The Hybrid Media System
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I am especially indebted to Ben O’Loughlin, who was kind enough to read and comment with penetrating intelligence and good humor on almost the entire draft manuscript. I would also like to thank Bruce Bimber, Angela Chnapko, and Philip N. Howard for their comments on the initial book proposal and C. W. Anderson, Lance Bennett, David Karpf, Daniel Kreiss, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen for their detailed comments on earlier drafts of some of the material. The diverse network of scholars and practitioners with whom I interact on Twitter has been a constant source of inspiration and insight. It goes without saying that this book’s errors or shortcomings are entirely my own.
I am deeply grateful to those working in British media and politics who allowed me to interview them for this book. Not only did these individuals agree to meet me, they also gave very generously of their time, despite working in fields where punishing schedules and tight deadlines are the norm. I hasten to add that the individuals and the organizations specifically mentioned herein bear no responsibility whatsoever for my interpretations or conclusions, nor do any opinions expressed herein constitute the official policy or opinion of any organization or organizations mentioned.
My department at Royal Holloway, University of London, has been generous in providing the time required to complete this book. Research leave that came after my period as head of department proved to be helpful during the project’s formative stages. For the financial assistance that made possible some of the fieldwork for this book, I thank Royal Holloway, University of London’s Research Strategy Fund, and the Department of Politics and International Relations. Thanks should also go to the Garden House Day Nursery, without whom this book would literally not have been written: clear personal evidence of the importance of time as a social resource, which is one of the sub-themes of my argument. I also thank staff at the following institutions: the Bedford and Founders Libraries at Royal Holloway, University of London; the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics; the University of London Library at Senate House in Bloomsbury; and the British Library.
Many of the ideas in this book were previously aired at conferences, workshops, and symposia. These include, in chronological order: the American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting at Boston in August 2010; the Royal Holloway Department of Politics and International Relations research seminar in February 2011; the University of Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute’s research seminar in February 2011; the European Consortium for Political Research Conference at Reykjavik, Iceland, in August 2011; the British Economic and Social Research Council/Hansard Society/Manchester University Roundtable on Social Media and Campaigning held at the British Parliament in November 2011; and the London School of Economics Department of Media and Communications Research Dialogues Seminar in November 2011. Last but certainly not least, it was an unforgettable honor to present an overview of this book to the Holberg International Memorial Prize Symposium, at Bergen, Norway, in June 2012, alongside esteemed prize winner Manuel Castells and symposium participants Bill Dutton, Helen Margetts, Terhi Rantanen, Annabelle Sreberny, and Göran Therborn.
I am continually impressed by the dedication and professionalism of the excellent team at Oxford University Press in New York. As everyone who has worked with Angela Chnapko knows, there is no finer commissioning editor. Angela’s enthusiasm, hard work, tact, sound judgment, and knowledge of her field are second to none. My thanks also go to the anonymous peer reviewers: that they improved the original proposal and the book is unquestionable. I owe a special debt of gratitude to a particularly important reviewer who undertook a detailed developmental review of the entire manuscript.
Some of the material presented in chapter 4 appears in Andrew Chadwick (2011) “The Political Information Cycle in a Hybrid News System: The British Prime Minister and the ‘Bullygate’ Affair,” International Journal of Press/Politics 16 (1), 3–29, and Andrew Chadwick (2011) “Britain’s First Live Televised Party Leaders’ Debate: From the News Cycle to the Political Information Cycle,” Parliamentary Affairs 64 (1), 24–44.
Finally, I dedicate this book to my wife Sam and our daughter Katie. Katie often seems to worry that my books do not contain many pictures. She was born just as the momentous events that form the subject of chapters 6 and 7—the campaign to elect Barack Obama president of the United States—reached their historic climax.
The Hybrid Media System
Introduction
“You Might as Well Go Home and Watch It on Sky News”
London, Saturday May 8, 2010. In the fallout from the inconclusive outcome to the British general election two days ago—the first “hung” Parliament in thirty-six years—senior politicians of all parties descend upon Westminster. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats seek a deal to form a coalition government. As the behind-closed-doors coalition talks begin, television reporters swarm around the grand entrances to Westminster’s government buildings, empowered by an election in which their medium has renewed its dominance during the staging of Britain’s first ever live televised prime ministerial debates.
The elite media feeding frenzy intensifies. With talk in the air of a deal on a fairer voting system as a condition of the Liberal Democrats agreeing to a coalition, a group of around a thousand people, many of them wearing purple, from a range of political campaign and activist groups—Take Back Parliament, Power 2010, and 38 Degrees—somehow manage to identify the location of the secret party talks. The protestors march from Trafalgar Square to Transport House in Smith Square, where Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg is discussing strategy with senior colleagues in advance of a meeting scheduled later that day with Conservative leader David Cameron.
As the purple march enters Smith Square, David Babbs, the director of activist network 38 Degrees, receives a phone call. Sky News, one of Britain’s twenty-four-hour television news channels, would like him to appear in a live interview with their on-scene presenter, Kay Burley. Babbs agrees and makes his way around the corner, to where the nation’s most important broadcast news reporters are camped on the green overlooking the Palace of Westminster and close to a gathering crowd of noisy protestors. Babbs composes himself for the interview, but before he and Burley go live to camera, Burley asks, “Can you tell these people to shut up?” “No, that’s not how it works,” Babbs replies (Interview May 15, 2010).1 The interview begins, and within a few seconds Burley is hostile. As Babbs tries to explain that he and the 38 Degrees members want to make their arguments about a more democratic voting system known to the British public, Burley repeatedly interrupts him with verbal jabs about the futility of the demonstration: “It’s not going to make any difference …” “What are you protesting for? …” “Why do you need to protest? …” And then comes Burley’s killer line: “You might as well go home and watch it on Sky News….”
Against the backdrop of high political drama in Westminster, this encounter crystallizes in one brief episode significant aspects of political communication as we hurtle through the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Consider the mediated experience of these events. I was not watching Sky News on television at the time of this live interview. In common with the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of people who were transfixed by Kay Burley’s extraordinary and unreasonable treatment of David Babbs, I watched the exchange later that day, on YouTube, or, to be precise, on the YouTube app on my iPhone. But what exactly did I and the hundreds of thousands of others watch, as the interview video clip flowed across television, websites, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, personal computers, smartphones, tablet devices, Xboxes, Nintendo Wiis, and web-enabled Blu Ray disc players, to name just a few of the ways you can now “watch” the internet.
What I watched on the YouTube app on my iPhone was, in fact, a web video of a phone video of a television broadcast video: a video of a video of a video. A person who goes by the YouTube moniker “lanerobertlane” had been sitting at home watching the interview li
ve on television. Possibly sensing from the interview’s first few moments that this might be an unusual encounter, lanerobertlane hurriedly pulled out his smartphone, switched on its video camera, pointed it at his television, and turned up the television using his remote control. Just as you manage to focus on the jerky images, you are jolted by the sound of the remote being plonked down onto a coffee table. Lanerobertlane, who remains out of shot throughout, then uploaded the video file to YouTube. Within an hour or so, tens of thousands had viewed it, an online flash campaign had erupted on Twitter and Facebook, and protestors had congregated in real space around the Sky News stage in Westminster to try to disrupt Burley’s subsequent interviews by holding up placards within camera shot and shouting, “Sack Kay Burley.” The Burley moment entered the YouTube hall of fame as one of the most excruciatingly bad examples of political interviewing in recent history. As I write today, lanerobertlane’s video of a video of a video has been viewed 383,783 times on YouTube and has generated 2098 comments (lanerobertlane, 2010).
On that day, and when I interviewed him as part of the research for this book nineteen days later, David Babbs handled the episode calmly and with dignity. What seems to have most angered YouTube’s lanerobertlane and the broader networks of protestors was Burley’s suggestion that Babbs “go home and watch it on Sky News.” 38 Degrees is part of a new generation of political organizations, like America’s MoveOn, Australia’s GetUp!, and the transnational movement Avaaz, that shrewdly combine the logics of newer media, older media, and real-space events to mobilize activists, often in real time, as a means of applying pressure on political elites for a wide range of progressive causes. In the case of 38 Degrees, this has ranged from political reform to the environment, media regulation to poverty, and from fighting cuts in Britain’s publicly funded National Health Service to opposing the privatization of the nation’s public forests. The last thing 38 Degrees members wanted to hear from Kay Burley was that they should go home, sit on the sofa, and watch the post-election drama on television. And yet, 38 Degrees’ leader was appearing live on Sky News precisely because he recognized the power and immediacy of television as a medium. And if sympathizer lanerobertlane had not been sitting on his sofa watching television, there would have been no YouTube video to upload and circulate, little awareness of the unfairness of the Babbs interview, and less attention in the mainstream media to whether the Liberal Democrat Party was about to betray its long-held pledge of electoral reform.
At the same time, Kay Burley is a well-established broadcast journalist working for BSkyB, which is partly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire, a global media conglomerate that has placed television and newspapers at the core of its strategy for more than thirty years. Probably the last thing Burley wanted to hear was that Babbs was representative of a movement of several hundred thousand people, most of whom explicitly reject the television-era, passive spectatorship logic of political communication the Sky News broadcaster both personified and, on this occasion, explicitly advocated. And yet, Babbs and his noisy comrades provided an obvious sense of drama and authentic liveness to this occasion, a sense that the election was an issue being discussed and argued about across the land—as, indeed, it was. Visible manifestations of unfolding drama are precious resources for all professional broadcasters. Burley was no exception here, and she clearly saw how the protests fitted with television media logic.
This was, perhaps, a clash of ideologies, between the progressive center-left and a right-wing media empire. The fortunes of News Corporation have since declined, as Rupert Murdoch was forced to react to allegations of widespread phone-hacking at one of his British newspapers, the News of the World, by closing the paper down. Murdoch’s son, James, was forced to stand down as chairman of BSkyB. 38 Degrees has since expanded its membership to over three million and has led successful mobilizations against a number of key policies of Britain’s Conservative-led coalition government.
But viewed more broadly, the Burley interview, the protests that surrounded it, and the mediation of both, involved a confluence of older and newer logics in the organization and communication of political expression. At stake here was not only what was being said, but also how and by whom it ought to be said. This moment condenses key questions of who has power in the mediation of politics. It is but one episode among many in the ongoing construction of the hybrid media system.
The Hybrid Media System
The rapid diffusion of new communication technologies creates a pressing need to rethink the complex and multifaceted forces that are reshaping the political communication environments of the Western democracies. At stake is whether we are living through a time of fundamental change in the nature of political life as a result of the disruptive influence of digital communication. Who is emerging as powerful in this new context? This book seeks to provide an empirically informed interpretive account of key aspects of systemic change in the political communication environments of Britain and the United States. It attempts to do this by employing a new type of focus on the classic concerns of political communication scholarship: the interactions among political actors, media, and publics. I argue that Britain and the United States have what are now best characterized as hybrid media systems.
In this book I start from the premise that in our analyses we should try as far as possible to integrate the roles played by older and newer media in political life. We require a holistic approach to the role of information and communication in politics, one that avoids exclusively focusing either on supposedly “new” or supposedly “old” media, but instead maps where the distinctions between newer and older media matter, and where those distinctions might be dissolving. Older and newer are relative terms. We need to understand how newer media practices in the interpenetrated fields of media and politics adapt and integrate the logics of older media practices in those fields. We also need to understand how older media practices in the interpenetrated fields of media and politics adapt and integrate the logics of newer media practices. This requires a perspective that discusses the systemic characteristics of political communication, but such a perspective must, I believe, be firmly rooted not in abstract structural prejudgments, but in empirical evidence and specific illustrations of these forces in flow. This task is all the more important because it is clear that media systems in Britain, the United States, and around the world are in the middle of a chaotic transition period induced by the rise of digital media.
The key to understanding the hybrid media system is a conceptual understanding of power, but one that can be illustrated empirically. The hybrid media system is built upon interactions among older and newer media logics—where logics are defined as technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms—in the reflexively connected fields of media and politics. Actors in this system are articulated by complex and ever-evolving relationships based upon adaptation and interdependence and simultaneous concentrations and diffusions of power. Actors create, tap, or steer information flows in ways that suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable, or disable the agency of others, across and between a range of older and newer media settings. The book examines a range of examples of this systemic hybridity in flow, through the analysis of political communication contexts ranging from news making in all of its contemporary “professional” and “amateur” forms, to parties and election campaigns, to activist movements, and government communication. I argue that hybridity offers a powerful mode of thinking about media and politics because it foregrounds complexity, interdependence, and transition. Hybrid thinking rejects simple dichotomies, nudging us away from “either/or” patterns of thought and toward “not only, but also” patterns of thought. It draws attention to flux, in-betweenness, the interstitial, and the liminal. It reveals how older and newer media logics in the fields of media and politics blend, overlap, intermesh, and coevolve. Hybrid thinking thus provides a useful disposition for studying how political actors, publics, and media of all kinds inte
ract.
In his influential book from the early 1990s, Media Performance, Denis McQuail fleetingly but revealingly referred to a media system as “simply all relevant media” (McQuail, 1992: 96). McQuail was writing in a different era, one that future generations will perhaps look back on as the zenith of the twentieth-century period of “mass communication.” But while the context has shifted dramatically, we would do well to adopt McQuail’s parsimonious formulation as our guide for understanding political communication today. In its own way, The Hybrid Media System tries to go beyond some of the limitations of existing treatments both of newer media and politics and of older media and politics. Too often the scholars in these two camps have talked past each other. Worse still, they have sometimes completely ignored each other’s central themes and contributions. This is a broad generalization, of course, but it is only in the last few years that digital media and the internet have started to be recognized as genuinely important by those working in what we might term the “historic mainstream” of political communication scholarship (Chadwick & Howard, 2009). And on the other side, much of the work on the internet and politics has been problematic. It has often been blind to non-internet media forms and too often has been dominated by assumptions about “revolutionary” change or by a too narrowly drawn frame of “politics as usual.” By neglecting the interrelationships between older and newer media logics, I believe research in this field is missing some important developments in the evolution of political communication. This book demonstrates one way—but by no means the only way—to explore these developments.