Ryan Holiday, American Apparel's PR man, has published a book about how he spent years lying to the media and manipulating bloggers to advance the agenda of the company and his other clients, which include Tucker Max and Linkin Park.
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His main point, however, is that bloggers and reporters are so lazy and mendacious that they manipulate the truth just as much as he does.
The media and PR business, therefore, is a bit like pig wrestling, he argues: Everyone gets dirty, but the pig loves it.
The book is titled "Trust Me, I'm Lying; Confessions of a Media Manipulator," and can be summed up by a quote from the first page of his introduction: "I'm paid to deceive. My job is to lie to the media so they can lie to you."
Given that Holiday has happily confessed that he tells lies for a living, here are some of his greatest hits, all from the book.
Disclosure: Large chunks of his book are devoted to criticizing Business Insider and its staffers, including the author of this post and his employer, Henry Blodget.
Because he encouraged "false perceptions" through blogs, one of his clients ended up being branded a "known rapist."
His book says:
I created false perceptions through blogs, which led to bad conclusions and wrong decisions—real decisions in the real world that had consequences of real people. Phrases like "known rapist" began to follow what were once playfully encouraged rumors of bad or shocking behavior designed to get blog publicity for clients.
He has his assistants pretend to be him on the phone when he's posing as an "expert."
Holiday uses Help A Reporter Out—a web site for journalists looking for expert commenters—to pose as an expert. He writes:
I've used it myself to con reporters from ABC News to Reuters to the Today Show, and yes, even the vaunted New York Times. Sometimes I don't even do it myself. I just have an assistant pretend to be me over e-mail or on the phone.
You can see the Times' retraction of Holiday's lies here.
He says Jezebel writer Iron Carmon did not reach out to Daily Show staffers for comment about a story in which she accused the show of discriminating against female employees.
Holiday writes, "Her story was a lie" and "bullshit."
Here's Carmon's story about female employees on the Daily Show, dated June 23, 2010. Carmon wrote that female writers were marginalized and under-represented on the show.
And here are her emails requesting comment from the Daily Show, from eight days before she published her story.
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