this alarmingly reshaped my model of modern media, and what people end up seeing and believing

To get a friend's book attention

• He paid for some billboards and then defaced them with stickers hating on the guy
• Sent them to bloggers/reporters, then won a newspaper’s bounty for pictures of more defaced ads by creating more of them
• Even sent some papers pics of ads from a different city claiming it was theirs
• Organized women's groups to protest it

He manufactures attention by giving the media exactly what it wants: controversy along all the stereotypical clashes

Manufacture a story and “Trade it up the chain” - small blog with low standards, then medium publication with medium standards, then big one, having more “evidence” to cite every time

And it's sometimes self fulfilling, making the story true by people thinking it's true (others start defacing billboards etc)

This is happening constantly.

Fake rumors engineered to spread

People don't usually care about if it's true as their #1 priority

The media is “all professional wrestling”

This is a great metaphor