The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  The first intervention was the publication in July 2008 of the New Yorker magazine’s controversial front-page cartoon depicting Barack Obama wearing Islamic dress alongside his wife Michelle, who was depicted as a Black Panther with combat fatigues and a rifle. Originally intended as the liberal magazine’s satirical attack on conservative rumor-mongers, it soon became evident that the cartoon was a misfire. Given the unsettling context of misinformation that had hung over the campaign, the cartoon was neither humorous enough nor ludicrous enough to be effective as satire. The Obama campaign officially condemned the cover as “tasteless and offensive” (Zeleny, 2008). Predictably, however, the vivid images dominated campaign coverage across television and newspapers for several days.

  The second older media intervention was the publication on August 1, 2008, of The Obama Nation, a book by Jerome R. Corsi. Corsi is one of the authors of Unfit for Command, the book that inspired the conservative Swiftboat Veterans for Truth campaign against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004. Among The Obama Nation’s many unsubstantiated allegations was the claim that Obama was hiding his Muslim religion. Corsi’s book was an instant bestseller and went on to ship more than a million copies, guaranteeing it earned media coverage in the form of tie-in news articles, both negative and positive, across broadcast and newspaper media.

  The “Obama is a Muslim” myth demonstrates that even the most extreme online information can now become hybridized in some way with professional news reporting. What had started out as a subterranean rumor circulating on a small subset of right-wing conservative blogs entered the mainstream as a result of Insight’s story and the Fox News–CNN dispute in January 2007. It then began circulating through e-mails, social network sites, and blogs, before occasionally erupting back into the mainstream under the pressure of new events: the publication of the New Yorker’s cover cartoon and the television and newspaper reception of Jerome Corsi’s book. And the individual effects of this rumor were probably substantial. Those who received greater numbers of e-mails (of all kinds) during the closing period of the campaign were more likely to believe that Obama was a Muslim (Kenski, et al., 2010: 100). By the end of the campaign, 19 percent of respondents believed this to be the case. While only a quarter of these individuals voted for Obama, 64 percent voted for McCain (Kenski, et al., 2010: 98). As we shall see in chapter 10, these dysfunctional aspects of hybridity re-emerged with powerful force during the 2016 presidential campaign, with the fake news scandal.

  Be the First to Know … After the Associated Press

  In common with the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004, the 2008 contest saw campaign staff use candidate websites and e-mail lists to selectively bypass traditional news gatekeepers and try to get one step ahead of the daily news cycle. As I have shown, this involved issuing new videos and press releases via e-mail to supporters in advance of sending them to journalists, in order to create a sense of excitement and solidarity. Fundraising announcements were usually first released on campaign websites. For example, the Obama campaign announced to its supporters that it would not be accepting public funding for the general election campaign via an e-mail linking to a video clip of Obama explaining why he had taken the controversial decision. There were also concerted efforts to capitalize on the real-time affordances of the mobile web, which had by 2008 finally become important due to the growing penetration of smartphones. While the use of Twitter was still in its early stages in 2008 and the practice of displaying hashtags at the start of television shows was in its infancy (though CNN experimented with this), abbreviated SMS text message codes were in abundance and a regular feature on web and television commercials.

  In August 2008, the Obama campaign planned a historic first in using mobile media to bypass professional journalists. Things did not quite go as planned. The announcement of the vice presidential running mate Joseph Biden was to be delivered by phone text message. The procedure leading up to Biden’s selection was just as secretive and elite-driven as it has always been, and the plan to use text messaging was spurred in large part by a desire to attract reporters’ attention and to increase the campaign’s cell phone numbers database, which was then in the “low six figures,” in stark contrast with its much larger e-mail list. Within two weeks of the VP announcement, that phone list had grown to more than two million numbers (Plouffe, 2010: 295). But the way the announcement almost backfired provides further insight into the perpetual power struggles between older and new media logics, even in this supposed moment of triumph for digital campaigning.

  Supporters were encouraged to sign up to “be the first to know” of Obama’s choice. Traditionally, television and newspaper reporters are the first to know of the vice presidential selection: this has evolved over the decades into one of the big media events of the campaign. The decision to announce via text message was not popular among journalists, and some of them decided to blunt its impact. The competition to break the news ahead of the formal announcement was intense and eventually global news agency the Associated Press (AP) managed to find out from an unnamed source inside the Democratic party that Joe Biden had been chosen as the vice presidential candidate. Eager to intervene before the Obama campaign sent its text messages, AP published the story on its website and its syndicated news feed shortly after midnight on August 23. Minutes later, broadcast news started reporting the story that had just been handed to them by one of their most important wire agencies. In a race to deliver the messages before too many supporters would see the news and realize that the plan had been thwarted, the Obama campaign began sending the messages to their cell phone subscribers. But this was the middle of the night across most of America and not part of the carefully timed delivery that the campaign had in mind. Older media’s revenge, in this case exacted of all things by a wire service established in the nineteenth century.

  Hard News and Soft News, Offline and Online: Framing Sarah Palin

  The vice presidential nomination message was an interesting example of older media’s power, but it was a skirmish when compared with my final exhibit of this chapter: the troubled reception of the Republicans’ 2008 vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

  In this case, television entertainment’s influence was partly made possible by the intensification of trends in the production and consumption of political information that have now been observed for around a decade: the growing importance of “soft” news and “entertainment” genres—particularly but not exclusively late-night comedy shows—for the acquisition of political knowledge and for political engagement (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011: 1–16). During 2007 and 2008, McCain and Obama made a combined total of nineteen appearances on the major late-night comedy shows that are now so important for reaching younger voters and those who pay less attention to straightforward news media (Gulati, 2010: 192). The use of entertainment-as-news is an important aspect of the hybrid media system in election campaigning. At the same time, however, contrary to the view that Sarah Palin’s “story was not defined by professional journalists” (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011: 3) we need to recognize the role played by professional political reporters in driving the story and creating a context in which the satire could flourish.

  Immediately after the formal announcement of Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee on August 29, as if surprised by their own decision the McCain campaign effectively cocooned her for an extended period as they scrambled to prepare for a convention speech and a series of high-profile television interviews. In the run-up to the nomination speech, the McCain campaign decided not to release the news that Palin’s unmarried teenage daughter was then five months pregnant, electing instead to “flush the toilet,” as Tucker Eskew, one of Palin’s senior advisers described it, on the Labor Day holiday (August 31) (Nagourney, 2008a).

  In the days between the Palin announcement and the Republican convention, McCain’s staff also found themselves having to defend the campaign against a series of revelations, including that Pa
lin’s husband had been convicted of driving while drunk in 1986; that, as governor of Alaska, Palin had fired a senior official because he had refused to fire a state trooper who was Palin’s ex-brother-in-law and with whom the Palin family had fallen out; and that Palin’s image as a reformist did not tally with her initial lobbying for federal pork-barrel funding for the construction of a bridge to Gravina Island, Alaska (the so-called “bridge to nowhere”).

  Suddenly the narrative of Palin as an outsider and a family centered conservative populist began to falter. As the doubts and critical commentary began to pile up, the McCain team went on the offensive, seeking to attack television and newspaper journalists for what seemed like a growing refusal to take the Palin candidacy seriously. This set in train a crucial set of interactions between professional journalists and the McCain campaign. These interactions reveal the enduring power of professional media—and of investigative journalists in particular—in using their considerable resources to hold campaigns to account and legitimize critical framing among entertainment media.

  The Republicans’ first attempt to reframe the vice president was when McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds appeared on CNN’s Election Central to argue that Palin’s period as governor of Alaska meant that she had more experience of political decision making than Obama. When asked for an example of when Palin had taken an important decision, Bounds floundered and an argument broke out between him and the show’s host Campbell Brown. In protest at what was perceived by the Republicans to be Tucker Bounds’s harsh treatment by Campbell Brown, McCain pulled out of a prescheduled interview with CNN’s veteran presenter Larry King. The campaign issued a press release: “After a relentless refusal by certain on-air reporters to come to terms with John McCain’s selection of Alaska’s sitting governor as our party’s nominee for vice president, we decided John McCain’s time would be better served elsewhere” (Rutenberg, 2008). The McCain campaign’s response to such a minor event was extraordinary. However, behind the scenes, journalists from what McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt pointedly described as “national media” had started to ask questions of a highly personal nature about Palin’s recent pregnancy and the parentage of her then five-month-old child, who was born with Down Syndrome (CBS, 2008).

  The Republicans’ attack on the credibility and legitimacy of senior CNN journalists did not play well. Frustrated at being denied direct access to a candidate about whom ordinary voters knew very little, newspaper and television journalists started to grumble in public. McCain’s boycott of CNN was framed as a broadside attack on journalism in general in a piece by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post (Kurtz, 2008). The Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times all called for the McCain campaign’s news blackout to end. But McCain campaign manager Rick Davis then inflamed things still further when he stated on Fox News Sunday that reporters would not be granted access to Palin unless they began to treat her “with some level of respect and deference” (Dionne, 2008).

  The response by the nation’s most prestigious and well-resourced media organizations was to send teams of investigative reporters to Alaska to unearth stories about Palin’s personal history and her record as Alaska governor. Facts emerged that allowed reporters to substantiate the story that Palin was involved in the improper firing of her ex-brother-in-law—it was revealed that an ethics committee of the Alaska state legislature was investigating the incident. (The committee later found that she had acted improperly.) A series of revelations also emerged regarding alleged improper expenses claims, the alleged withholding of e-mails from the public record, the alleged firing of a librarian who resisted the governor’s attempts to have books removed from the Wasilla public library, and Palin’s exaggerated claims that she had cut unnecessary costs in the governor’s office. The three major television networks weighed in with synchronicity on September 9 and 10 with reports summarizing these and more of the fruits of the newspaper journalists’ endeavors (Alexander, 2010: 226–230). On September 14, the New York Times completed the picture, with a piece by senior reporters Jo Becker, Peter S. Goodman, and Michael Powell that proudly proclaimed that it was based on “a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials” (Becker, et al., 2008). In a process that in fact differed from what has been variously described as the recycling of “viral slurs” (Kenski, et al., 2010: 137) “the hardwiring of the crazy left-wing blogs into newsrooms” (Wallace, 2009: 33), and an illustration of “the precipitous decline in the power of journalists” (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011: 6), these Palin revelations emerged from a well-researched article produced by experienced and respected political reporters working for America’s most prestigious traditional news organization.

  The McCain team relented and proceeded as planned with extended interviews with Charles Gibson of ABC News and Katie Couric of CBS News. Palin’s performance during these two events, particularly the Couric interview, set in train an extraordinary period of negative commentary and satire, the likes of which, in terms of its impact and modalities, had never before been witnessed in U.S. presidential campaigns. But it was the negative newspaper coverage that had been provoked by the McCain campaign’s attacks on journalists during the interregnum between the vice presidential announcement and the Charles Gibson interview that legitimized what turned out to be such damaging satirical treatment.

  An important line of inquiry for journalists was Palin’s lack of foreign policy experience and this was tested in both interviews. Palin was working against the context of low expectations and did not perform disastrously, but there were some damaging exchanges over economic and foreign policy. One line would come back to haunt the Republicans. In response to a question about Russia during the Gibson interview, Palin responded: “They’re our next-door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska” (SaveOurSovereignty2, 2008). Palin’s suggestion was that Alaska’s proximity to Russia somehow equipped her with valuable foreign policy insight.

  These were odd remarks: folksy and down-to-earth but basically irrelevant to Palin’s foreign policy credentials, not to mention the broader state of United States–Russia relations. They were soon picked up by political columnists, but by this time mainstream television satirists were also circling. In the first show of Saturday Night Live’s new season comedian Tina Fey embarked on a series of heavily trailed comedy sketches in which she played the Alaska governor. In the opener, she uttered with uncanny precision the line “I can see Russia from my house!” The offending clip was replayed across television news shows, but because the new season of Saturday Night Live is traditionally an important event in the American television calendar, coverage also spilled over to soft news and talk shows like Today and a raft of cable entertainment and celebrity gossip programming.

  Matters were made worse two weeks later, when Palin was interviewed by Katie Couric of CBS. After Couric pressed her to explain her remarks in the Gibson interview, Palin provided a longer response, but one that was confusing and even less credible. This too was the subject of critical commentary and the embedded video clip from the CBS News website became instant blog fodder (Pitney, 2008). It provided further fuel for Tina Fey, whose corresponding Saturday Night Live sketch was extraordinary, not because of its imagination, but because so much of its content was directly lifted from the replies Palin provided in the real interview with Couric (johny boy, 2008).

  The Couric interview spoof clips caused traffic to spike on the NBC website. The Fey sketch from September 13 led to 5.7 million views within four days on NBC’s site alone (Wallenstein, 2008), providing a boost to Saturday Night Live, one of NBC’s most important shows and very much a bastion of television entertainment. On October 18, with barely more than a couple of weeks to go before election day, Fey and her colleagues received the largest television audience for Saturday Night Live in fourteen years—seventeen million (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011: 4).

  And yet the online audiences for the
Fey sketches greatly exceeded those from television. By October 23 NBC had streamed the sketches forty-three million times from its website and its joint venture Hulu.com (Snider, 2008). Spread virally through links to online video as well as consumed through paid-for iTunes downloads, these clips played an important role in the framing of Palin, spanning the gaps between the weekly television installments of Saturday Night Live.

  A mid-October Pew Research Center survey reported that 72 percent of the American public had heard about Tina Fey’s portrayal of Palin (Pew Research Center, 2008b). Annenberg election study data reveal that regular viewing of Saturday Night Live (the data do not distinguish between television and web viewing) was associated with skepticism about Palin’s suitability for the vice presidency, and this was particularly strong among all-important independent voters (Kenski, et al., 2010: 157). But Pew’s mid-October survey also reveals that 78 percent of Americans reported hearing about the Palin-Couric CBS news interview. Hard news, soft news, and entertainment; bloggers, elite broadcast and newspaper journalists; NBC.com, Hulu.com, YouTube, and iTunes: it was the hybrid media system that did so much damage to Palin.

  Conclusion

  This analysis of key episodes during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign reveals an evolving system of interconnected and interdependent older and newer media logics. Politicians, professional political staff, journalists, citizen activists, and sometimes only momentarily engaged members of the public competed and cooperated in mediated environments as they attempted to use both older and newer media logics to exert their power. Actors in this system are articulated by complex and evolving power relations based upon adaptation and interdependence. They 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.