediacy problem blogs have created and how it doesn't really contribute to a better story. Publishing news online before it's vetted gives us a few minutes or maybe a day's advance notice and the majority of the problems regarding our complicit approval of information that refuses to actually inform could be solved by taking away the immediacy. But what about when immediacy is vital? Take the snipers in Libya. They were taken down by the Social Media shotgun. Whenever a crew of snipers were spotted via camera phones, they were hastily shared on Twitter and local news literally saving lives and turning the tide for the rebels, who would send in grenadiers to take out their crow's nests. Perhaps there's a story to be written as well, but that kind of social media news is clearly a new spigot of information that doesn't appear as a counterpoint in Holiday's book to show how we can be taking advantage of instant news. But the book as it's written isn't meant to be a full digest of online media at large, it's a confession tape of a media abuser so it's obvious why it's left out. I just didn't see the immediacy problem as big when it comes to Twitter, it has it's uses for news, but I thought it was understood that 140 characters isn't enough. My last critique is only that he admits to not knowing how to solve the myriad of problems facing online news at large other than confessing he repeatedly took advantage of chinks in their armor and hopes by revealing his secrets they'll be better protected. If I worked for the New York Times I'd be sending Ryan an all white stetson in appreciation instead of casually correcting a post when he pretended to be a vinyl record lover and calling it a day. I was genuinely curious as to what his solutions might be and was a little disappointed to not even see one. Could you gamify the news so that accurate, and well written coverage gets rewarded in some arbitrary but entertaining way while shoddy inaccurate news is punished? Would a paywall ostensibly solve the bloggers' problem of having to publish far too many posts for quotas? How about utilizing digital wallets and social networks to create a system where people get credit for being sources, but give the credit back when consuming articles? In that scenario you establish a record of someone's name and wall off the garden without ever actually exchanging money. Oh well, perhaps in the next one. Awesome work Ryan, it was a great read. I'm not even lying.

In "Trust Me, I'm Lying," Ryan Holiday pulls back the curtain to reveal what is going on behind the scenes of online “blogs." For the book, Holiday defines a blog as any online site, from single-person operations up to the New York Times, which either purports to report current news or provides commentary. Holiday discusses how easy he found it to manipulate the blogosphere and how it ultimately creates a world of unreality, which, unfortunately, does intersect with the real world enough to cause destruction to the individual lives and businesses in the news. Summary of Contents Holiday's central thesis is that the blogosphere suffers from two major and interrelated problems: The first problem is that blogs suffer from fierce competition for table scraps of revenue. Since there is so little money to be made for most in blogging, bloggers race to publish first, most sensationally, and with complete disregard for the time required to ensure even reasonable veracity of their stories. The second related problem is that blogs seem to operate on a "delegated trust" model. Holiday argues that before blogs, news media had developed editorial standards that were about the same from publication to publication. This meant that if one outlet was reporting something, others had some confidence that the first had done their due diligence regarding the story's veracity. Holiday shows that there is now a wide variety of editorial standards, including, in many cases, none, that break this model. Holiday relates numerous cases showing how he exploited the weaknesses in the blogosphere to feed false information into the monster and then "trade it up the chain." For instance, starting with the lowest level blogs, hungry for any traffic that could go viral, he could get them to publish wholly made-up "leaks" from "anonymous sources" that he says were never verified. From this, a buzz would be created on low-level blogs that he would then mention to higher-level blogs, asking, "How can you not be covering this?" Holiday claims that by using this basic method, he and others could get publications all the way up to the New York Times to report on information completely manufactured out of whole cloth. Along with relating numerous instances of garbage information entering the system at the lowest levels and percolating up to the top, Holiday examines some of the underlying social science explaining why the system is so vulnerable to manipulation. Evaluation of the Book Given the amount of misinformation out there, which only continued to explode after the publication of the revised edition in 2017, this is the kind of book that any citizen of a democracy who interacts with online media or is affected by it (a long way of saying everyone) should read. Indeed, this book is now mandatory in many journalism schools and is required reading for new employees entering the news media to help their outlet avoid being victims of these manipulations. Although this book was a highly worthwhile read, it leaned a little too heavily toward numerous case studies instead of spending time on the underlying theory for me. In the preface, Holiday makes it clear, however, that this was a deliberate choice as he wanted to write a book on this critical topic that would be read instead of an academic treatise that would be ignored. Holiday used all the techniques he learned from the blogosphere, including heavy media manipulation, to have the book reach as extensive an audience as possible. Some of this is clearly demonstrated in the organization of the book. The chapters are short. Each is further broken down into multiple short sections with very few blocks of text longer than even a couple of pages. It is all designed to be exceptionally easy to consume. Although presenting much interesting theory, for example, research on how little time viewers spend reading an article and how likely they are to immediately "bounce" from a page, the tilting toward case studies came at the expense of making the stories repetitive after a while. I often read a story and wondered what new principle it was trying to establish versus what had already been established by previous stories. The second significant weakness of the book is that although it does delve somewhat into politics, it could have gone much deeper into underlying theories, such as "my side bias," of why people are so prone to political bias and how the media seems just as affected by these biases or, perhaps, even more so, than everyone else. Although the book's conclusion is already bleak, Holiday underestimated just how extreme political polarization would become, a situation that events since 2020, especially, have laid bare. In addition to these two weaknesses, it was unclear how everything described comes together in some cases. For example, Holiday mentions that there are a number of low readership blogs that are read by some very important people and thus have influence far beyond what their reader count would suggest. At the same time, Holiday says that since these blogs are tiny and do not get much traffic, they are easily manipulated by manipulations offering them more traffic. This claim did not make much sense to me. First, how does Holiday know where these low-traffic but influential blogs are? Second, it seems that the only way that important, and presumably at least somewhat intelligent, people would pay attention is if they were publishing high-quality content, as opposed to any junk that would generate traffic. Conclusion Despite the weaknesses mentioned, I understand that the book was written the way it was for a reason: to make it as accessible as possible. Given that many feel, looking back at historical examples, that online misinformation is following a pattern that has a high chance of becoming a risk to American democracy, this book provides an excellent look behind the scenes at how the online misinformation sausage is made.

Since 2008 you've probably gathered that Wall Street and the entire economic system that props it up is horribly corrupt and broken, in "Trust Me, I'm Lying" Ryan Holiday follows in the footsteps of Lewis and Perkins, painstakingly and yet engagingly laying bare a systemic case of dangerous and soulless hypocrisy. In Holiday's case it's the deception and immorality that's fueled the rise of Huff-Po, Gawker, and every other website that's cashed in on the rise of the Cthulhuian blogosphere. It does for the new era of social media and internet marketing what "Liar's Poker" did for the rise of Wall Street back in the 1980s, and "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" did for American foreign policy a decade later. And not only is it just as readable and impossible to put down as those largely autobiographical premiere books, but it may run the risk of serving as a siren-song instead of heeded as a warning in just the same way - at least if you put any credence into the initial reviews the book is getting. Although to a much greater extent than Lewis, Holiday falls more in line with Perkins and goes out of his way to decry his old way of life and attempts to implode the whole rotten house of crap-stained cards in on itself before it impacts the discourse of the mainstream media anymore than it already has. On Wall Street it was the trade of empty derivatives, bets about the results of other bets, none of which were rooted in the actual production of capital. Bernie Madoff may be the most recognizable name associated with Ponzi schemes, but in a sense just about everyone working in the financial trade of derivatives, CDOs, and default swaps was pushing their own version of Ponzi marketing. And so it goes on the web, as online "each blog is its own mini-Ponzi scheme, for which traffic growth is more important than solid financials, brand recognition more important than trust, and scale more important than business sense. Blogs are built so someone else will want it - one stupid buyer cashing out the previous ones - and millions of dollars are exchanged for essentially worthless assets." And in the same way that Wall Street's malfeasance cost people their homes and their livelihoods, the intentional manipulation of mass market blogs has driven companies to ruin, lead to deadly riots abroad, and helped march America off to war with Iraq. In both cases, there's much more at stake than simply doing the Right Thing. As you read, it's hard not to imagine the startled and shameful look on a cannibalistic serial killer's face after you stumble onto him tearing into a pile of dead babies, limbs and viscera spread across the table - I never meant for it to get this far, Oh God what have I done? At times Holiday's logic is a touch circuitous, not too long after boasting about artificially rallying negative media coverage for Tucker Max's failed movie, he notes that making viewers feel uncomfortable is not solid marketing, that "unsettling images are not conducive to sharing" and asks "why would anyone - bloggers or readers - want to pass along bad feelings?" And although he carefully lays out how he "leaked" fake American Apparel ads in an effort to cheaply drive sales, he later laments that they were later used by blogs to case the company in a negative light - despite later observing that in the blogosphere the line between real and unreal is continuously blurred into oblivion. But these small slips don't detract from his arguments, if anything they bolster them - Holiday was submerged so deep into the cesspool for so long that he doesn't seem to have been able to shake off its last remaining tendrils just yet. Holiday's utterly compelling book uses a mix of anecdote, history, and philosophy to peel back the veneer of legitimacy that mass market blogs swath themselves in. Their cloak of "iterative journalism" which supposedly breaks and refines news faster and better than traditional journalism is shown to be nothing more than a Vegas pastie, meant only to help turn a cheap buck and having nothing to do with decency or service. "Trust Me, I'm Lying" is an immensely entertaining and informative read, Holiday's brutal honesty and impressive intellect combine into a thrilling and startling confessional that you won't be able to put down. Not, at least, until that blog page you have open right now refreshes itself with an EXCLUSIVE story about Kim Kardashian smuggling Suri Cruise out of the country by clenching the little tyke firmly between her butt-cheeks as she makes her way to the Paris premiere of "The Jersey Shore" movie. (And to see what Holiday did to mass market blogs done to international terrorism, check out: Tremble the Devil: "the story of terrorism as Jesus Christ, James Bond, and Osama bin Ladin would tell it."

Where to begin? To be honest I actually had fun reading this book. It is both inspirational and motivational which I enjoy but the real "show", as with any decent work of investigative journalism, is in the horrors that lay behind the yet unexposed truth. Like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, this book will make you cringe and squirm. This book is not for the faint of heart! Beyond the sex lies and youtube videos - which make this book a page turner- lies the cold hard fact that today everyone needs to market themselves and, to do so effectively, you need to peek behind the curtain and watch the best professionals. Today the top experts in media and PR are the bloggers who write for sites like Gawker and the Huffington Post, these guys are the best of the best and Ryan gives you step-by-step, detailed, instructions on how they have become so influential. This is powerful information you can use to your advantage. In full disclosure I have met Ryan, I was introduced to him by a personal hero of mine, fellow author Robert Greene and was shocked when Robert told me that him, along with others Ryan has worked with (Tim Ferris, 50 cent and Tucker Max just to name a few) owe much of their publishing success to ideas first formulated by Ryan. I was somewhat skeptical at first wondering how an American Apparel marketing guy can help a Maritime journalist like me. I don't write about things covered in Gawker, certainly not fashion trends, I write hard news articles for Forbes and nonfiction books for HarperCollins on serious topics like maritime disasters. The secret I discovered was shocking... and this is the reason EVERYONE should read this book. The "tricks" Ryan mentioned are not just being used by celebrity bloggers they are being used against real journalists, people who write for the world's most respected publications, to influence hard news stories. In writing my own book, the story behind the BP Gulf oil spill, I spent many days spinning my wheels after reading articles from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others. What I found was an alarming percentage of hard facts where wrong. Countless times I traced the story back to a small blog or local newspaper only to find the story evolved from a lawyer or corporate spokesman. But, throughout all my research, I had a nagging voice in the back of my head... how did a small fact they planted evolve into a major news story? The second I finished reading Ryan's book I poured over my notes and soon discovered the truth. It's not just PR people that have learned the tricks which Ryan so eloquently uncovers, but also spokesmen and lawyers at many of the world's largest corporations and, yes, many politicians as well. In short my own research helped me understand what caused the BP oil spill but I never understood the whole media circus and aftermath of that spill until today. For this I am grateful. With Ryan's modest author profile few would predict the effect he has had on so many prominent authors and fewer still will predict the unprecedented success a series books Ryan will undoubtedly produce in the coming years I look forward to reading them all! (On a side note I did chuckle when my editor sent me a link to this book with the note "John, order a copy of this book, you need to read this... my reply? "Order 10 copies and spread it around the office.... Yes, it is that good".) -John Konrad, Author of Fire on the Horizon: The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster

If you got Don Draper of TV’s “Mad Men” really drunk on martinis and he unburdened himself of how he and his industry schemed and plotted to make consumers of the 60s do what they wanted them to do, this is what it would be like. Holiday dishes the dirt about the media manipulators’ tricks, scams, abuses, exploitation of weakness and their perverse and joyful disregard of what is true or good or even ethical, all in the pursuit of controlling social media and the broad audience of news viewers and product consumers. Yuck, what a messy business it is, too. Just in case you thought there was something not quite right about the link between social media and the news cycle, this book tells you how right your instincts are. The Financial Times calls it a “disturbing book”; well that’s a classic British understatement for sure. Here’s Holiday’s theme in a nutshell: “With limited resources and the constraints of a tight medium, there are only a handful of options: sensationalism, extremism, sex, scandal, hatred. The media manipulator knows that bloggers know that these things sell – so that’s what we sell them.” Things that make you happy work really well, and things that make you angry work even better, and that is why social media seem to be so, well, increasingly angry. He quotes an unnamed White House staffer who sums the mess up by saying that the modern news media are made up of two machines, and the controversy machine is bigger than the reality machine. What I didn’t like about this book is that it is slangy and salted with vulgarisms to make it look hip and flippant. It is sadly full of typos, which is surprising in a Penguin Portfolio imprint. It has an unpleasant odor of sanctimony about it: the first half of the book tells how Holiday ruthlessly manipulated and corrupted the system, and then the second half complains about how bad the system is. He wants you to admire him for his skill and daring as a corrupter and a confessor, and then admire him even more for deploring the mess he and others like him have caused. He wants to have it both ways and you end up feeling the book itself is kind of creepily manipulative. Overall, the book is much too long and repetitious; where was the editor on this project? On the other hand, this is a fascinating glimpse into a world that is as foreign as the inside of a volcano, but still as familiar as our trusty laptop open at the breakfast table. This book should be mandatory reading in journalism classes. For the rest of us, it can be a salutary inoculation. We should read it, pay careful attention to the broken and rather insane world described here and resolve to use the time we now spend on Twitter and Facebook on yoga instead, or something equally wholesome, your choice. And we should graze blogs and social media with more caution and skepticism, and try to consume our news higher up on the edited food chain.

As I started reading through Ryan Holiday's book, I couldn't help but think of the final message from the classic John Ford film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Paramount Centennial Collection) , "Print the Legend". Yes, we all know that the public is largely spoon fed news articles and headlines that sell newspapers, hence the rise in the "popular press" over the traditional "broadsheet" newspapers in last 100 years. And the same is true for commercial TV, which was largely launched into this system from its inception. Holiday neatly adds in his assessment of the newest and probably the most influential addition to this triad of popular information sources by discussing the influence of the internet, and most specifically blogs, on our current culture. As 21st century citizens access to the information highway should make us a more informed species, able to share and assimilate important information to progress our societies in a meaningful way, but does it? Holiday paints a picture of a dystopian universe with a wide-eyed populace of reduced attention span, focusing on celebrity and scandal above all else, under the guise that they are being informed. Add in an obsessive promotion of the need for speed to publish fresh stories to ensure people remain engaged and it is not surprising that there is a lack of interest in the accuracy of the stories that are being spread. The book contains a short background of the newspaper evolution, describing the rise of the great printing dynasties and their impact on 19th and 20th century society, the change in journalism and the pay-per-click advertising models that drive the current approach to exploiting the internet user. Holiday's critique of iterative journalism and the way this approach is defended by those who espouse it's approach is quite fascinating. Somehow it reminds me of a British sit-com from several years ago (either Hot Metal or DROP THE DEAD DONKEY - SERIES 1 TO 3 [NON-USA Format / Import / Region 2 / PAL ]) where a news editor is forced to print a retraction to a headline and grudgingly does so as the answer to a crossword question, "He's not really a vampire." Modern blog editors seem to have taken this approach to an extreme, especially as their scribblings are so ephemeral. Yes, Holiday writes the book from the perspective of an insider who seems to have suddenly gained a conscience, and the language is perhaps unnecessarily crude in some parts, but it didn't detract from the narrative too much. From my perspective the book delivers the goods. Even to a cynic like me some of the blatant manipulation presented in the stories just fall short of jaw-dropping, while others made me angry. Anyone who reads this should at least look at some of the so-called news stories that crop up on a daily basis with a much more cynical perspective. Overall, a great read, for it gets you thinking about what is reality. By way of a postscript, the day after I finished reading this book one of my work colleagues forwarded to me a viral email concerning a story around "Texas gun law", and how bizarrely this had applied as reported in a "true story" in the Houston Herald. It took me a few seconds to look up the Houston Herald, just to see if this story was in fact accurate, only to find that the Houston Herald is, in fact not Texan at all but a newspaper from Houston, Texas County, MO. There doesn't appear to be a newspaper in Houston TX with that title, yet the email gets forwarded as yet another meme. I didn't bother to investigate further. "Print the Legend"

The objective of Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, by: Ryan Holiday, is to reveal the insider views and information of the media manipulators (bloggers, public relations, etc.). The book delves into how to manipulate the web and how Holiday has personally benefitted from these manipulations. Following the how-to part one of the book, Holiday moves onto the second part of the book that describes the consequences and reasons why we should not become manipulators, but stop the manipulation of the web and news overall today. The audience that Holiday reaches out to is outsiders to the knowledge of manipulation done in media by marketers. Holiday continuously throughout the book makes claims based on his previous experiences as well as from his observations. Though all are engaging and almost disturbing through the amount of invalidity in the media, I will only explore a few examples. Holiday claims that blogs and online media sites only caring about traffic and page views; he supports by using the example of TMZ, a blog developed by AOL in 2005 that generated millions in revenue. TMZ gained media by getting to stories first and even using inaccurate stories, however, from gaining fans, they prospered from advertisements companies wanting to be on their page as well as the amount of traffic coming through the site. This is rather interesting because although I always knew you cannot trust everything you read on the web, I never thought that everything posted is only in order to gain revenue. Another claim made by Holiday is that you can use the technology against itself. He supports this argument by sharing previous experiences in working with bloggers and feeding them stories. In doing this, he would send emails from fake accounts, and without question, the bloggers take the stories and publish them, when the stories could be and usually are inaccurate. The stories that Holiday uses are just to bring publicity to his clients and lack validity, yet leading back to the previous argument explored, bloggers need to fill quotas of page views and the more they post the more likely they will fill that quota, no matter how outrageous or invalid the post. One of the examples of the arguments of consequences the bloggers face is the lack of validity that their posts have. Holiday tells the philosophy of the bloggers, that they publish first, verify later. Holiday proved this point in the previous example I shared through his personal experiences. The consequences, however, give the blogs lack of reliability as well as losing traffic from their invalid posts and losing money. The fact that society has come to just having to fill up space with what they consider “news” is just upsetting because it is filled with crap that is mostly false. Personally, I believe Holiday was successful in his efforts of manipulating the media; he demonstrates these through the personal experiences he has staring with Tucker Max. He begins the book by telling the story of when he was sabotaging his friend’s billboards for the movie his friend made. The movie needed publicity and Holiday believed that bad publicity would still get attention and he began to make fake riots and fake bad publicity until the public fed into it and made the riots and everything the reality. Holiday was successful into manipulating people in order to create his own revenue. Another example is when Holiday gave his friend who was starting a fundraiser tips in creating publicity by sending exaggerated videos from various fake accounts to media sites who ended up blowing up the story and creating revenue for a good cause. In this aspect, I enjoyed the fact that Holiday used his “talent” to benefit others rather than just his own pocket. In conclusion, I would say that I overall enjoyed the book and thought it was engaging, although I was disturbed by the manipulation that occurs everyday in the news. I did not necessarily believe in Holiday’s tactics in creating publicity, however, I appreciated that he knows that the manipulation is wrong. He successfully grabs the audience attention with disgustingly true facts about society today and brings the publics attention the problem the media and news has today. I would definitely recommend this book to others ignorant to the growing manipulation problem and to those marketers who would like to benefit from these tactics.

Ryan Holiday's book, Trust Me I'm Lying, is a look into the darker side of mainstream media. Not only does Holiday show us a comprehensive view of our media system in all of its ragged ugliness, he takes his reader through the history of media, so not only can we see how we got to a system that is incredibly flawed, but we can follow the winding path of how we evolved to our current state. Most importantly, we see how our current state of iterative journalism with its focus on clicks and counts can only continue to reinforce a media more concerned with speed than with accuracy. Holiday uses a metaphor he found in an old magazine, the media monster, and while it seems contrived, it's surprisingly appropriate. The more the online advertisers, the bloggers, and the media manipulators feed the current media system, the larger and more unruly it becomes. It closely parallels the same monster we've seen grown in both U.S and world economies, whether it be the fall of the housing market fed by banks and mortgage brokers, or the debt crisis in Greece that is spreading across Europe. The power in this book comes from the insight and examples Holiday provides. Make no mistake - Holiday is a master media manipulator. There is no one better to dissect this broken system than someone who was front row for some of the larger media manipulations in current history, whether he witnessed or orchestrated them. While you want to dislike Holiday for his manipulations, his clear lack of ethics in some his tactics, some of his cringe-worthy examples - you can't. I had much more respect for him. His writing is honest. His insights are deep and true. And his analysis is cutting and clear. This book left me feeling incredulous, fearful, and angry of our current media system. I've always said I'd rather by a sucker than cynic, but after reading this book, I can't help but take every news story, blog or headline with a grain of salt and wonder how much of what I read is really true. Love him or hate Holiday, he's written a ground-breaking book on the current state of the media and one that you should not miss.

O livro veio sem plástico de proteção, com a capa amassada e danificada. Claramente sofreu algumas quedas. Nunca tive problemas com livros na Amazon e por isso fiquei surpresa. Decidi não devolver pois comprei esse livro para ler durante o carnaval e é impossível receber um novo até amanhã kk

Disturbing but interesting, it will totally change your point of view about online news

Compré el libro usado a este proveedor. Me ha llegado el producto estupendamente empaquetado y en bastante buenas condiciones para estar usado. Recomiendo este librero. Del libro no puedo decir nada todavía. Lo acabo de recibir.

I recommend everyone who has to work with social media to read this book, it's is what it claims to be. That is the "bible" of such jobs. Marketing,publishing and journalism all meeting at one point.

Cose che già si sapevano, ovvero che i media mentono, ma questo libro è davvero illuminante perché racconta non solo come si fabbricano le false notizie, ma anche come si crea un trending topic e come una notizia (falsa) può danneggiare seriamente chi va contro il sistema.