The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  Conclusion

  What are we to conclude about these fascinating episodes in the evolution of news making and political mobilization?

  Part news producer, part social movement, part public information provider, part broadcaster, part direct action network, WikiLeaks has had an undeniable impact on public affairs. It leaks, it publishes, it produces, it mobilizes. Whether one admires or dislikes Julian Assange and whether one agrees or disagrees with WikiLeaks’ political mission, the series of leaks in 2010 were arguably among the most important global political news scoops of the past few decades. As Charlie Beckett and James Ball succinctly put it, “instead of taking sides, we should be taking notice” (Beckett & Ball, 2012: 159). These scoops were all the more significant because they were the creative product of ongoing investigations, and not simply the reporting of unforeseen events like natural disasters, which journalists are always compelled to cover.

  It is my argument that the overall impact of these news stories was achieved through interdependent power relations built upon the integration and exploitation of older and newer media logics. This involved the hybridization of professional investigative journalism and online volunteer activism, the recombination of established institutional power and what Manuel Castells has in other contexts termed distributed “network-making power” (Castells, 2009: 45).

  No doubt there are strong opponents of this interpretation in the professional news industry. The WikiLeaks approach threatens traditional investigative reporting because in some ways it offers a more effective model. Some interpretations have been replete with phrases designed to construct a cordon sanitaire between the domains of journalism and WikiLeaks. For example, one journalist referred to the 2010 stories as simply a “collaboration of newspaper and Web site” (Ellison, 2011). WikiLeaks is not just a website, and it is more than “just a source,” to revisit New York Times editor Bill Keller’s formulation.

  But while we need to look beyond self-justificatory dismissals of WikiLeaks by professional journalists we also need to recognize there are obvious weaknesses in the WikiLeaks approach. This is only partly a story of WikiLeaks’ insurgency.

  In many ways, as this analysis has shown, to depict WikiLeaks or professional journalists or, indeed, online hacktivist networks like Anonymous only in terms of each group’s or network’s power to “act upon” a preexisting set of media relations is to miss the truly important point. WikiLeaks constructed for itself and then occupied important boundary spaces between older and newer media practices and logics. It conducted technologically enabled raids across each side of these boundaries in a continual quest for resources that enabled it to exercise power. But these power resources were themselves always conditioned by relations of complex interdependence with other political and media actors, whether they were online or offline networks of activists, or professional news organizations.

  WikiLeaks relied upon anonymous whistle-blowers for its source material and over time it built a leak infrastructure able to marshal huge quantities of data. It built a publishing operation and it produced important pieces of journalism from its own resources, as the process leading to the publication of the Collateral Murder film reveals. It has propelled the ethics and even the caché associated with hacktivism, internet libertarianism, and “data journalism” into the realm of mainstream politics and news media. It has even created a relatively novel online documentary genre (Collateral Murder again).

  But it seems to me to be an inescapable fact that the information that has had the most decisive impact has been animated and mediated by professional journalism. This journalism has operated in environments where professional status, experience of investigations, and institutional resources have been decisive. Even Collateral Murder, an online viral success with more than thirteen million YouTube viewings, drew upon television genres. And it was embargoed until a relatively high-profile press release event in Washington, where Assange distributed a press kit to the gathered media before moving on to appear on the Colbert Report, a popular U.S. satirical television news show. Press and broadcast news media have both been essential to the WikiLeaks phenomenon.

  Yet by the same token we should be wary of according too much power to professional news organizations. We might ask: if WikiLeaks must coexist in symbiosis with the press and broadcasters, is WikiLeaks powerful? Or we might reverse this question: if the press and broadcasters must coexist in symbiosis with WikiLeaks, are the press and broadcasters powerful? These are valid enough questions but they perhaps rest upon an inadequate conceptualization of power. For in the hybrid media system, as I have shown in this chapter, power is not always exercised in zero-sum games; it may emerge from physical and mediated interactions that are socially and technologically constructed and which evolve over time, in a diverse range of settings. What actually count as effective resources for powerful action in the hybrid media system have emerged from the interactions among WikiLeaks, the newspaper and broadcast media, and the online activists.

  As I have shown, some of these interactions were shaped by power operating as resources for the issuing of ultimatums and vetoes among elite players in focused, discrete environments, often behind closed doors and with legal teams in tow. This was the case, for example, when Assange and the press partners came together at the last minute to hammer out the terms of the deal for the cables release. Sometimes power has been dispersed across a broader network, such as when WikiLeaks used its technological infrastructure to gather data leaks and channel these to the press; or when it has capitalized on the expertise of activists on the ground in various geographical locations. This broader network was also in flow when hacktivists came to the symbolic aid of both WikiLeaks and their press partners, as happened in the aftermath of the cables leaks.

  WikiLeaks’ role as a networked publisher continued beyond 2010. In April 2011, for example, it partnered with the Washington Post on new cables releases detailing secret plans to depose the Yemeni president (Whitlock, 2011). All of the quarter of a million embassy cables were released by WikiLeaks in unredacted form in late 2011, as part of a new round of partnership deals with “over 90” media and human rights organizations around the world (WikiLeaks, 2011). This was a controversial move that WikiLeaks claims it was forced to make due to the Guardian’s leaking of the password to an encrypted copy of the cables database that had been uploaded via BitTorrent when Assange was arrested in December 2010 (Cablegatesearch, 2011). Bizarrely enough, the Guardian’s David Leigh and Luke Harding seem to have accidentally published the password in their book about the collaboration with WikiLeaks. They had assumed—wrongly it transpired—that WikiLeaks had changed the password once they had handed over the files to the paper (Ball, 2011).

  Cooperation has by no means been a frictionless process. There are plenty of examples of when things turned conflictual. Much of this suspicion stemmed from WikiLeaks’ capitalization on the resources offered by the hybrid media system. Assange’s approach evolved to the extent that he personally began using the WikiLeaks’ Twitter account to express his views, including his argument that he was becoming the victim of U.S. intelligence “dirty tricks.” His use of Twitter to publicize the cause involved projecting his own persona to try to build a larger online support network and articulate connections among the other elements of the hybrid media system, particularly broadcasters. This became an important aspect of WikiLeaks’ overall repertoire of behaviors during the embassy cables affair, and a simultaneous strength and weakness. Assange adapted quickly to the glare of publicity and he began to move more easily among celebrities. His December 2010 arrest pending extradition proceedings further amplified a growing cult of personality, as several wealthy publishers, actors, journalists, and film directors, including Ken Loach and Michael Moore, provided money to enable his release on bail. By the time he was freed from prison just before Christmas 2010, Assange was a global celebrity.

  Unsurprisingly, the press partners involved in the big releases of 201
0 were quick to attack WikiLeaks’ publishing of the entire unredacted cables database in late 2011. Previously permeable boundaries between WikiLeaks and the professionals began to solidify. Elite professional journalists in Britain modulated their emphases back toward the importance of professional practices and norms, by intensifying their framing of WikiLeaks around the Assange personality cult and other human interest frames and generally drawing a cordon sanitaire ever more tightly around WikiLeaks in order to prevent it from assuming the status of a meaningful competitor to professional journalism. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks, too, modulated its emphasis back toward the networked online activism that had fueled its earlier, pre-embassy cables phase, albeit with a new inflection provided by Julian Assange’s willingness to use his new celebrity status to attract mainstream media attention to his cause. Assange took the decision to publish all of the embassy cables after conducting an online poll of WikiLeaks’ 1.5 million followers on Twitter, but the results of the poll were not published (Ball, 2011). In the spring of 2012 he was hired by the state-funded Russian television news channel Russia Today to conduct a series of high-profile interviews with political figures from around the world, further enhancing his persona and his identity as a journalist, but also contradicting WikiLeaks’ fundamentalist approach to free speech. Assange’s decision to seek political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden and potentially on to the United States to face espionage charges before a grand jury generated further new frames for the professional journalists, who were quick to pick up the threads of the human interest narrative they had used when Assange was first arrested in December 2010 (Guardian, 2012).

  From 2012, despite having its credit card and Paypal donations system frozen by the United States, WikiLeaks’ online supporter networks and publishing structure clearly remained in place, enabling it to publish over five million e-mails detailing the “web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods” of Stratfor, a global “intelligence” company that provides services to companies and governments (WikiLeaks, 2012). And, as we shall see in chapter 10, by the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign WikiLeaks had adopted a belligerent attitude toward Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton—one that led Assange and his network to assist Republican Donald Trump by publishing tens of thousands of Democratic campaign emails that had allegedly been obtained by Russian hackers.

  It is interesting to reflect on why the New York Times’ discourse about WikiLeaks differed so markedly from that of the European press partners during the 2010 megaleaks. In the uproar that followed publication of the embassy cables stories in the United States there was much debate about whether WikiLeaks was “really journalism” (see for example Adler, 2011; Benkler, 2011; Greenwald, 2010; Packer, 2010). There is more than principle at stake: if WikiLeaks can be publicly defined as journalism, any prosecution of Assange would need to overturn U.S. constitutional precedent because WikiLeaks would be subject to traditional First Amendment protections for the press under U.S. law. Fueling this discussion are differing views on whether WikiLeaks is responsible in its approach to redacting leaked data. As I have shown, the evidence in this area is mixed. WikiLeaks has often been selective in its approach to publication and it has taken redaction seriously, but it has been hampered by an inability to mobilize sufficient volunteer labor to systematically carry out these tasks and it steadily became frustrated with what it saw as journalists’ cowardice in the face of elite pressure. WikiLeaks’ view of political information was fundamentally different from that of the journalists, who are well used to protecting sources for the long term, cherry-picking the best pieces of evidence, and framing stories to generate the maximum possible short-term interest, before moving on to the next thing. Newer media logic conflicted with older media logic in this regard.

  New York Times editor Bill Keller’s dismissals were echoed across the American broadcast and press media and the wider debate about WikiLeaks’ journalistic credentials were shaped there by the American broadsheet press’s comparatively strong professional norm of objectivity and its related ambivalence toward advocacy journalism. In some respects, then, WikiLeaks’ hybrid model of journalist, publisher, and mobilization movement is much more disruptive of the media system of the United States than it is of those in Europe, though there are of course many important differences across the European context. This goes some way toward explaining the distancing tactic of Keller and his allies in 2010.

  But overall, in 2010 WikiLeaks and the professionals innovated together, effectively blending their preexisting technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms to create new hybrid approaches to news making. They shared these resources among themselves and, in some cases, with networked publics. The development of meaningful capacity for action in this new type of technology-enabled, not-quite-journalism has involved a process of learning, co-creation and co-evolution in the creative pursuit of new norms and working practices.

  This is a story of interdependence among older and newer media logics in the gathering and production of information, and the exploitation of that information as news. WikiLeaks and their media partners in Britain, America, Germany, France, Spain and many other countries have together played an important role in the ongoing construction of a media system in which they have also developed the capacity to so decisively intervene: a hybrid media system.

  6

  Symphonic Consonance in Campaign Communication: Reinterpreting Obama for America

  I am like a Rorschach test.

  —Barack Obama1

  Everything was synched up and working in symphonic consonance.

  —David Plouffe, chief campaign manager, Obama for America, 20082

  The 2008 U.S. presidential election was momentous in the history of modern electoral politics. Much attention has focused on Barack Obama’s use of the internet to engage supporters, register new voters, and mobilize them to turn out on election day. But while these aspects of the campaign are obviously important, this chapter offers a different interpretation of campaign communication in 2008. Online media were undoubtedly a key part of Obama’s strategy, but this is far from the whole story.

  My aim in this chapter is to explore the complex hybridity of the Obama campaign. My overarching argument is that the campaign’s significance lies not in its internet campaigning, but in how it so ruthlessly integrated online and offline communication, grassroots activism and elite control, older and newer media logics.

  But 2008 is not only the story of Obama. Candidates and their staff, journalists, builders and maintainers of online platforms, volunteer activists, entertainment media, and many ordinary citizens together played crucially important roles in forging new political communication practices. These groups were pioneers in the construction and exploitation of a hybrid media system in election campaigning and the 2008 presidential campaign revealed much about the wider context in which struggles for political power now play out. So the chapter that immediately follows this one widens the scope in order to explore this system on a broader canvas.

  Much will continue to be written about the Obama phenomenon, and irrespective of one’s interpretation of President Obama’s period in office, 2008 will long be seen as one of the most important elections in the history of liberal democracy. Here, while I certainly discuss how Obama’s campaign constructed and, in turn, capitalized upon the evolving patterns of the hybrid media system more effectively than did opponent John McCain’s, my main aim in this chapter and the next is to explore the textures of mediation that defined the campaign as a whole. I seek to reveal how the interdependence of older and newer media logics—their technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms—has become a key force in the power relationships among media, politicians, and the public during U.S. election campaigns.

  Ascribing too much importance to campaigns can of course blind us to the long-term forces that inevitably shape all
elections. After all, in 2008, the two traditional long-term predictors of American electoral outcomes—the incumbent’s popularity and the state of the economy—were in alignment. Republican George W. Bush was one of the least popular presidents in the history of opinion polling and the economic downturn weighed heavily on the entire campaign, sharpening its intensity to dramatic effect during the run-up to election day as the financial crisis plunged confidence in the economy to depths not seen since the Great Depression.

  And yet 2008 was still a remarkably close contest. The Democratic primary turned out to be an endurance test, as Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton ran neck and neck until the summer of 2008, causing a delayed start to the general election campaign. Just as significant is that McCain and Obama were effectively tied in their approval ratings for surprisingly long periods. Indeed, McCain was ahead right before the Democratic convention, which came at the end of August 2008. It was not until mid-September, with only six weeks to go before election day that Obama opened up a lead, and yet the polls narrowed once again during the final week (Kenski, et al., 2010: 4). Arguments about the “inevitability” of an Obama victory can therefore only be made in hindsight. As Jeffrey Alexander has convincingly argued, campaigns are “a flow, a stream of meaning making” characterized by attempts to actively shape the stage on which the entire political drama unfolds (Alexander, 2010: 163). Hazards and missteps abound. The 2008 campaign mattered, and because the campaign mattered, its mediation matters. As I will show, however, this mediation matters in a way that belies easy talk of the ascendancy of online communication in campaigns. The year 2008 was a crucial moment in the building of the hybrid media system. This is the story of how extraordinary newer media logics in campaigning were integrated with equally extraordinary older media logics.