Conclusion
Britain’s first ever live televised prime ministerial debate revealed that competition and conflict, but also interdependence, among broadcasters, the press, and digital media actors—the latter including some online activists organized in informal social network environments—have become real forces in the mediation of political life. The selective real-time coverage of early stages of the political information cycle and the occasional integration of greater numbers of non-elite actors in the construction and contestation of news at multiple points in the cycle’s lifespan are emerging systemic norms in the mediation of high-profile political events. The 2010 election debates were an opportunity for British broadcasters to deal a blow to their traditional competitors in the newspaper sector, but they were also widely framed as a means of exposing the deficiencies of digital media, in order to force home television’s advantage as the principal medium of political communication for the British public, a status it undoubtedly retains. Previews, analysis, and commentary concerning the debates dominated news coverage across all media for the entire campaign, leading many commentators to label 2010 a “TV election.” But the analysis here suggests that this label is only partially correct and ultimately misleading. It fails to capture the reality of Britain’s hybrid media system.
The analysis of the Bullygate affair reveals the same processes at work. This sensational political news story received cross-media saturation coverage across all outlets for an entire weekend, as the logics of online blogs and social media were hybridized with those of broadcast and print media. There was a book whose contents were leaked to a national newspaper three weeks before it was excerpted in a rival national newspaper as part of that rival’s relaunch strategy. There was a prime minister who tried to preempt the revelations by appearing on a television talk show a week earlier, granting an interview to a further rival national newspaper, and using an exclusive interview with a television news program to deny the allegations the day before they were published. There were journalists operating in a hypercompetitive environment, interacting with each other and with ordinary citizens in public and online, breaking stories and new information on the web, on their own blogs, or on Twitter, hours before they appeared in scheduled broadcast news bulletins. Some journalists clearly picked up valuable information in online interactions with ordinary members of the public. A backbench MP orchestrated a Twitter hashtag campaign in order to attack the story’s credibility, forcing the book’s author to respond directly on Twitter in order to defend himself. An amateur blogger conducted online research encompassing the archives of a seemingly unrelated anonymous blog set up six months earlier in order to reveal the dubious credibility of a source that most mainstream news journalists appeared not to have bothered to research.
These cases reveal how a range of new real-time genres, non-elite interventions and elite-activist interactions are coming to assume a greater role in the shaping of political news. These news-making assemblages are dominated by political and journalistic elites, amateur and semi-professional bloggers, the public relations industry, digital marketing firms, and politically active citizens, but they also involve greater numbers of players and a more diverse range of actors than news cycles ever did.
Broadcasters and newspapers now integrate non-elite actors and information from the online realm. They also use digital marketing techniques and intermediary consultancies, not only to convey to audiences the increasingly important online activity taking place around political events, but also to marshal specialized techniques, such as the appealing presentation of behavioral data in real time, which broadcast media and newspapers are still surprisingly ill-equipped to provide for themselves. Established television and newspaper genres sit cheek-by-jowl with newer digital genres in a hybrid but integrated flux of remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999).
In some respects these processes duplicate and amplify aspects of broadcast coverage that have long been considered problematic. Most notable in the case of the prime ministerial debate was the inauthentic expression of public opinion through snap polls whose symbolic value to news media is always likely to prove attractive in a hybrid media system with pressures to create ever greater amounts of “fresh” content for print, the web, and broadcast, all at the same time. The potential for news outlet bias to color the design and reporting of what seem on the surface to be “neutral,” technologically driven devices like sentiment analysis for monitoring online expressions of public opinion could become of greater concern in future.
An important outcome of these news-making assemblages are interpretive frames that are strongly determined by how real-time coverage is orchestrated during and immediately after an event. But political information cycles are not simply about single events or the acceleration of news time; the idea of a “24-hour news cycle” does not capture their multiplicity. Political information cycles rest upon a subtle political economy of time. This involves not only the often-rehearsed “speeding up” or “efficiency” of communication but also the importance of continuous attention and the ability to create and to act on information in a timely manner. Those who recognize the importance of time and the circulation of information—when to act quickly, when to delay, when to devote intensive attention to the pursuit of a goal, when to repeat, when to act alone, and when to coordinate—are more likely to be powerful. The logic of newer media enables a more diverse range of actors to shape time in order to pursue their values and interests. In an era when we are surrounded by clichés such as “always-on connectivity” and “24/7 media,” and when we are witnessing seemingly contradictory phenomena such as the simultaneous shrinkage and extension of news cycles, the economy of time is a neglected but crucial force in political communication. In the contemporary era, those who have the resources to intervene in the political information cycle are more able to exercise power; those who lack these resources are less able to be powerful in political life.
In an increasingly fragmented media environment, in which growing segments of the audience are turning away from older channels of delivery, political information cycles increase the likelihood that multiple, fragmented audiences will be exposed to political content and they increase opportunities for intervention by citizen activists. They can fashion a form of unifying “publicness” that has been undermined by media fragmentation.
Increasingly, this is how important political news is produced. The hybrid ways in which politics is now mediated presents new opportunities for non-elite actors to enter news production assemblages through timely interventions and sometimes direct, one-to-one, micro-level interactions with professional journalists. Contrary to the skeptics, bloggers and social media users are not always “parasitical” upon the “mainstream” media. Equally, professional journalists do not slavishly chase every last online utterance by bloggers and social media users. As they did in the past, journalists use their considerable power and professional resources to influence news agendas, control the flow of information, outdo their rivals, and undermine the new media upstarts. But at the same time, online activists and news professionals alike are now routinely engaged in loosely coupled assemblages in the pursuit of new information that will propel a news story forward and increase its newsworthiness. Much of this activity is episodic and it occurs in real time as stories unfold. It is therefore easy to miss and can only be reconstructed through detailed qualitative research based on live media ethnography.
Political information cycles contain pockets of intense engagement, but this is not “crowdsourcing” or the “wisdom of crowds” (Howe, 2008; Surowiecki, 2004). Intra-elite competition is a dominant feature of this environment and the non-elite actors in this study were mostly, though not exclusively, motivated and strategically oriented political activists, or those with at least some interest in following politics. Their behavior suggests an awareness that carefully timed interactions with elite politicians and professional journalists will occasionally be able to play a role in shap
ing the news. Small numbers of individuals made the truly decisive interventions, and we will always need to pay careful attention to deciphering who actually does the powerful work in these environments. At the same time, however, we should not lose sight of the fact that ordinary citizens, using digital technologies that enable them to cross from the outside to the inside of the elite political-media nexus, may now, on occasion, affect the meanings and flows of political information in new ways.
5
Power, Interdependence, and Hybridity in the Construction of Political News: Understanding WikiLeaks
Assange bedevils the journalists who work with him because he refuses to conform to any of the roles they expect him to play … He’s a wily shape-shifter who won’t sit still …
—Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian1
If it feels a little bit like we’re amateurs, it is because we are … Everyone is an amateur in this business.
—Julian Assange, WikiLeaks2
If you want us to do something for you, then you’ve got to do something for us.
—David Leigh, journalist3
WikiLeaks has been described by one of its former leaders as “the most aggressive press organization in the world” (Domscheit-Berg, 2011: Chapter 10, para. 36, Kindle Edition). Alan Rusbridger, the long-standing editor of Britain’s Guardian newspaper called the U.S. embassy cables stories of 2010–2011 “the biggest leak in the history of the world” (Rusbridger, 2011). Greg Mitchell of the Nation described what WikiLeaks does as “the megaleak” (Mitchell, 2011).
But what is WikiLeaks? Is it a website, an e-mail list, or a globally distributed technological infrastructure based on secure encryption standards? Is it a publishing business, a professional investigative online news magazine, or a public relations agency acting on behalf of anonymous clients? Is it an elite-centric lobby group, a netroots social movement pressing for radical transparency in all areas of life, or a secretive group of dedicated activists? Is it a collective of radical poets and artists, a transnational, distributed online network of hackers, or an educational foundation funded by charitable donations? Is it a loosely connected series of conferences and alternative festivals? Is it truly global or embedded in specific national media systems? Or is it just one person: Julian Assange?
WikiLeaks is all of these things and more. Its hybrid media logics reveal important shifts in how political news is created but they also raise issues of broader significance for political organization, mobilization, and communication in the present era.
WikiLeaks’ Impact on Political News
From its inception in 2006, WikiLeaks has had a significant impact on political news, across a wide range of issues and in a large number of countries. It is impossible to do justice to the full scope of these interventions here, but consider the following summary.
On America’s Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 2009, WikiLeaks published more than half a million confidential pager messages that had been gathered by the U.S. National Security Agency during the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. In July 2010, in alliance with Britain’s Guardian, America’s New York Times, and Germany’s Der Spiegel, WikiLeaks released around seventy-five thousand documents related to U.S. military incidents in the war in Afghanistan. These documents contained detailed reports of all the major events of the conflict, including casualty numbers. Up until that point, the U.S. military had said that statistics on civilian casualties were not recorded (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 8, para. 10, Kindle Edition). The Guardian and Der Spiegel published leaked reports mentioning previously unreleased civilian deaths that were caused by experimental long-range weaponry used by a secret military squad named Task Force 373. These stories made it public that Task Force 373 was working on a special two-thousand-person “kill or capture” list of key targets. There were deep divisions among coalition forces over the civilian deaths caused by these tactics. There were also concerns about the extent to which such special forces were subject to political as opposed to merely military control. The documents brought to light how civilian deaths had become a depressingly regular feature of daily military operations in Afghanistan and how difficult it was to obtain clear and timely confirmation from official sources about such deaths: the majority of those detailed in the logs had simply gone unreported by the media. Tensions caused by attempts to undermine the military strategy of containing the Taliban in Afghanistan were also exposed, when it transpired that Pakistan had been launching attacks on Afghan soldiers at the border between the two countries (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 9, paras. 8–24).
In October 2010, again in alliance with press partners, WikiLeaks released around four hundred thousand confidential Iraq war field reports. These revealed many cases of systematic torture and abuse by the Iraqi army, most of which had been ignored by the U.S. authorities. The reports also made it possible to identify at least 66,081 civilian deaths that had occurred as a result of the war in Iraq between 2004 and 2009. (The logs did not cover the most bloody period of the conflict—the invasion of 2003.) Not only did this leak directly contradict the official view that there were no detailed records of civilian casualties, it also enabled the anti-war think tank and campaign group Iraq Body Count to corroborate its own research. Upon analyzing the field reports Iraq Body Count concluded that they contained records of 109,932 deaths. When they added these deaths to their own numbers, Iraq Body Count were able to say publicly that between 99,383 and 108,501 civilians lost their lives in Iraq between 2003 and the end of 2010 (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Ch. 10, paras. 17–19).
The embassy cables leak of November 2010 saw WikiLeaks hand to five newspapers—the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País—some 251,287 confidential internal U.S. State Department memorandums originating from embassy and consulate staff in no fewer than 180 countries. During the first day of what would turn out to be months of coverage of the cables, the Guardian’s website attracted 4.1 million unique users—its highest ever daily audience (Leigh & Harding, 2011: Chapter 15, para. 24). The embassy cables revealed that in 2008 and 2009 the U.S. government had circulated to the CIA, the FBI, America’s staff at the United Nations (U.N.), and thirty U.S. ambassadors’ offices a request that they should start gathering “biographic and biometric information on UN security council permanent representatives.” This included iris scans, fingerprints, and DNA samples, as well as personally identifiable data trails such as frequent flyer accounts, passwords, and encryption keys. Details of telecommunication and computer systems inside senior officials’ bureaus were also requested. This surveillance program affected large numbers of U.N. staff, including its leadership and secretary general, Ban Ki-moon (R. Booth & Borger, 2010; Mazzetti, 2010). Spying at the U.N. has long been suspected, but here, for the first time, was public, documented proof. This “national human intelligence collection directive,” signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was previously entirely secret.
Further revelations—far too many to mention here—emerged from the embassy cables leak. Here are some of the more prominent from the first few days of newspaper articles. During the 2000s, not only Israel but also King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had been secretly urging the United States to launch a military attack on Iran as a means of containing the rogue state’s growing nuclear program; the Saudi leader suggested that the U.S. “cut off the head of the snake” (Sanger, et al., 2010). The U.S. military had been more heavily involved in Yemen than had been publicly admitted: this was facilitated by a secret pact between the U.S. military and the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, according to which the Yemenis would claim that they were the perpetrators of ongoing attacks on local al-Qaeda branches (Shane & Lehren, 2010). The cables unveiled the reality of the U.S. government’s attitudes toward Russia: diplomatic correspondence stretching back over several years had provided Washington with acute analyses of the interpenetration of officialdom and organized crime in Vladimir Putin’s regime (Chivers, 2010). Deep divisions b
etween North Korea and China were catalogued, as was China’s censorship of Google and the often fragile nature of the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain. Corruption on a grand scale was exposed, such as the alleged export of $9 billion out of Sudan by its president, Omar al-Bashir. The close nature of the linkages between Shell Oil and the Nigerian state were made public (D. Smith, 2010). A leak from a 2009 cable written by the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia, Robert Godec, detailed in highly critical terms the autocratic and corrupt nature of the Tunisian regime led by president Ben Ali, as well as the growing unrest that would eventually erupt into the country’s pro-democracy uprising during the Arab Spring of early 2011 (Shane, 2011). The Tunisian dissidents were encouraged by American opinion and the potential international support for their cause that they predicted would flow from the publication of the U.S. ambassador’s views. And finally, the cables told of disturbing and sometimes bizarre tensions in the diplomatic relationships between the U.S., Britain, and Libya. Most worryingly, the then Libyan dictator Colonel Qaddafi, offended by his treatment in New York during August 2009 (he had been refused permission to pitch a tent outside the U.N. headquarters) had delayed shipment of thirty-five metric tons of uranium that was to be sent back to Russia as part of an agreement to reduce Libya’s nuclear stockpile. The highly radioactive substance sat in unlocked containers at the Tajora nuclear plant for a month, potentially risking an environmental disaster (Leigh, 2010).
The WikiLeaks embassy cables leaks fueled an extraordinary response in the United States. Two Republican congressmen for Michigan, Pete Hoekstra and Mike Rogers, called publicly for WikiLeaks’ leader Julian Assange to be tried for treason and issued the death penalty. Former 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin asked publicly why Assange had not been targeted personally by the U.S. security services, when he was a “terrorist” on a par with al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman led a successful campaign for the WikiLeaks website and its online payment facilities to be closed down (Arthur, 2010; Slajda, 2010). Meanwhile, back in Europe, Javier Moreno, the editor of Spain’s El País, said that “measured by its international impact, it’s probably the biggest story this newspaper has ever been involved with” (Moreno, 2010). The story of WikiLeaks is still evolving. In March 2017, Julian Assange still sits in asylum in London’s Ecuador embassy as part of an attempt to resist extradition to Sweden on allegations of sexual misconduct involving two women—allegations that he claims are false and politically motivated but which the Swedish authorities claim are genuine. And, as I show in chapter 10 of this second edition, a different kind of WikiLeaks played a major role in the 2016 U.S. election campaign.
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