It is rather disconcerting to learn that just because a blog carries the name of a well-known media brand, it doesn’t mean that it’s held to the same editorial standards as that brand. This is just one of the revelations in this book. Of course, it could be that that caveat applies only to those American examples cited by the author, but it has made me somewhat more wary of brand name blog posts than their mainstream cousins.

TMIL has a similar aim to How to lie with statistics. In that book, the author regards himself as the equivalent of a burglar teaching you all the tricks of the trade — not in order to turn you into an accomplished burglar but to help you better protect yourself against such people.

In TMIL, Holiday demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate the news. The template is: get your news or fake news item onto small blogs first of all. Their owners are desperate for content, and desperate to be first with the news. Consequently, according to Holiday, their editorial standards are not perhaps the highest we might hope for. Those blogs are trawled for content by bigger blogs. Eventually, the item in question might even find its way into mainstream media.

You can help it on its way by creating some controversy around the item. After all, in the media good news is no news, so spicing it up with the hint of a scandal or bad behaviour or something similar can be a good move.

What’s good about the book is that it lifts the lid off such practices. It’s depressing to read in the interviews section that some people used Holiday’s first edition as a playbook to enable them to manipulate the news in their favour, but I suppose that that demonstrates that they work.

Interestingly, in a recent issue of Scientific American American, an article entitled Why We Trust Lies makes the point that because friends share things on Twitter, Facebook and so on, and people tend to trust their friends and peers, social media in effect transforms disinformation into misinformation. (The difference is that the former is a deliberate attempt to mislead, whereas the latter is much more innocent. ) Applying that logic to TMIL, it’s clear that media manipulators, to borrow from the book’s subtitle, can rely on people on social media to transform their lies — fake news — into a kind of truth.

Holiday doesn’t have an answer to the question of what we can do about it. In my opinion, media literacy — and not just digital literacy — should be taught in schools where it isn’t already. He might perhaps have also pointed to some ways of evaluating websites, and apps to help that process. (I covered this in depth, and provided details of several useful websites and methods, in the September 2019 issue of Digital Education.)

However, I do think Holiday is being a bit unfair about journalists and their editorial standards (or what he regards as their lack of them). I’ve no idea what the situation is like in the USA, but certainly in the UK the economics of journalism are such that some journalists are working on 50 or more stories a week (see the slide deck in Read all about it: what does the research REALLY say?). In that situation it would be nothing short of miraculous if nothing slipped through the net. In fact, a talk I give on the subject makes it clear that news is often misleading even when nobody deliberately sets out to make it so.

Nevertheless, the book offers an interesting insight into how clever, and unscrupulous, marketeers can take advantage of the facts that (a) bloggers and others tend to be extremely keen to be first with the news, and that websites make money from advertising based on page views. That being the case, publishing something which turns out to be wrong is a positive advantage, because you can then publish a correction — and thereby garner even more page views.

If you teach media or digital literacy, you should definitely buy this book.

Please note: I was sent a free copy of this book for review purposes, but that has not influenced my opinion.

Related articles