As occurs in the United States, broadcast media and the national newspapers heavily trailed the television debates during the opening stages of the election campaign. There were repeated mentions of the “historic” nature of television’s role in informing public opinion. Douglas Alexander, the Labour Party’s election campaign manager, had predicted that the debates would cast a long shadow over the election media coverage, possibly absorbing as many as nine campaigning days—three days for each debate (Wintour, 2010). This proved a conservative estimate. The media trailers began many weeks before the official start of the campaign and coverage ratcheted up during the first week of the campaign proper, culminating in two days of preview features on television and in the mainstream newspapers. The entire week following the first debate was heavily shaped by media reaction to those first ninety minutes in Manchester and this established a pattern for the reporting of the two subsequent debates.
These preview features were typically concerned with “learning lessons” from candidates’ triumphs and mistakes in the United States. The historic footage of the famous Kennedy-Nixon debate from 1960 was wheeled out time and again, as was Lloyd Bentsen’s famous “You’re no Jack Kennedy” dismissal of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice presidential debates, though the inconvenient truth that Quayle ended up on the winning side was usually forgotten. Television’s treatment was dominated by commentary from an assortment of “body language experts,” “language experts,” and opinion polling companies.
The scheduling of the debates had a crucial bearing on their impact, creating the perfect conditions for a powerful integrated cycle of coverage and commentary. All three were given slots on Thursday evenings, in television’s hallowed 8:00–10:00 p.m. prime time. This schedule ensured close temporal integration with the rhythms of the British elite media’s regular politics, commentary, and opinion cycle, which as I explained above now reaches a crescendo with the weekend newspapers and the Sunday political television shows. BBC and ITV, the major television news players, run their main nightly news shows at 10:00 p.m., so this scheduling meant that they could guarantee immediate post-debate coverage in these regular bulletins and could in turn influence editorial deadlines at newspapers. Thursday evenings have also long been the favored slot for British television’s most influential political discussion show, Question Time, which was aired as usual on the BBC soon after each debate. Running the debates on Thursdays thus jelled with political broadcasting traditions and was part of a bid by broadcasters to maximize their audiences and their power. The television audience for the first debate was 9.4 million; about 16 percent of the British population and a huge figure for this type of programming (BBC News Online, 2010a).
ORCHESTRATING IN REAL TIME
Stage two of the political information cycle is best characterized as the orchestration of real-time action. It involved the following: instant reaction based on snap, unrepresentative, self-selecting, online polls on ITV’s and the main newspapers’ websites; small studio panels of citizens operating sentiment dials which generated real-time reaction “worm” charts overlaid on top of the live streaming video on the ITV website; the expression of citizen opinion, primarily through Twitter and Facebook; and minute-by-minute live blogs produced by professional journalists during the event.
ITV’s website featured a live video stream of the television coverage, but it also carried a rolling comment facility provided by the Canadian company CoveritLive (CoveritLive, 2010). This allowed members of the public to post messages that appeared underneath the video feed as it happened. The ITV web page also featured a real-time reaction worm laid over the streaming video of the debate. This was a dynamically updated line chart depicting the changing negative and positive responses of a small, selected panel of twenty undecided voters watching the debate on television, armed with dial boxes in rooms in the nearby marginal constituencies of Bolton North West and Bolton East (ITV News, 2010a, 2010b).
The Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the BBC, and MSN all carried live blogs, while Sky News, Channel 4 News, the Times and the Mirror supplemented their sites with text comments provided by an embedded instant message service, again provided by CoveritLive (Belam, 2010; Collins & Blake, 2010; Metcalfe, 2010; Sparrow, 2010; Times, 2010). A Twitter “sentiment tracker” provided by the web company Tweetminster funneled real-time text content analysis of Twitter messages, with hashtags such as #leadersdebate, #ukelection, or #ge2010, into the ITV website. Overall, during the ninety-minute debate, 211,000 individual Twitter messages were produced, as users structured their commentary and conversations using these shared hashtags. The messages were produced at an average rate of thirty-nine per second, as 47,420 individual Twitter users engaged in real-time discussion (O’Loughlin, 2010). This cemented the emergent role played by Twitter and Facebook as backchannels adopted by the politically interested to form ad hoc discursive communities around major live television events.
Some journalists, most notably Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, preempted their post-debate appearances on the 10:00 p.m. television news by posting their initial reactions to the debate on their blogs and on Twitter (Robinson, 2010d). Channel 4 News’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy, eager to intervene despite the absence of a late-night bulletin on Channel 4, joined hundreds of other British journalists in posting real-time commentary on Twitter (Google Replay Search, 2010a).
One issue here is how the Twitter audience compared with the television audience. Twitter’s design is asymmetrical and some well-known individuals amass huge armies of followers. Many less well-known but still important individuals, especially those inside or on the margins of the Westminster “village” have follower lists running into the several thousands. These 47,420 active debate tweeters constituted just half a percent of the total television audience of 9.4 million. But the important number here is the combined amount of followers these 47,420 active tweeters had—in other words, the number of people who were potentially exposed to commentary on the debates. Note “potentially”: we have no means of verifying actual exposure in this case. Unfortunately, these data on follower counts are impossible to obtain, so consider a hypothetical illustration based on a mixture of conservative assumptions and what we already know from large-scale studies of message propagation on Twitter (Kwak, et al., 2010; Ye & Wu, 2010). At the time of the debate, Labour’s Alistair Campbell had 44,000 followers, the comedian Chris Addison had 24,000, and Channel 4 News’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy had 27,000. All three were active tweeters during the prime ministerial debate. Granted, these are celebrities, albeit minor ones, and we know that Twitter as a whole has a long tail of users with relatively few followers; in June 2009, the company itself revealed that the average number of followers per user was 126 (Weaver, 2009). There are also important unknowables, particularly the amount of mutual following inside the network of 47,420 active debate tweeters, and the extent to which individuals outside the active network followed multiple individuals inside it. Bearing these caveats in mind, let us somewhat artificially but conservatively assume that each of the 47,420 active debate tweeters had an average of just fifty “unique” followers. This produces a potentially exposed audience of 2.4 million individuals. Then there is further propagation of content, either through Twitter’s retweet feature or selective repetition of others’ messages, through which the followers-of-followers are also potentially exposed. The basic statistic that “47,420” Twitter users tweeted about the debate therefore only tells part of the story, which is that due to its design Twitter can quickly scale in ways that expose surprisingly large potential audiences to political messages.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the political parties were eager to selectively present their own participants in the Twitter and Facebook social media debate backchannels. This was done to create excitement and engagement through a constructed sense of liveness, but also as an attempt to influence broadcasters’ and newspapers’ coverage. For example, Labour featured three live Twitter fe
eds on its home page, from “politicians,” “bloggers,” and “Labour on Twitter” (The Labour Party, 2010). These were hand-picked and highly sympathetic to Labour. The Conservatives’ site featured CoveritLive’s real time text commenting facility (Belam, 2010).
ITV News’ and Sky News’ home page featured a Facebook Connect widget that pulled in comments in real time from Facebook’s Democracy UK page (Facebook, 2010). The Guardian’s website had a live feed, featuring constantly updated messages from its own journalists on Twitter, an online poll, and a crude “sentiment tracker” which relied upon individuals to click plus or minus buttons for each of the three parties as they watched the debate (Sparrow, 2010). At least this had the virtue of transparency, unlike the several Twitter sentiment trackers whose text mining algorithms were left unpublished. This is a development which should signal huge accountability and transparency problems if, as seems certain, such devices are to become a permanent feature of campaign coverage across the advanced democracies. The Guardian tracker poll was deeply flawed and it was reportedly manipulated through automated page loading by staff in the Liberal Democrats’ central office. Their IP addresses were banned by the Guardian’s online editor, Janine Gibson, once the activity was discovered during the debate (Gibson, 2010).
Sky News could not resist starting to “analyze” the performances before the debate had actually ended. Having arranged an instant text messaging real-time tracker poll of 1608 viewers, run by Fizzback, a “real-time survey company,” Sky used interim “results” to declare the Conservatives’ David Cameron the “winner,” just a third of the way into the ninety-minute show. Fizzback provided two sets of interim results—at thirty minutes and sixty minutes in. The thirty-minute results page remained on Sky News’s main web page until later that night, when the full results emerged and revealed Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg as the debate winner by a large margin. Fizzback used instant text message polls of selected samples from what the Sky News website claimed was a panel of ten thousand individuals and it also tracked real-time responses to specific policy issues on a scale from –10 to +10, again by text message (Chung, 2010). Earlier, Sky News’ press release had stated that Fizzback’s panel would consist of “more than 6000 voters” and that it would be “pre-selected to represent the demographics of the whole of the UK” while “rigorous quota sampling and weighting of the results will be overseen by Futuresight [another market research company] to ensure the results are robust.” The precise nature of the sampling and method were not published, though mention was made of what was termed “The unique Fizzback Artificial Intelligence Engine” (Sky News, 2010a).
Broadcasters and the newspapers tried to construct a particular role for digital media. Facebook and smaller, niche organizations such as CoveritLive and Tweetminster were integrated into the production in ways that were perceived to add value to the television viewer’s experience. They were there to do the things that television itself was ill-equipped to do: real-time crunching of huge volumes of online social network data, sentiment analysis, and the attention-grabbing visualization of results. This creates a qualitatively different sense of hybrid liveness around an event, one that does not rely upon traditional political broadcasting and newspaper genres, which, in this context—live blogging aside—were staid and familiar. A similar symbolic liveness has previously been observed in interactive “reality” and comedy entertainment formats (Levine, 2008; Ytreberg, 2009). As Nick Couldry argues, liveness is often now a “cross-media construction” (2002: 286). Online media’s role in the televisual aspects of the leaders’ debate rested upon technological expertise and a willfully “geeky” attention to the flow of vast amounts of data. The ITV web page epitomized this hybrid integration, with its live video feed direct from the television studio situated alongside the various internet widgets tracking data from the social network sites. ITV’s presenter Alistair Stewart explicitly drew attention to the website’s affordances at the start of the debate, when he asked viewers not only to follow along on television, but to “join in” on the website (ITV News, 2010a).
The problem here is that this broader strategy of integration sometimes blunted digital media’s affordances for presenting a wider range of expression in the event’s immediate framing. The digital players ended up tailoring their offerings in ways that closely fitted with the broadcasters’ and newspaper editors’ requirements. There was little transparency around the precise methods involved in real-time sentiment analysis of online text, which is far from an exact science, but these data were too often presented as social facts by the television and newspaper websites, and by the online companies themselves. These real-time digital genres often therefore simply reinforce the older normative problems associated with ritualistic shortcuts to “public opinion” through opinion polls (Herbst, 1993). They provide a sanitized, symbolic presence for the public (Bennett, 1994) in what is essentially an orchestrated, one-to-many broadcasting environment. That they do so in real time compounds the problem, because there is even less scope for journalists to explain key issues such as sample size, method, self-selection bias, and any number of problems associated with the unpublished algorithms used for text mining.
Nevertheless, broadcasters themselves were able to use digital media tools in ways that laid bare some of the techniques that have been the staple of political communication specialists for decades but which are usually hidden from public view. The depiction of backstage processes is a case in point. In the hours and minutes leading up to the debate, several professional journalists, including Laura Kuenssberg, then the BBC’s chief political correspondent, posted pictures from their camera phones, capturing something of the character of “spin alley.” Here on display was a backstage space set aside for the post-debate huddle involving journalists, politicians, and the parties’ press officers, complete with a giant screen and rows of desks covered with laptops, smartphones, and notebooks (Kuenssberg, 2010f). ITV formally held exclusive rights over backstage photographs taken during the debate itself (Rogers, 2010), so depicting spin alley then mostly fell to bloggers, albeit elite ones, such as Conservative Home’s Tim Montgomerie, who posted camera phone pictures on Twitter of senior Conservative Jeremy Hunt, former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, and Labour’s Peter Mandelson briefing journalists before the debate had actually ended (see for example Montgomerie, 2010). These semi-illicit photos clearly influenced the mainstream coverage. The Times election blog managed to sneak out some photographs the following day (Rogers, 2010), and by then television news was running behind-the-scenes material showing the parties’ communications teams grouped with numerous journalists. Such coverage became part of the fabric of the remaining two debates and illustrated the ways professional journalists used the logics of digital media to subvert attempts at spin (see for example Kuenssberg, 2010f).
Thus, “process” and “meta-coverage” were very much in evidence (Cappella & Jamieson, 1997; Esser, et al., 2001; Patterson, 1993). And yet the implications here are ambiguous. Similar, if less formally organized, spaces in which journalists, politicians, and communications staff come together to establish common understandings of a major event, like the leader’s speeches at the annual party conferences, have been a crucial part of the reporting of major political events in Britain for decades (Stanyer, 2001). Yet due to the real-time framing of reaction in the prime ministerial debates, spin alley assumed a new significance. The smuggling out of surreptitiously taken camera phone shots by some journalists and bloggers, as well as Twitter updates condemning party staff and journalists for getting together before the debate had ended, served to expose these machinations to the viewing public. And this was also part of a meta-game: the simultaneously competitive and cooperative interactions between newer and older media logics.
MOBILIZING IN REAL TIME
The third stage of the prime ministerial debate’s political information cycle involved journalist commentary, the reporting of a range of further instant opinion p
olls—this time by established polling companies—and more traditional interviews with representatives of the three main political parties. These took place immediately following the debate. Television journalists ran their post-debate interviews from the backstage newsroom. This conveyed a sense of the urgency and importance of the media’s presence, but these episodes were formal, staged, and in a space away from the busiest parts of the room. They provided little genuine sense of the ongoing interactions that were out of shot, in spin alley. And they largely featured senior politicians from each main party, whose judgments predictably divided along party lines.
This stage was dominated by discussion of the orchestrated real-time mechanisms that had framed stage two. A good example was ITV’s mobilization of selected excerpts from its twenty-person backstage reaction panel, complete with a rerun of the computer-generated graphic of the worm chart the panel had collectively produced for the ITV website live during the debate (ITV News, 2010b). The BBC featured its own worm poll analysis, provided by Ipsos MORI and based on a sample of thirty-six “undecided voters from the Manchester area” (Ipsos MORI, 2010). As I discussed above, the information generated during stage two was mostly the result of unrepresentative, non-transparent, and in some cases easily manipulated instant polls and sentiment trackers. And editorial decisions about which footage to use must, out of necessity, have been taken before the debate actually drew to a close, during the scramble to assemble video packages by the 10:00 p.m. television news deadline.
The Hybrid Media System Page 16