The Hybrid Media System
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The consumption of campaign news from online sources has increased massively in less than a decade, and yet television remains the most important overall source of information for citizens, as print media organizations repurpose their content and reposition it at the center of the online news system. Candidates attempt to premediate the framing of their individual character and judgment through the strategic use of autobiographies; reporters fall back on these books as a resource. The physical spectacles of candidate appearances on the campaign trail continue to generate important television, radio, and newspaper coverage, as Obama’s grand tour of foreign nations and his Denver acceptance speech demonstrate. But these televisual spectacles also integrate newer media logics of data-gathering, fundraising, tracking, monitoring, and volunteering, as well as the conveying of enthusiasm, movement, authenticity, and common purpose.
These older and newer media logics now constitute a system for producing and reproducing a campaign’s important events, combining the powerful genres and modalities of political television with the networked coordinative power of internet media. Sometimes these older and new media logics are fused in real time, as occurred with the phone banks at speeches and the online fundraising drives that occur during televised debates. Sometimes the temptations to campaigns of orchestrating and projecting power in these large-scale televisual campaign moments are too great, as Obama’s Denver speech again makes clear. Yet events based on smaller, more intimate moments of televisual campaigning are also risky because they are also subjected to a newer media logic, as activist citizens are now able to scour remediated television clips of slip-ups using YouTube’s archive.
This chapter has revealed growing systemic integration of the internet and television in American election campaigning. There is conflict between older and newer media power but there is also a great deal of interdependence. The CNN/YouTube debates illustrate how older media seek to extend their power by making online media practice conform as far as possible to the safe and controlled environment of a televised candidate debate, though the domestication can never be complete, as many of the citizens’ questions were based on classic YouTube amateur genres. The exuberant outpouring of online amateur video is an important trend in campaigns, but one that must be understood in the context of the power resources of those who are able to produce the successful online videos. Virality can never be fully predicted, but establishing linkages among previously well-known celebrities and organizations is more likely to produce it. The most successful online videos are created by those who already have cultural capital and network power from the entertainment field. “Yes We Can” was coordinated with the Obama campaign and it was produced by global celebrities. The Reverend Wright affair owes its origins to conservative bloggers and it became a YouTube phenomenon in part due to the wide variety of amateur-produced mash-up videos, but the Wright sermon videos first broke on Fox and ABC television, the majority of the YouTube content was simply remediated from television clips, and viewings on YouTube tended to be responses to new information on television news. Obama’s response, the “more perfect union” speech, was designed as a supremely televisual intervention, but once uploaded to YouTube the video soon acquired a newer media logic, one that capitalized on the power of the online archive to circumvent the sound-bite constraints of television.
The case of Bittergate reveals the uncertainties but also the impacts on news that can occur when the boundaries between older and newer reporting norms begin to blur. The rumors that Obama “is a Muslim” spread across e-mail networks during the campaign but they are best understood not as the product of a wild and untamed internet, but of complex interactions between a conservative magazine, Fox News, CNN, a million-selling book by a conservative author, and an ill-judged satirical cover of the New Yorker. Newer media logic drove the Obama campaign’s attempt to enthuse its supporters, boost its cell phone number database, and bypass political reporters by releasing news of the vice presidential nominee by text message, but the impact was diluted by AP’s leaking of the story before the vast majority of the messages had been sent.
Entertainment media played important roles in the critical reception of Sarah Palin, but these attacks were sparked and legitimized by professional reporters who reacted negatively to the McCain campaign’s complaints that they were not giving Palin a chance to establish her credentials. Senior reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post used their considerable investigative resources to establish the credibility of several negative stories about Palin’s governorship of Alaska. The news reports and the satirical treatments fed off each other, as the NBC websites, the iTunes store, YouTube, and, of course, the public through their downloads and sharing of links gave the comedy a viral life cycle in between the punctuating weekly doses of Saturday Night Live. In short, we end this chapter where we began: the campaign of many screens.
8
Hybrid Norms in News and Journalism
So far in this book, I have sought to demonstrate how power relations based on conflict, competition, and interdependence among older and newer media logics operate across a range of fields: technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms. While I have drawn upon some important insider evidence to demonstrate these processes in action, for instance from key political and communication staff working for the Obama 2008 campaign in chapters 6 and 7, and from journalists and WikiLeaks activists in chapter 5, most of the evidence has been drawn from publicly available data. In order to demonstrate, for example, the importance of the interactions between television and online video in American election campaigns or the hybrid assemblages of real-time news-making in the cases of the British Bullygate scandal and televised prime ministerial debates, it was essential to reconstruct the publicly available traces of these phenomena.
But a thorough examination of the norms that animate a media system—which I understand as contestable, shared meanings that are socially sanctioned and which inform legitimized and regularized patterns of thought and behavior—requires a different research strategy. To explore norms we need to get inside the textures of meaning that give life to the settings—the organizations and networks—that matter in political communication. In short, we need to understand how people make sense of their daily practice as actors in the hybrid media system.
The challenges here are numerous. Studying a single organization like a newspaper or a political campaign by exploring the beliefs of its key actors is difficult enough. Exploring norms in the hybrid media system requires that we focus on a wider range of actors than is usually the case with insider studies of media and politics. Indeed, the very idea that there are easily identifiable, organizationally granted roles when it comes to the creation of mediated politics is becoming increasingly problematic. As I have shown throughout this book, political communication now occurs in complex, hybrid assemblages of older and newer media, as a diverse array of actors, ranging from large professional news organizations to elite politicians to engaged citizens, participate in an incessant struggle to shape public discourse and define the political agenda.
This and the following chapter therefore switch to a different mode of research. In these chapters I explore the evolving norms of the hybrid media system by considering the meanings actors ascribe to their roles. These actors are drawn from a range of relevant older and newer fields of political and media practice. The aims of this and the following chapter, then, are to try to get under the skin of how and why these actors behave as they do, to assess the extent to which new norms are being forged, and to identify the extent to which these norms are becoming embedded in routine practice in political communication. In short, this and chapter 9 are concerned with sense making in the hybrid media system.
My raw materials here are interviews I conducted personally among people operating at the very heart of Britain’s media–politics nexus in London, during 2010, 2011, and 2012. Happily, this period included Britain’s momentous general election of
May 2010. During my fieldwork I interviewed party communication staff; journalists, program-makers, and editors working in radio, television, newspaper, magazine, and news agency organizations; independent bloggers; the director of a prominent public relations company; senior regulatory staff at the Office of Communications (OFCOM) and the Press Complaints Commission (PCC); communications staff working inside government departments and in the Prime Minister’s Office in Number 10 Downing Street; and members of the renowned progressive political activist network, 38 Degrees. The interviews ranged in length from forty-five minutes to two hours and forty-five minutes.1
I chose these interviewees because I wanted to “sample” a range of different political and media settings: those associated with formal organizations but also those working in nonorganizational settings, or settings whose precariousness, contingency, or what we might term “boundariness” were what made them interesting as subjects of study, given the initial research questions that fueled this book. It helped that several of my interviewees had, in previous careers, moved between the different but deeply interconnected worlds of media, politics, public advocacy, and citizen activism; indeed, some had done so shortly before the interview.
This fieldwork sample is not, of course, meant to be representative of the hugely diverse media system of contemporary Britain. No set of in-depth qualitative interviews could ever achieve that status and it would be unwise to assume that it might. However, my interview subjects, and the norms they reveal as important, add up to what I believe is a convincing figurative representation of daily practice in the hybrid media system.
In this chapter I focus on evidence from the field of news and journalism. In the chapter that follows I turn my attention to political activism, election campaigning, and government communications.
The Evolution of Westminster Lobby Journalism: “the Whole Works”?
Britain’s Westminster “lobby” is infamous for being one of the most secretive and restrictive systems in the liberal-democratic world for managing interactions between senior politicians and journalists. Around two hundred lobby-registered journalists are drawn from elite newspaper and broadcast organizations and enjoy access to political and communications staff working at the highest levels of government. Among the many controversial aspects of the lobby rules is the norm of non-attributability that surrounds the reporting of the twice-daily press briefings chaired by the prime minister’s press officer. But lobby norms extend, tentacle-like, through the rest of Britain’s system of political reporting. Despite recent developments that have weakened the lobby, such as the opening up of the morning’s (but not the afternoon’s) prime ministerial briefings to all accredited journalists, source confidentiality based on “lobby terms” remains a well-established weapon that can be deployed strategically by politicians, senior civil servants, and of course journalists themselves (Gaber, 2011). The lobby came into its own during the heyday of broadcast-mediated politics from the 1960s to the 1990s (Cockerell, et al., 1984). And yet we know next to nothing about how the emergence of digital media is influencing the norms of lobby correspondents.
To gain an insider perspective on what is still a secretive world, I interviewed two lobby correspondents: David Stringer, the Westminster correspondent of the Associated Press (AP) news agency, and Laura Kuenssberg, former chief political correspondent at BBC News and now Business Editor at ITV News (Interview 25, October 2010; Interview 31, January 2012).
Kuenssberg and Stringer, who are both in their thirties, work for what are, in many respects, two of the most traditional institutions of journalism anywhere in the world. They operate according to the routines and expectations of elite political reporting, in Kuenssberg’s case at the very highest professional level in Britain. Yet both are avid users of the web and both were among the first generation of journalists to use Twitter. Indeed, Kuenssberg was an early adopter of the service and before she began to use it for reporting had to write a paper for senior management at BBC News, justifying its virtues as a tool for political correspondents (Interview 31, January 2012).
Kuenssberg and Stringer both express enthusiasm and optimism about how social media have enhanced journalists’ ability to connect with the public and hold politicians to account. Stringer speaks of how Facebook and Twitter provide monitorial resources for political journalists eager to react quickly to stories as they develop throughout the day. He uses the example of instantly getting “about twenty” MPs’ initial responses to the election of Ed Miliband as the new leader of the Labour Party in September 2010. “How groups of people are thinking, how they’re responding to events” is important for getting a quick sense of the significance of a potential story. Stringer also suggests that there has been a broadening of sources beyond the usual Westminster “bubble” and that he is now able to identify networks of activists keen to try to engage with journalists online. In the process, these distributed publics reveal grassroots opinion to journalists in ways that previously were very difficult to trace. This has changed reporting, by making it essential for journalists to get a sense of how events are playing out among a broader network rather than simply relying on biased proxies like government or party press officers. Stringer cites his experience during the 2010 general election, when he says reporters were able to get a “richer sense of how the Labour Party felt, the pessimism within the party.” “Without the web you traditionally wouldn’t have got a handle on it,” he adds (Interview 25, October 2010).
At the same time, Stringer has developed a certain measured skepticism about how the online environment has evolved. He identifies signs that party spin doctors are now settling on a range of effective new approaches to strategic communication. He points to the shrewd use of the online personas of Gordon Brown’s wife, Sarah, and David Cameron’s wife, Samantha, during the 2010 election. Sarah Brown was very active on Twitter and Samantha Cameron had her own YouTube channel. Then there was Labour’s recruitment and integration into their election campaign of Ellie Gellard, a blogger with the pen name Bevanite Ellie. Gellard, a Labour activist and at that time an undergraduate student at the University of Bristol, described herself on her blog as the “stilettoed socialist.” She amassed a large Twitter following after her successful campaign to have a video, “Fighters and Believers,” shown nationally as one of Labour’s allocated television election broadcasts. During the run-up to the election it became obvious that Gellard was one of Labour’s more prominent online supporters and she was invited by Gordon Brown to give a speech at the formal launch of the party’s campaign. Stringer suggests that this was a case of the “party hierarchy taking someone who has built herself a following, and using her as a PR tool.” She went from “independence and her ability to express herself to essentially becoming a party official,” he says (Interview 25, October 2010). Stringer also points out that the Conservatives’ senior press officer during the campaign, Henry McCrory, used Twitter to target a select group of political journalists with a “super-fast form of rebuttal.” And more broadly across government there is now an embedded awareness of what works strategically in the digital environment, with, for example, departments like the Foreign Office launching new digital diplomacy initiatives designed to frame foreign policy in softer terms for both domestic and foreign audiences.
Stringer works for AP, a successful and long-established global news agency. AP feeds a great deal of content to British media organizations and its reputation for factual accuracy is an important part of its status and power. Stringer is keen to stress that news agencies like his are an oasis of high-standards journalism in a desert of often dubious practice at tabloid newspapers. This should come as no surprise. But news agencies like AP, Reuters, and the Press Association (PA) have come under pressure in recent years as a result of the internet’s impact on breaking news. The news agencies have adapted, of course, and the most important strategic move in this process of adaptation is the argument that not only must agencies be the first to break news, they mu
st do so with the highest standards of accuracy and journalistic judgment. So Stringer is keen to draw a boundary between the agency model and his lobby routines, on the one hand, and the frenzied, hypercompetitive digital news environment, on the other. The rush to break news and compete with bloggers, online activists on Twitter, and digital-only media organizations like the Huffington Post has led to older news organizations often churning out insubstantial stories based on PR releases, in order to stay in the game, he says:
For an agency journalist there is no capacity to be wrong. It would damage the reputation of the company. Ourselves, Reuters, PA, AFP, their whole rationale is to be fast, to be first, yes, but also to be accurate. And if you don’t have both, essentially there’s no point. So it does bring incredible pressures on getting things right. It brings incredible pressures on attempting often to corroborate news, particularly in the political sphere, [where] there may be news broken by the BBC who may quote unnamed, unattributed sources.… It means to me and my colleagues, yes you have to move very quickly, you have to have the access and the ability to attempt to find those people and corroborate stories, but you have to have a very, very clear sense of what your company’s standards are, what your sourcing standards are; you have to have a very clear sense of whether something is correct or not. Otherwise, the reputational damage you could do could be really corrosive (Interview 25, October 2010).