How This Guy Lied His Way Into MSNBC, ABC News, The New York Times and More | Hacker News Reader

How This Guy Lied His Way Into MSNBC, ABC News, The New York Times and More

forbes.com

84 pointssteve891824 comments

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.

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....

"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

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

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.

I feel uncomfortable posting this, but a related argument: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/media/2012/07/how-media-sh...

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

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

This sentence is a lie.

Same kind of recursion :)

> "people should be assume"

Should not assume?

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...

So has this one:

http://todayhealth.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/27/1024...

And this one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/technology/personaltech/ho...

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

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".

s/stuff/staff/ of course :)

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

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

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

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.

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

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 . . .

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.

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

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.

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

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.

What a fucking attention whore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com