The book Trust Me I'm Lying has been written by Ryan Holiday who's working as a media manipulator. The book will tell you how you can manipulate the media and how it has been done before. One may think that everything written today by the larger newspapers is the truth - but that is not always the case. The reporter on the newspaper may have been manipulated by a new group of people whose job it is to manipulate the media.
To find news stories, 89 percent of the journalists today are using blogs and other social media services such as Twitter. To manipulate the journalists, one has to begin with manipulating the blogs. Blogs are easy to manipulate - they are each day searching through the Internet for news stories - and they are desperate to find something to blog about. Many bloggers are making their money from ads - and to get money from ads, you need many users each day. To get many users each day, you need to write many posts - and if you write many posts, you don't really have the time to check the sources behind each story you publish. From the book, we also learn that many of the larger blogs are lying on purpose. They publish made up stories to get more traffic to their blogs.
Let's say that you come up with a fake story about Microsoft that goes viral across the Internet. After a while, someone discovers that the story was a fake one, and thus all the journalist have to admit that they were wrong. The people who read the first article and the article saying that the first article was wrong, they will still believe that some of the faulty facts from the first article is the truth. Most people will also miss the second article since these types of articles correcting faulty facts are often hidden somewhere in the newspaper.
Here's a video produced by Greepeace to manipulate the media:
The name of the person who submitted the video to YouTube is kstr3l and the description of the video says:
"This was a private send-off for Shell's arctic rigs (Kulluk and Noble discoverer) at the Seattle Space Needle. The rigs were visible outside the window. Incredibly, there was an obvious malfunction of the model rig that was supposed to pour drinks for guests."To make the video go viral across the Internet, they published the video on a smaller blog written by Occupy Seattle. The video was later picked up by larger Internet sites like Gizmodo, and the local Seattle newspapers. To make it look even more real, the people involved created fake legal messages on behalf of Shell threatening bloggers who reported on the story. How are you supposed to know if this was a hoax - or not? How credible is Greenpeace if the produce fake videos? How are we supposed to know that future videos from Greenpeace are not also fabricated?
Source: Forbes
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