Lesson:Why the News Isn't Really the News/ExerciseL1

Listening Exercise

<quiz display=simple> {Watch the video and complete the text according to what you can understand. |type="{}"}

So you're cruising around the { Internet _8 } and you see a link to an article from some { trusted _7 }news source, and it's got a really intruiguing title, so you read it. And later you find out that that whole article was mostly false. What you thought was news, was really just { gossip _6 } or conjecture. So we've got Ryan Holiday here. He's a media { manipulator _11 } and he explains how this happens:

Ryan: So what I quickly { discovered _10 } is that the media was this sort of hierarchy or chain. The bottom you have small blogs who have small readerships but correspondingly low threshold for what they will and will not { publish _7 }.

Ryan: Say this blog publishes a { rumor _5 } then Business Insider or The Huffington Post or Perez Hilton writes about it. And now, because of the stature of those sites, it becomes something that people are talking about on Twitter, on { Facebook _8 }, on e-mail, they're chattering about it. And what happens is, producers for CNN, producers for a right wing talk { radio _5 }, journalists for The New York Times - where do they find out the news? They're not out pounding the pavement like it's a hundred years ago. No, they're { reading _7 } what people are chattering about online. And that cycle is hijacked by people like me who say, "Okay, if this blog here has the power to accidentally start a media firestorm by what it { publishes _9 }, I'm going to get them to publish something that benefits me."

Ryan: I, I´ve sent them { fake _4 } anonymous emails and watched as that turned into front page stories. The public isn’t aware that this is how their news is being made, but on both sides of the divide – on the marketing side and on the news side – neither is particularly concerned with { quality _7 }. They´re concerned with what will get attention.

And that´s { because _7 } of how blog sites and news sites make money. First, they get a lot of viewers to their pages. And then they sell that view count to advertisers. So to get { more _4 } views you do stuff like…

Ryan: Asking rhetorical untrue questions in a headline, doing your fact { checking _8 } after you´ve published an article, gossiping, speculating, making up a story from whole cloth.

But what if I want good, { accurate _8 } news. I mean, shouldn’t news sites want to give that to me ?

Ryan: Yeah, look, uh, I think the rule of thumb is if you´re not { paying _6 } for it they don’t give a shit about you. They´re { loyal _5 } to their advertisers.

If you're not { paying _6 } for it, you're not the { customer _8 }, you are the { product _7 }.