You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Read online

  Over twenty-one years of professional bullshitting, whenever a colleague would raise a question about Kelley’s latest scoop, “Jack Kelley Revealed to Have Largest Penis Ever,” they were shot down by the editors. Eventually, someone filed a complaint that stuck. When the higher-ups asked to speak to a translator Kelley used on a story, Kelley handed one of his friends a script and asked her to pretend to be the woman in question. Somehow this didn’t work out (it was probably his insistence that she pepper her responses with flattering anecdotes about his mastery of karate sutra, the deadly art of sex-fighting). When USA Today launched an investigation, it found Kelley had made up “all or part of 20 stories that appeared in the paper, lifted more than 100 passages and quotes from other, uncredited sources.” There was no Pakistani student gunning for the Sears Tower, and he never infiltrated anything or rode along on a hunt for bin Laden. And then there was his heartrending tale, in 2000, of a Cuban woman who died trying to flee her country by boat. Turned out the woman in the snapshot he provided the editors was a Cuban hotel worker who they tracked down in 2004, alive and well.

  What it taught us about the media

  You could walk into a major newspaper, introduce yourself as Jack Ryan, and hand in an excerpt of a Tom Clancy novel. They’d put in the next morning’s paper. Then they’d win the Pulitzer.

  4. THE GREAT MOON HOAX

  When It Happened: 1835

  News Agencies Involved: The New York Sun

  In 1835, the New York Sun duped the people of the United States into believing that aliens had been discovered on the moon.

  To its credit, it attributed this fantastic discovery to John Herschel, the best-known astronomer of his day. Herschel was the perfect cover because he was famous yet reclusive. Since telephones hadn’t been invented, it was virtually impossible for Herschel to dispute the Sun‘s claims, and the ridiculous scheme worked: The Sun increased its subscriber base by over fifteen thousand daily after the first story.

  Having learned a valuable lesson about deceiving its readers (specifically, hey this shit works!) the Sun announced the life that was discovered on the moon consisted of intelligent batmen. Once again, circulation increased, making the Sun the largest newspaper on the planet. The story was so thoroughly believed that a Springfield, Massachusetts, missionary society resolved to send missionaries to the moon to convert and civilize the bat-men, apparently unaware that bat-men have lost all faith since they saw their parents gunned down in that alleyway.

  What it taught us about the media

  The story was revealed to be a hoax several weeks after its publication, but since there was no television or radio, the news didn’t spread very far. The Sun never had to issue a retraction, and its circulation didn’t decrease as a result. Nevertheless, the media learned its lesson: Don’t tell falsehoods unless you like giant piles of money that will last forever with no repercussions.

  3. MICHAEL BAY DIRECTS THE NEWS

  In 1992, Dateline NBC aired an investigative report that showed unsettling videos of GM pickup trucks exploding on impact in low-speed collisions, presumably due to faulty fuel tanks … or wizards.

  Harry Pearce, GM’s executive vice president at the time, attempted to discredit the story with a press conference that involved what legal scholars call “a shitload of evidence.” During the press conference, Pearce produced a letter NBC sent him claiming the vehicles used in the video had been “junked” and, as a result, couldn’t be inspected. Then he produced the astonishingly not-junked cars. Before the folks at Dateline could respond, “Oh, you wanted the cars we used in the footage ! We thought you said cards, and we were like, ‘huh?’ Ah, but no, the cars are fine … ,” Pearce was ready to move on to act 2 of Ruining NBC’s Shit: The Reckoning.

  Next, he brought out a blown-up screen grab of the collision that NBC aired and zoomed in on two tiny plumes of smoke coming out of the side of the pickup truck. The problem with this was that the screen grab was taken just moments before impact. The GM pickup truck explosion that aired on the NBC program was actually caused by NBC. The producers had rigged the trucks prior to filming. There was literally a guy standing off camera pushing a button a split second before the filmed impact.

  Of the five people responsible for the report, three were fired, one resigned, and one got transferred faster than a touch-y priest.

  What it taught us about the media

  We at Cracked.com like to think the best about people, so the only explanation is that the Dateline producers were drunk. For weeks. And GM was holding one of their daughters hostage.

  2. EVERY MEDIA NETWORK IN THE COUNTRY STICKS ITS FINGERS IN IS EARS AND SHOUTS, “NAH NAH NAH, I CAN’T HEAR YOU”

  When It Happened: 2009

  News Agencies Involved: ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Fox

  In 2008, New York Times journalist David Barstow discovered that in the run-up to the Iraq War, every single major media outlet had featured pro-war “impartial experts” who were in fact government sock puppets (metaphorically speaking, in all but the most retarded cases). The report even went on to reveal which Pentagon officials’ bony wrists were protruding from the asses of which talking heads (still metaphorically speaking … hopefully).

  In the end, Barstow’s report revealed that when it came to the Iraq War America got news that was as reliable as a Chinese Google search for “Tiananmen Square.” The Pentagon and major TV news outlets misled Americans into war. That’s the information age’s Watergate! So why had we never seen Barstow’s name before our research intern told us to type it up there?

  It turns out the reports, though impossible to deny, were remarkably easy for TV news outlets to ignore, despite the fact that they were published on the front page of the New York goddamned Times. When Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2009, most television pundits were busy hyping swine flu. Brian Williams had the balls to report that the paper had won five Pulitzers, and even mentioned the subject of three of the stories they’d won for. He just chose not to mention the one they got for pointing out that he’s a government stooge.

  What it taught us about the media

  Hey, those celebrity vaginas aren’t going to expose themselves. OK, they are, but that’s beside the point. The system’s not perfect, but it’s not Stalinist Russia either. As long as the New York Times is around, we have nothing to worry abou—Oh, hey, look. There’s one more entry on this list.

  1. THE DENIAL OF THE HOLODOMOR

  When It Happened: 1932-33

  News Agencies Involved: New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and the Nation

  When the harvest of 1932 was poorer than expected in most regions of the Soviet Union, it became pretty clear that there wasn’t enough food for the Russian people. Unfortunately, Stalin’s government was busy convincing the world that Communism was rad, and alerting the world to an impending disaster wasn’t part of the PR plan.

  Luckily, America had its best Russian reporter on the ground at the time: Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner who had interviewed Stalin himself. As millions of Russians began starving to death and Stalin continued itching his balls indifferently, the New York Times‘ Duranty stepped up to the plate, informing the world:

  “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” The people, you see, weren’t starving to death; they were just dying of malnutrition. Wait, what the hell?

  It turns out that most writers who got approval to enter the Soviet Union were too terrified of Stalin to talk about what was really happening. They pretty much just reported whatever the Soviet government told them to. In Duranty’s case, scoring an interview with the year’s hottest dictator came with a price. Namely, not alerting the world that 10 million people were about to starve to death.

  What it taught us about the media

  Everything you’ve ever read is a
lie. Trust no one.

  FOUR BRAINWASHING TECHNIQUES THEY’RE USING ON YOU RIGHT NOW

  BRAINWASHING doesn’t take a lot of sci-fi gadgetry. There are all sorts of tried-and-true techniques that anyone can use to bypass the thinking part of your brain and flip a switch deep inside that says “OBEY.”

  In fact, there’s an entire arsenal of manipulation techniques being used on you every day to do just that. Techniques like:

  4. CHANTING SLOGANS

  Every cult leader, drill sergeant, and politician knows that if you want to quiet all of those pesky doubting thoughts in a crowd, get them to scream a repetitive phrase or slogan. You know it as chanting, but at New York City’s Cult Hotline and Clinic, the practice is known as a thought-stopping technique. Guess why.

  Why it works

  The analytical parts of your brain and those that handle repetitive tasks just can’t seem to function at the same time.

  In a 2000 New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell argued that this is why athletes choke in big moments. The heightened pressure turns on the analytical part of their brain while they’re trying to complete a repetitive task. Athletes refer to this as “overthinking a shot,” or “pooping the wedding bed.”

  Chanting just reverses the dynamic. It forces your brain into repetitive-task mode so you can’t think rationally. For instance, try solving a complex logic puzzle while screaming the chorus to that “I get knocked down” song over and over again.

  Meditation works the same way, with chants or mantras meant to “calm the mind.” Shutting down those nagging voices in the head is helpful for stressed-out individuals but even more helpful to a guy who wants to shut down an audience full of nagging voices suggesting that what he’s saying might be ridiculous.

  3. SLIPPING BULLSHIT INTO YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS

  The rise of the Internet has given birth to a whole new, sly technique of bullshit insertion. People who get paid to manipulate your opinion have figured out that most of us browse headlines instead of actually reading the news. And there’s a way to exploit that based on how the brain stores memories.

  The Drudge Report lives off this. A single anonymous source will report to a news blog that, say, Senator Smith runs a secret gay bordello. Drudge will run the headline:

  NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT SMITH’S SECRET GAY BORDELLO

  Or perhaps there’ll just be a question mark on the end:

  SMITH: SECRET GAY BORDELLO ASS MASTER?

  It doesn’t matter that the headline merely involves “questions” about the bordello. The idea has been planted, and two months later when somebody mentions Senator Smith around the water cooler you’ll say, “The gay bordello guy, right?”

  Why it works

  It’s called source amnesia. According to a 2008 article in the New York Times, it’s the reason why “you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.” The brain has limited storage, so it stores just the important nugget but usually discards the trivial context, such as when and where you learned about it.

  In the era of information overload, that’s a mechanism that can be easily exploited. A piece of information can be presented with all sorts of qualifiers, but often the brain will only remember the ugly rumor and completely forget the qualifiers. It happens even if the headline we read was specifically about the rumor being untrue.

  You’ll see this every election cycle. The entire point of putting a shaky rumor into the press is to force your opponent to deny it, because denial works just as well as the accusation to secure the rumor in the brains of voters. Thanks to source amnesia, for millions of people all three of these:

  SMITH DENIES GAY BORDELLO RUMORS

  SMITH REFUSES COMMENT ON GAY BORDELLO RUMORS

  SMITH ADMITS STARTING, VISITING, BURNING DOWN BORDELLO-ORPHANAGE

  register as the exact same headline.

  2. CONTROLLING WHAT YOU WATCH AND READ

  Restriction of reading material is common to every cult. The idea is to insulate the members from any opposing points of view. That’s why the guys claiming to be sex messiahs tend to start their polygamous compounds out in the middle of the desert. Not a lot of dissenting voices out there.

  It turns out that technique works just as well out in the real world. Only nobody has to drag you into the desert and tell you what to read. Your brain handles that part for them.

  Why it works

  Our brain is wired to get a quick high from reading things that agree with our own point of view. Scientists at Emory University actually hooked scanners up to the brains of staunch conservatives and liberals and asked them about politically divisive issues. The scans showed the brain’s pleasure center lit up when people heard something they agreed with and lit up again when intentionally dismissing information that they disagreed with. Yes, our brain rewards us for being closed-minded dicks.

  This is why the Right and Left each has its own publishing arm, and why each one’s favorite topic of discussion is how corrupt and ridiculous the other side’s media is. Most of us will gladly close ourselves in whichever echo chamber of talk radio, blogs, and cable news outlets give us that little “I knew it!” high.

  1. KEEPING YOU IN LINE WITH SHAME

  You can win any formal debate in college by using our patented technique of simply repeating your opponent’s argument in a high-pitched, mocking tone while wiggling your fingers in the air. There really is no defense.

  They call this the appeal to ridicule fallacy. To which we would reply, “Ooh, appeal to ridicule fallacy! Well, I’ve got a phallus you can see right here, college boy.”

  Professionals have more sophisticated methods, but they still know that if they can portray an idea as ridiculous, the listener usually won’t bother examining it any closer to find out if the ridicule is justified.

  For instance, the UN recently released a report that found more greenhouse gasses come from cattle than the tailpipes of cars. Luckily for whichever side of the global-warming debate that information pisses off, this statistic can also be stated thusly: “So now they’re telling us that—get this—global warming is caused by cows farting! Priceless!”

  And now it’s ridiculous. Why even consider a piece of information that ridiculous? That’s only something a ridiculous person would do! And you’re not ridiculous, are you?

  Why it works

  There are these primitive, lower parts of your brain called amygdalae that control base, emotional reactions. That’s where things like contempt and shame come from, and stimulating the amygdalae can completely shut down the analytical part of your brain. The gang calls you a coward, and the next thing you know you’re wedging a Roman candle between your butt cheeks.

  You can thank evolution for that. Mockery developed as a conformity enforcer, to keep people in line. Way back when humans started forming groups and tribes, social status was everything. Making a person, idea, or behavior the target of mockery gave it a lower social position. If you were associated with the idea, you were left out of the hunting/eating/ orgies that made life worthwhile. Thousands of years later, a good dose of mockery can still shut down critical thinking and make us fall right in line.

  FIVE HOLLYWOOD ADAPTATIONS THAT TOTALLY MISSED THE POINT

  AH, publishing a book. It’s like getting confirmation that your time here on earth mattered, but putting your thoughts down on paper doesn’t come without risks. There’s always the chance that Hollywood will turn your book into a movie, and—spoiler alert—the studio has a few ideas about the ending. This is showbiz slang for, “We’re going to make your story say exactly the opposite of what you’d intended.”

  5. FIGHT CLUB, ALLEGEDLY BASED ON THE BOOK BY CHUCK PALAHNIUK

  In rebellion against the shallowness of modern life and IKEA, the narrator creates an imaginary split personality named Tyler Durden, who urges men to beat the crap out of each other and commit random acts of anarchy. As the story reaches a climax, the narrator realizes he needs to rid himse
lf of Tyler and shoots himself in the head, because that’s where your imagination lives.

  The book ending

  The book makes the dubious claim that being shot in the head puts you in the hospital, and that’s where we find the narrator. The narrator describes the hospital in beatific language, calling the attendants “angels.” But alas, one of the “angels” is a Fight Club member, who ends the book saying, “We look forward to getting you back.” Thus we learn that the narrator has created a monster in the Fight Club anarchist group that is out of his control.

  Moral of the book

  Modern life is emasculating and can provoke a violent backlash by those feeling disconnected from humanity. This is a bad thing.

  The Hollywood ending

  After shooting himself in the head, the narrator naturally has sustained only a minor flesh wound. The film ends with him holding hands with his love interest while watching a massive spectacle take place in the background, which we all recognize as Hollywood shorthand for “everything is going to turn out all right.” For those who don’t get it, Edward Norton helpfully states, “Everything’s going to be fine.”