A review by ebonyutley
Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday

3.0

The publisher sent a review copy for me to consider Trust Me, I’m Lying for my pop culture students. For many of them, the responsibilities of a media manipulator will be eye-opening, but I also don’t want to be responsible for giving them any ideas. I’ll likely assign a couple of chapters and let them read the rest on their own time. I don’t want the class to become about media manipulation. I want the class to see the value in popular culture but I want them to use critical media literacy too. I admit that I wasn’t sure what kind of company American Apparel was. I get them confused with Abercrombie and Fitch—neither of them produce products or ad campaigns that appeal to me—but then as soon as I googled the ads, I knew them because students do projects on them all the time—half naked waifish looking girls in panties in what could easily be perceived as date rape campaigns, but now I wonder, how many of those images were leaked by author of the book for publicity and weren’t campaigns at all? The tips part of the book is very useful because it shows you how to manipulate the system if you want and how to tell the system is being manipulated if you don’t want to play. The history of newspapers and yellow journalism was informative too. When papers were subscription you didn’t have to be sexy, you got your money, but when they started selling them in the street you had to outsell the other guy by having the best headlines, that’s where the extra, extra, read all about it actually comes from. Then they went back to subscriptions and the reputable news sources stayed that way because they didn’t have to sell sensation—they already had subscription dollars. Papers could trust each other because they had equally high performance and fact checking standards. The blog world is the return of yellow journalism. You headline something sexy and use the link economy to cover your ass. If it’s wrong you were just linking to someone else. Trading up is cool when you're seeking publicity. It’s decidedly uncool when the public is gunning for you because of a false report that someone else traded up. Blogs want the ad dollars to they can sell out and up to bigger blogs/companies and the bloggers want the sexy stories so they can sell themselves out and up to bigger blogs. A whole world that I’ve been apart of without really ever considering how it works.