Gucci Little Piggy

I’m just blindly endorsing Ryan Holiday’s new book Trust Me, I’m Lying:  Confessions of a Media Manipulator.  I base this not just on Tyler Cowen’s endorsement, and not just a very interesting Bloggingheads segment (which, I’ll admit, have been very dull over the past six months), but also because he wrote, in a recent Huffington Post piece tearing down one Peter Shankman who founded a company called HARO which stands for “Help a Reporter Out”, on Shankman’s hypocrisy:

This isn’t the pot calling the kettle black; this is the pot calling the kettle the n-word.

I chuckled.

Holiday is a young media guru who has worked for Tucker Max and American Apparel.  He seems like the type of guy that could fit in well in the particular internet niche which I call home. While peddling a Tucker Max production, Holiday writes in his book “I alerted college LGBT and women’s rights groups to screenings in their area and baited them to protest our offensive movie at the theater, knowing that the nightly news would cover it.”  Attaboy.

The icing on the cake for me is that Holiday, through HARO, once duped a New York Times reporter into thinking he was an expert on vinyl records.  Silly me, I thought that modern journalists did at least a little legwork.  Turns out that this HARO outfit provides esteemed journalists with what sources and ready-made stories.  So you wonder where NY Timers pull out some of their crazy beats – HARO and other such outfits provide a gathering spot for some of these sources.  Basically, it’s PED for journalism.  Which might be good or might be bad, but Holiday infiltrated the organization and fooled a good number of “journalists”.  As he points out, instead of apologizing to its readers for falling victim to a jokester, the New York Times called Holiday a liar in an end-of-story correction.  I appreciate this type of anarchy.