How easy is it for fakes to pull one over on major media? Pretty easy, if you’re a professional fake like Ryan Holiday, the subject of a Forbes profile and whose work as a media liar should serve as a cautionary tale for reporters everywhere. He’s got a new book out (of course) called: “Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator.”
Among the bamboozled: ABC News, CBS News, MSNBC (on whose air he pretended someone had sneezed on him while working at Burger King) and the New York Times (as a phony vinyl records collector).
From the Forbes piece:
Holiday, 25 years old and based in New Orleans, mostly just wanted to see if it could be done. He had been getting blogs to write what he wanted for years, and had developed a sense of how stories were put together in the internet age. He thought he could push the envelope a bit further.
“I knew that bloggers would print anything, so I thought, what if, as an experiment, I tried to prove that they will literally print anything?” he says. “Instead of trying to get press to benefit myself, I just wanted to get any press for any reason as a joke.”
