Man punks journalists

Ryan Holiday pretended to be a credible source on a variety of subjects, just to see who would fall for it. Scalps include CBS, ABC, Today and The New York Times.

“I knew that bloggers would print anything, so I thought, what if, as an experiment, I tried to prove that they will literally print anything?” he says. “Instead of trying to get press to benefit myself, I just wanted to get any press for any reason as a joke.”

At Forbes, Holliday offers a rundown of how fake stories are generated and propagated even without intentional misdirection. He even has a book out on the subject, titled Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. [Forbes]

• [TWX]

  ’cause I’m going to believe a book written about master manipulation by that manipulator.

  Right.

  And this whole story will fall apart and shatter into A Million Little Pieces…

  • [Ramone]

    Agreed. It’s sad that we reward the fraudulent with attention and money.

• [fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

  Thankfully we don’t, y’know, have an entire industry of ‘PR’ operatives(more numerous than journalists at this point) for which this is a job rather than a stunt. 

  That might seriously impact the quality, accuracy, and integrity of the media, which would be bad. Good thing that this is just an isolated incident of internet pranksterism.

• [Hanno Zulla]

  Alan Abel anyone?
  http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/25/entertainment/et-abel25

• [dragonfrog]

  Bets on whether this thread turns into a sockpuppet arts festival, as 
  http://boingboing.net/2012/06/21/book-trailer-trust-me-im-l.html did?

• [nemomen]

  Man punks boingboing into flogging his book.

  • [Rob Beschizza]

    I KNOW! It’s so easy to trick us into it!

    • [nemomen]

      Totally!  http://boingboing.net/2012/06/21/book-trailer-trust-me-im-l.html  

      • [Rob Beschizza]

        It’s almost as if there was some kind of extrinsic motivator for us to link to the Amazon pages of books we like and recommend!

        • [nemomen]

          Almost!

        • [dragonfrog]

          I am rather surprised that BB continues to promote the book, given the prevalence of single-sentence, glowingly positive comments from (surely entirely honest, not at all sock-puppety) first-time posters, on the referenced thread…

• [auralee]

  This is what the media gets for publishing “he said/she said” w/o verifying underlying facts or calling the speakers to account when they’re wrong.  But that would be the sort of prank Stewart and Colbert indulge in.

• [dethbird]

  Man bites Journalist