The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  This was classic campaign television, but it also caused a hybrid media storm. The tears were replayed continually on cable news shows and multiple versions were uploaded to YouTube, where they quickly amassed hundreds of thousands of viewings. This one-minute, fifty-two-second clip dominated the rest of the New Hampshire primary, which Clinton went on to win. And yet, if the short-term effects of what many perceived to be a genuine moment of emotional authenticity were positive for Clinton, the hybrid media system also provided a context for deeper ambivalence to take root. Taking advantage of the instant archival properties of YouTube, viewers pored over the footage, strategically deploying the video frame’s pause button to look for even the slightest signs of fake emotion, before telling the world about their own particular interpretation in the comments section—and taking some of the sheen off Clinton’s New Hampshire “comeback” (Kantor, 2008).

  FROM THE GRAND TOUR TO THE “C-WORD”

  Important as this episode was, it pales into insignificance when compared with the grandest manifestation of the enduring importance of television in campaigns: Obama’s tour of foreign leaders in July 2008.

  Obama’s campaign had long planned a series of overseas visits and a large outdoor rally as a way of marking the transition from the primaries to the general election. So in July 2008 Obama traveled to visit troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait, before heading to Israel, Jordan, Berlin, Paris, and finally London. This voyage was unprecedented in recent campaign history and ambitious even by U.S. presidential standards. But the key point is that Obama was not yet president. Flocked by cameras as he moved from one carefully chosen location to the next, to be greeted by yet another head of state, the televisual, even cinematic construction of presidential power became more and more obvious. The very nature of the journey, a multi-stop tour of several foreign countries, rendered this a decidedly older media spectacle. The resources required for journalists to cover it in person were substantial, ruling out contributions from bloggers, and it tapped into decades of established genres for covering televised presidential interventions on the international stage. Television news was in its element.

  A trip of this importance would be guaranteed to get saturation media coverage back in the United States. The aim was to convey that Obama had international standing, counter charges that he lacked foreign policy credentials, and signal his willingness to engage afresh with European leaders whose support for U.S. foreign policy had wavered in recent years over issues such as the war in Iraq. Germany fitted the bill as the location for the outdoor rally. There was a good historical reason to choose Berlin: it had been the location of John F. Kennedy’s famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate in 1963.

  There were significant risks attached to this journey. Most obvious was the potential for missteps in countries whose media were unfamiliar with Obama and where the campaign could not rely on its own supporters to appear on cue for the cameras. While it might be predicted with some certainty that at least a few thousand Berliners would turn up to hear a presidential candidate’s speech, there was much uncertainty about the size of the crowd and how negative coverage would be generated by a small showing. By the time of the speech it became clear that the crowd would be large—the campaign had secretly hoped for fifty thousand. As it transpired, over two hundred thousand people assembled at the Tiergarten—more than four times the number that heard Kennedy in 1963. Obama appeared before a vast crowd, many of whom were waving American flags, and announced himself as “a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world” (BarackObamadotcom, 2008c). The television images were unique in post-war presidential campaign history. This was an event with obvious visceral power.

  And yet the grand tour proved a double-edged sword. Reporting just after the Berlin rally, Fox News’s David Asman spoke of “Barack Obama looking like a rock star in Germany today … ” “Is the fact that they loved him there a red flag for Americans here?,” Asman asked. Other conservative media followed suit, as the Washington Times and the New York Post weighed in with the “rock star” theme. The right-wing Media Research Center released a web video, “Obama Love 3.0,” featuring a montage of positive comments from liberal journalists accompanied by Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” (Alexander, 2010: 170).

  The stage was set. Two days after Obama returned from Europe, the McCain campaign countered with one of their most successful television attack ads of the campaign. An illustration of the enduring power of television advertising in the hybrid media system, the ad caused significant damage to Obama’s reputation. Entitled “Celebrity,” it was a “press ad” (see chapter 6) published to the campaign website the night before it was first aired on television, as a way of influencing the following morning’s news agenda. It intercut Obama’s Berlin speech with crowds chanting his name, but this was followed by images of musician Britney Spears and millionaire heiress television celebrity Paris Hilton. The strapline: “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world. But is he ready to lead?”

  The McCain Celebrity ad had an immediate impact on professional journalists, who were eager to report what they thought was the first significant blow to Obama’s image as a gifted orator and crowd-puller. Television comedy shows soon joined the fray. Stephen Colbert: “The big story is still Barack Obama’s world tour. I’ve got to give him credit. Once again today he made history by being the first man to travel around the world in a plane propelled only by the power of the media’s flash photography” (The Colbert Report, 2008). With over 2.2 million views, Celebrity became the McCain campaign’s most popular ad on YouTube, enabling them to secure a foothold in an online arena which until then had been dominated by their opponents.

  The success of Celebrity encouraged McCain’s team to follow up with a series of variations on the theme. These included several public statements designed to stoke perceptions that Obama was a cultural elitist, such as the claim that he liked organic tea. McCain also gave an extraordinary speech at a motorcycle rally in South Dakota at which he said that he preferred “the roar of fifty thousand Harleys” to a “couple hundred thousand Berliners” (Ma3lst0rm, 2008). A blizzard of celebrity-themed coverage dominated news and entertainment programming. Broadcasting outlets as diverse as Fox News, CNN’s Showbiz Tonight, NPR’s Morning Edition, ABC’s World News, and MSNBC’s Today Show discussed the ad. Even relatively liberal MSNBC declared: “Fifty years ago, the charge being hurled around that would hurt any candidate was, you know, ‘communist sympathizer.’ There’s another ‘C’ word out there today, celebrity … He’s a celebrity!” (Alexander, 2010: 173–175). Meanwhile, the Republicans established a new initiative on their website, punning on the title of Obama’s second book: they called it “audacity watch.” In a bizarre twist, satire met reality and reality met satire, as the comedy website Funny or Die released an online “ad for the Paris Hilton Presidential Campaign.” Hilton herself appeared in leopard-print swimwear, criticized McCain as a “wrinkly, white-haired guy,” and, in a swipe at the Republicans’ denigration of her as a celebrity bimbo, eloquently described a perfectly credible position on energy policy that inventively combined the two candidates’ positions (Funny or Die, 2008). In later iterations of the Celebrity commercial, the Republicans dropped Hilton and Britney Spears from the imagery.

  The traction gained by the Republicans’ hybrid media success with Celebrity contributed to their closing the opinion poll gap with Obama to well within the margin of error. The Obama campaign became concerned that the large crowds they were drawing as they criss-crossed around the country would add further fuel to the mainstream media’s growing “rock star” narrative. Bizarrely, they started to avoid rallies and began placing their candidate in smaller, more intimate settings, like diners, stores, and factories. They also decided to scale down some of the pageantry of the settings for Obama’s biggest events. The Democratic party’s Denver convention acceptance speech had been carefully planned to convey to the television audience the impo
rtance of appearing before a large crowd of seventy-five thousand people. Plans involved a stage set redolent of the Lincoln Memorial, complete with fake classical columns. Faced with criticism of Obama’s hubris, the night before the speech campaign managers desperately proceeded to “rip out lights and all kinds of embellishments,” as senior adviser David Axelrod described the process (Axelrod, 2009: 73). Parts of the stage were dismantled and camera angles tested to ensure that Obama was not filmed in front of the offending columns. The aim was to give the impression that Obama was positioned among the crowd, not rising imperiously above it.

  The fake classical columns survived the makeover, though they were in the event rather understated, pushed to the edge of the stage and out of the close-up shots of Obama speaking. The video filmed for the web by the Obama campaign team was a simple one-camera production, shot in precisely the way they wanted. The television news coverage, over which the Obama campaign had some influence but not total control, was quite different, with multiple cameras, sweeping shots across the crowd, and close-ups on supporters’ jubilant and often tearful faces. And yet, during the most important sections of the speech the television news coverage’s backdrop was also columnless and low-key. The speech managed to escape being tarnished by accusations of rock star arrogance. The Obama campaign eventually switched back to bigger outdoor rallies.

  The Perfect Union of Internet and Television

  Despite its enduring power in shaping campaigns, it is important to note that television today is not what it was a generation ago. It has been partially hollowed out, disaggregated, and scattered across a diverse array of platforms and technologies. The televisual still exists as a powerful set of campaign communication genres, but its modalities have shifted, as content migrates across the hybrid media system. Television’s role in campaigns is increasingly complex and multi-layered, and there are now pockets of systemic integration between television and the internet.

  The 2008 election was the first in which YouTube (founded 2005) played a major role. YouTube and other online video platforms like Dailymotion and Vimeo have hybrid media logics. They combine the potential reach of a mass broadcast medium with the interactive, horizontal, network affordances that have grown to be an essential part of internet media. But the emergence of YouTube has also encouraged much interdependence among the internet and television, and this can sometimes be decisive in shaping the campaign.

  THE CNN–YOUTUBE DEBATES

  The first signs of this in flow came with the CNN–YouTube debates, held in July and November 2007. The product of a unique collaboration between Google and CNN, these two live media events fused the genres and stagecraft of traditional televised candidate debates with the amateur authenticity that has become the dominant characteristic of the most popular YouTube content. Ordinary citizens were invited to submit thirty-second videos for consideration by a panel of CNN and party staff. A representative enough sample of the best of these was selected for presentation in their original form, and these were mediated live to the candidates and the studio audience via a giant screen. Each candidate was also given a single thirty-second slot in which he or she could screen an officially produced “YouTube-style” campaign video; these were interspersed with the citizens’ videos. CNN presenter Anderson Cooper played the traditional role of moderator, channeling to candidates 39 video questions that were selected out of a total of 2,989 for the Democrats and 34 out of 4,927 for the Republicans. Following the live debates, an archive was established on YouTube.

  Due to the show’s format, watching the debates on live television involved several layers of remediation. But watching the debates online meant engaging in a remarkably kaleidoscopic media experience. Online viewers watched the remediated television images online at YouTube, but those television images prominently featured a giant video screen that remediated to both the studio audience and those watching from afar a series of videos that had started life as YouTube uploads. And, of course, those videos had been jointly solicited by a television news organization and the video division of an internet company.

  The tensions and power plays in this hybridity are evident from a closer reading of the debates. As we saw in relation to broadcast media’s treatment of the internet during Britain’s prime ministerial television debates in chapter 4, CNN too sought to put YouTube in its place by prefacing each debate with a series of dismissive remarks about the videos they could not show because they were deemed unsuitable. Anderson Cooper was an active moderator who intervened with journalistic authority. He often injected detailed information, rephrased a video’s question, and asked supplementary questions. At the same time, however, it is clear that CNN did not wish to drain YouTube of its distinctiveness. While serious and well-considered, the amateur videos had an unmistakable YouTube vérité. Shaky camerawork, bad lighting, and domestic locations like bedrooms and living rooms were much in evidence, and many of the videos were quirky and humorous. For example, an animated Alaskan snowman named “Billiam” asked a question about climate change. The studio audience had no formally assigned role, and yet they made several decisive interventions through their selective applause for both the questioners and the candidates. But the most decisive moment came when it was demonstrated how such a nontraditional event could have a significant long-term impact on the presidential campaign. As the debate turned to foreign policy, a YouTube video from Stephen Sorta of Diamond Bar, California, asked Obama and Clinton if they would be willing to meet “without precondition with the leaders of the authoritarian states of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.” Obama replied that he would, but Clinton made it clear that she would not. This line of division produced a flood of press commentary after the debate and an ongoing discussion among all of the Democratic candidates that rumbled on for several weeks during the primaries (Phillips, 2007). It also spurred the Clinton camp to increase their attacks on Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience.

  AMATEUR AND NOT-SO-AMATEUR ONLINE VIDEO

  The 2008 election saw an explosion in the amount of online video produced by those working away from the direct control of the campaigns. Accurate measurements are difficult to obtain in this field and the closest thing there is to an overall count comes from Divinity Metrics, an online marketing firm. Its analysis of all videos uploaded across two hundred different platforms during four hundred days of the campaign found that there were around 104,000 videos about Obama and 64,000 about McCain (Aun, 2008). Several of these online videos will go down in history as the first important interventions of their kind in American politics. They are undoubtedly significant but their provenance and overall impact are in some cases less straightforward than headlines like “YouTube sensation” would suggest.

  An early sign of what was to come was the “bomb Iran” video. An attendee at a Republican rally shot a cell phone video of John McCain singing about wanting to “bomb, bomb, bomb” Iran to the tune of the Beach Boys’ song “Barbara Ann.” The film was uploaded to YouTube by “mckathomas,” but it was then reported by television news (mckathomas, 2007). Bomb Iran was also subsequently repurposed for professionally produced television commercials by MoveOn and for an online film by Robert Greenwald, which brought it to different audiences (Brave New Films, 2008; heyitsjoe, 2007). Many of the popular satirical videos were by amateurs and mashed up some well-established online memes with campaign news footage. There was “Baracky,” which featured clips of McCain and Obama playing out the plot of the hit film, Rocky; the “Empire Strikes Barack,” featuring clips of Obama and Clinton playing out plot lines from Star Wars; and Hugh Atkin’s “BarackRoll,” which tapped into the long-running “Rick Rolling” online meme that involves posting links that lure unsuspecting individuals into watching the video for Rick Astley’s now-kitsch 1987 song, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The “Barack Roll” mash-up featured video footage of Obama dancing on The Ellen Degeneres Show, underlaid with spliced-together phrases from speeches to give the impression of Obama “
singing” along to Astley’s song (disappointme, 2008; HollaAtYoDaddy, 2008; Humanitainment, 2008).

  The most important of the unofficial videos were not, however, made by amateurs. Their presence reflected a broader assemblage of creativity, entertainment, and political education, comprising professional artists and designers (like Shepard Fairey) who played significant roles in producing symbolic resources such as street art, logos, posters, and illustrations that were important in framing Obama’s public persona (Seidman, 2010). “Vote Different,” the well-known film depicting Hillary Clinton as the Big Brother figure in Apple Computer’s famous “1984” television ad, was created by Phil De Vellis, an established political public relations professional. Website Barely Political’s equally well-known video “I Got A Crush … on Obama” was the idea of an experienced advertising executive named Ben Relles and it took three weeks in production with professional filmmakers Kevin Arbouet and Larry Strong (L. S. Miller, 2008). Actress Amber Lee Ettinger, the star of “I Got A Crush … ,” appeared on Fox and MSNBC and was subsequently hired by the Obama campaign to do voice-overs for its “robocall” voter contact (L. Powell, 2010: 94).