
How This Guy Lied His Way Into MSNBC, ABC News, The New York Times and More - steve8918
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/07/18/how-this-guy-lied-his-way-into-msnbc-abc-news-the-new-york-times-and-more/
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elmuchoprez
Most, if not all, of the stories listed in this article are pure puff pieces,
not the kind of hard journalism that you would expect someone to rigorously
fact check.

He made up an embarrassing story that supposedly happened in the office that
is of absolutely no consequence other than it's an embarrassing story? How do
you even reasonably fact check that?

He said that someone once sneezed on him at a Burger King for a story about
sneezing etiquette... how you fact check that?

And for the big finale he told someone at the NYT that he likes listening to
vinyl? And they didn't even ask to see his vinyl club of America membership
card? Outrageous!

The only one of these where he seems to be acting as an expert in anything and
offering advice to that effect is the winterizing your boat thing, and that
doesn't appear on a legit news website. It's a shitty wordpress site operated
by a manufacturer.

I suppose he technically lied his way into all these news organizations, but
it's not exactly the caper of the century.

~~~
timjahn
It's very meta.

Guy lies to various media outlets and feeds them bogus stories to prove that
various media outlets will publish anything that will get them more
pageviews/readers/circulation/whatever, regardless of the quality of the
story.

Then similar various media outlets cover the story of the guy who lied to the
media outlets to prove that they'd write any sort of stupid story like about a
guy who lied to the media outlets to prove....

------
JonnieCache
_"For Roy Furchgott, the reporter from the New York Times, this kind of lie
can be hard to catch — Holiday sounded just like all the other record
collectors he had talked to, and it was hard to imagine why someone would lie
about something so mundane."_

This whole thing reminds me of the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment>

------
vijayr
The last line - _"We know that quotas make cops do shitty things, or academic
admissions offices do shitty things, and they make bloggers do shitty things
too"_

Indeed

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chimi
I don't understand why we are giving this guy the time of day. He contacted
journalists, lied to them to promote a book, so now the journalists are
helping him promote his book.

Rewarding the lying is only going to encourage more lying.

~~~
mcantelon
It serves to expose the fact that journalism is easily compromised and people
should be assume fact checking is adequately done.

~~~
pedalpete
and strangely, we are hearing about this from a journalist, so do we trust the
Forbes story too?

~~~
Karunamon
This sentence is a lie.

Same kind of recursion :)

------
larrys
The product for any news organization is always something that is interesting
for them to print. The problem isn't someone who obviously can easily found to
be a fraud. The problem is someone who is not so easily found out because
there is no easy paper trail or time is short. You're not going to get an
affidavit or a notarized statement. There is always some trust involved (like
when you pickup your dry cleaning for example..)

Generally with something of an important nature (not vinyl records) I would
think think there is a certain degree of investigation. Of course the fact
that someone says they are at Harvard, and a medical professor does not mean
that someone couldn't fake being them and write from a gmail account or even a
university account with a different name. I would think that would be fairly
easy to social engineer actually. That's really the danger here. Or to create
a history or a website pretending to be someone important.

Ryan has a certain amount of credibility and while apparently a simple search
would have pulled up his reputation we don't really know how many people
recognized that he was a fraud, only those that fell for his manipulation. And
if anyone saw he was a fraud did they report this or just "move along" because
they were busy.

Articles that quoted him, well, I just looked at a few (to see what he said)
and they've already been updated and his name redacted in all but one that I
checked:

[http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-57369829/6-embarrassi...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-57369829/6-embarrassing-
office-stories-that-will-make-you-cringe/)

So has this one:

[http://todayhealth.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/27/1024...](http://todayhealth.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/27/10244201-flu-
faux-pas-germy-strangers-and-the-etiquette-of-being-sick?lite)

And this one:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/technology/personaltech/ho...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/technology/personaltech/how-
to-enjoy-turntables-without-obsessing-over-them.html?pagewanted=all)

(Didn't take the time to check the others).

------
smsm42
The problem for journalists is that they have to write about things that they
do not know and frequently do not understand. They don't have a choice but to
rely on experts - real or fake - and they usually don't have budget or stuff
to check them - because for that you'd need to hire another set of experts! So
unless the journalist works for some publication that is obsessive with fact
checking (I've heard New Yorker is like that) and has budget to do it, they
are at the mercy of the sources. So when you read some random quote in the
press, the first instinct should not be "it's true because New York Times says
it" but "some guy I don't know said something to some other guy I don't know
who probably didn't bother even to verify it".

~~~
smsm42
s/stuff/staff/ of course :)

------
TimJRobinson
There could have been plenty of reporters who fact checked then didn't bother
contacting him after discovering he was lying.

------
mcantelon
Joey Skaggs is a guy that's done this sort of thing over the span of decades.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Skaggs>

~~~
scottmey
Been a fan of Joey Skaggs for a long time now. First discovered his work in
the RE/Search Publication "Pranks"... Definitely check that publication out.

As far as this article is concerned, this guy rubs me the wrong way right off
the bat.. but I agree that the reporters should have done some fact checking,
probably would have been apparent rather quickly something was up.

~~~
mcantelon
"Pranks" is great... an inspiring book.

------
rdp
I have read almost 1/4 of this guy's book--Trust Me, I'm Lying--and it is
actually interesting. He rather explicitly describes the process by which he
has manipulated the news media for various clients, including American Apparel
(he is the guy who makes those "controversial" ads), by feeding or leaking
info to blogs (his definition of a "blog" is very broad) and then working
those stories up the media food chain. There is lots of puffery and some of it
will trigger any reasonable person's b.s. detector, However, a lot of it rings
true and he definitely presents a lot of interesting nut-and-bolts ideas--that
may or may not actually work.

As to financial results, I can recall one instance where he specifically
identified a link between a campaign and financial results. Whether you
believe it is another matter . . .

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rshlo
I've been a long time journalist in my country, and I've got to tell that this
is really disturbing. This is not only about journalism, but about pure trust
between two human beings. As a journalist (unless it's a company or a story
with an angle) you really don't expect people to lie. Why? because as human
beings we don't expect someone to lie, just for the sake of it.

I think that the state of journalism these days have been greatly discussed
everywhere. Nothing new to add on that. But it's really disappoints me to find
out you can't trust no one.

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sachitgupta
Related: Mixergy interview where he talks about more ways in which he got
publicity: <http://mixergy.com/ryan-holiday-interview/>

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allentucker
In other news American Apparel is losing money. While this guy seems to know
how to get attention, the type of attention he gets isn't the kind that
converts. It's difficult to make this work without adding real value at some
point.

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allbombs
Gold. Good for him, shame on those reporters that never checked their resource

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pdog
Following the links in the article, you'll find that they contain editor's
notes that are helpfully "corrected" to remove quotations from Ryan Holiday.

------
tubbo
What a fucking attention whore.

