Conclusion
This chapter has explored how those working in the fields of political activism, parties, and government in Britain are forging and adapting to the hybrid media system. I have shown how activist movement 38 Degrees cannily switches between older and newer media logics in its attempts to mobilize supporters and influence policy. It uses a division of labor between older and newer media to structure the “actions” that serve as its only meaningful organizational basis, but as David Karpf has argued in the U.S. context, this is not “organizing without organizations” but “organizing with different organizations” (Karpf, 2012: 3). The leadership engages in constant monitoring of the views of its members through a variety of sophisticated digital tools and it uses the knowledge gained from these processes to prepare for the launch of campaigns that are often timed for when an issue is prominent in broadcast and newspaper media. There is also a strong normative attachment to being able to react extraordinarily quickly to issues that rise to prominence in the “mainstream.” Responsiveness produces and reproduces identity and solidarity because it meets expectations of authenticity and connectedness that have become embedded as cultural values among activists online. And yet the actions that 38 Degrees’ leadership asks its networks of supporters to perform, like donating money for ads in newspapers and commissioning opinion polls, are often far removed from what we might think of as online activism. Indeed, they rest upon and capitalize upon an acceptance of broadcast and newspaper media’s enduring roles. These new democratic forms of politics are carved out of the hybrid interstitial spaces between older and newer media.
We have seen how, in the field of parties and election campaigns, there is a contested blurring, but a blurring nonetheless, between the practices of “new media” and “press” staff. This is being enacted by the integration of both of these domains under the umbrella of “communications,” as part of a general shift toward bringing digital practices into the core decision-making structures of British election campaigning. There are differences in emphasis across the two largest parties. Labour’s approach rests more heavily on integrating the internet into the ground war, while the Conservatives have placed greater emphasis on targeting the undecided voter through effective online messaging. Yet online campaign teams in both of these parties have now settled on a range of back-room practices that provide resources for staking their claim to a seat in the war room, such as the use of Google AdWords campaigns. There are clear divisions between the self-described strategic and tactical aspects of integrating the internet, and those expecting hybridity in these particular fields to generate unbridled new opportunities for citizen engagement should prepare to be disappointed, especially when compared with the fields of news and journalism that I discussed in chapter 8. These fields therefore stand in contrast with the hybrid mobilization typified by 38 Degrees.
As the evidence in this chapter from those working at the very top of British government reveals, “tactical” rather than “strategic” integration provides the most powerful logics for combining broadcast-era control and spin with the fluidity of the internet, primarily because it does not unduly threaten the identity, routines, and therefore the power of traditional press staff. Tactical integration has, nevertheless, enabled hybridity to emerge, as it did during the 2010 election when all parties sought to run their online campaigns in consonance with broadcast media coverage dominated by the televised prime ministerial debates, in echoes of the developments we saw in the U.S. context in chapters 6 and 7. Even those working at the forefront of public relations and advertising, who see themselves as putting digital tools at the center of their campaigning practice, have a strong sense of the appropriateness of a division of labor between older and newer media. And the very idea of a division of labor, is, after all, based on the premise of systemic interdependence.
10
Donald Trump, the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign, and the Intensification of the Hybrid Media System
Washington, DC, January 20–22, 2017: Presidential Inauguration Weekend
For Duff Goldman, there is a problem with the cake.
At first glance, it is difficult to see why. It is an extraordinary creation—a four-feet-tall, nine-tiered, teetering panoply of frosting in red, white, blue, and silver. On its side, lovingly rendered in food coloring, is a faithful reproduction of the presidential seal. At its peak, suspended on slender sticks, are several silver-coated, cookie-dough stars that appear to float in mid-air.
This is no ordinary cake. It is for a Washington party—the Salute to Our Armed Services Ball—following the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States (Wang & Carman, 2017). Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were the first to cut into the cake, not with a knife, but an antique military sword. The Washington Post recorded video of the occasion and posted the file to its website, marking an event that would immediately resonate with the many who have witnessed similar, if less grandiose, symbolic gestures at their own family celebrations.
But Duff Goldman has a problem. This cake is identical to one he designed, baked, and decorated four years earlier. Then, the occasion was equally important: the 2013 inauguration ceremony for President Barack Obama. Had Goldman been invited back to the White House to recreate his masterpiece for Trump? No. In fact, Goldman had nothing whatsoever to do with Trump’s inauguration cake. Someone else had made it, copying Goldman’s 2013 design down to the last detail. We know this because Goldman tweeted his distaste for the copy of his cake. And, within a few hours, the story of the fake cake had traveled around the globe.
Duff Goldman is a pastry chef and minor celebrity who made his name on a Food Network television show, Ace of Cakes, featuring daily life at his Baltimore bakery. As of January 2017, about 115,000 people followed him on Twitter. Late into the night of inauguration day, frustrated upon seeing the replica of his cake online, Goldman posted a photo showing Trump’s cake alongside a photo of the cake he had made for the Obama White House in 2013. He wrote: “The cake on the left is the one I made for President Obama’s inauguration 4 years ago. The one on the right is Trumps [sic]. I didn’t make it.” The photos showed the two cakes to be almost identical, though, unsurprisingly, Trump’s was slightly bigger. Goldman rounded off his tweet with the emoji symbol for what can best be described as a thinking-while-stroking-your-chin face—perfect for conveying sarcasm: “Hmm . . . I wonder what happened there . . .” (Goldman, 2017).
Then, Goldman’s tweet went viral. By the following evening, it had received more than 125,000 retweets, had been “liked” by more than quarter of a million people, and had attracted more than 5,000 replies. Many of those engaging with the tweet added the hashtag #cakegate to their own messages. And by Sunday evening, professional media organizations around the world, including the Washington Post, USA Today, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and Britain’s Telegraph and Guardian, to name just a few, were running articles about how Donald Trump’s inaugural cake was a “plagiarized” confection. Journalists managed to trace the cake back to Buttercream Bakeshop, a Washington business that had been commissioned by White House staff. The source for this information? An Instagram post from Buttercream, making it clear that the company was “asked to replicate someone else’s work” (Wang & Carman, 2017). By Monday morning, my search for the exact phrase “Trump inauguration cake” on Google News revealed that the story had already been woven into the fabric of the web: more than 141,000 pages now contained this most unlikely combination of words.
Duff Goldman followed up with magnanimous tweets expressing support for the company asked to copy his design. Then, in response to criticism from members of the public on Twitter and Instagram, Buttercream Bakery announced that the profits from their work for Trump would go to the Human Rights Campaign, a well-known civil society organization that campaigns for equality for LGBT people (Wang & Carman, 2017). All appears to have ended well in the world of high-specification catering.
But to under
stand the broader significance of Duff Goldman’s viral tweet, we need to consider the systemic context that enabled its production and circulation. In particular, we need to understand the proximate webs of meaning that gave the tweet such powerful resonance among social media users and professional journalists alike. This chain of events was simultaneously extraordinary and predictable. It was extraordinary because it demonstrates how social media have reshaped the mediation of politics. It was predictable because it was simply the latest episode in a 2016 presidential election whose mediation was fundamentally and consequentially hybrid in its integration of older and newer technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms.
For Donald Trump’s press team, things were certainly not all well with how the inauguration celebrations were being framed and reported—both by professional journalists and many members of the public on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The fake cake became a politically charged, memetic metaphor for Trump, the man, and his character. The tweets, retweets, and replies of #cakegate enabled many to assert and galvanize their political identity by using the cake as a symbol for all that liberals had found unappealing about Trump since he had begun his campaign for the White House in 2015—the empty glitz, the vulgarity, the lack of grace. The fake cake became emblematic of Trump as chancer: the one who had gone a long way on very little, and who was prepared to stoop so low as to rip off a baker, of all people. This was a confluence of media event, minor celebrity, Twitter, Instagram, professional journalists eager for a fresh angle on the new presidency, and liberal social media users eager to position the cake as a culturally charged intervention in the flow of symbols that might make a difference to the reporting of inauguration weekend.
The fake cake was all the more powerful because it involved a mobilization against Trump of symbolic resources from the field of lifestyle celebrity culture. This was, after all, a field in which Trump had long been prominent and which had been crucial for his rise through the ranks of American public life. This was about a more authentic, humble, down-to-earth, everyday form of celebrity—the minor celebrity baker defending his livelihood against Trump’s narcisissm. It spoke to the importance, in everyone’s lives, of the art of the celebratory event: of wedding cakes, christening cakes, Bar Mitzvah cakes, and all the rest; events when we make an effort to do the right thing, get things just right, put on a bit of a show, dress up, perhaps gather in a fancy hotel, to show how much we care about family and friends. In late modernity, a constellation of media practices surrounds such personal family events, adding to their intensity. These events’ ceremonial character is as much influenced by the genres of reality television, instructional YouTube videos, online lifestyle platforms like Pinterest, and the social media–enabled sharing of advice, tips, and emotional support, as it is by traditional and religious customs. The event industry is big business, and Trump is an important part of it. He is chief of a leisure empire on which he built his reputation with hotels, resorts, golf courses, wineries, fragrances, clothing, jewelry, home furnishings, chocolate, and vodka, among other things, and which he ceaselessly cross-promoted through his celebrity persona on the television show The Apprentice. This is why #cakegate resonated with hundreds of thousands of Twitter users and the professional journalists who remediated the story of Duff Goldman’s problem.
For Sean Spicer, there is a problem with the size of the crowd.
It is easy to see why. Spicer is Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary. Earlier that day, his boss, President-elect Donald Trump, walked out of the Capitol building to be formally inaugurated as 45th president of the United States. Trump delivered an uncompromising, combative speech that echoed all of the themes of his election campaign. The event was broadcast, web streamed, tweeted, Facebooked, Instagrammed, and Snapchatted live across America and far beyond. It was a day of celebration for Trump, his family, and his staff, including Spicer.
But as Trump had emerged from the Capitol building, on an observation platform close to the top of the famous stone “needle” that is the Washington Monument, sat Lucas Jackson, 500 feet above the ground, and breathless from climbing fifty flights of stairs. Jackson is a well-known photojournalist for Reuters, the highly respected, second oldest, second largest news agency in the world.
Jackson’s job was to point his camera east toward the Capitol and take photos of the crowd watching Trump. At 12:01 p.m., with Trump on the stage, Jackson took his picture and uploaded it to Reuters’ office. Editorial staff at the agency then pulled out an old photo of Obama’s 2009 inauguration and compared it with Jackson’s. The differences were stark and newsworthy. At 2:02 p.m. Reuters published on their website a composite image showing the two crowd photos side by side. The Obama inauguration photo showed crowds almost completely filling the National Mall, stretching all the way back to the National Monument and spilling over into Madison and Jefferson Drives. The Trump photo showed that the crowd started to thin out about halfway down the Mall and did not reach the Monument. The difference between these photos potentially went to the heart of the debate about one of Trump’s obvious characteristics during the 2016 presidential campaign: his desire to be portrayed as popular—a winner. Reuters’ message was clear: Trump could not draw a crowd like Obama could.
We know all this because Reuters later published a self-congratulatory article, describing how Lucas Jackson had got his shot (Trotta, 2017). Significantly, however, Reuters’ piece showing the two photos had made no comment on the size of the crowds. It did not need to contain these details because, as soon as the article was posted, it went viral on Facebook and Twitter, as hundreds of thousands recirculated the image, adding their own commentary about how it revealed Trump’s relative unpopularity. Within hours, the major US news organizations, including CNN, CBS, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today, to name just a few, had picked up the images and published their own stories. This was Sean Spicer’s problem.
Spicer was the incoming White House press secretary for the Trump administration. It was his first day in the job, and professional media framing of the inauguration was slipping through his fingers. Two forces were working against him: professional news agency Reuters’ access to the best spot on the National Mall, secured through their status, reputation, and their network of contacts in the US capital; and the actions of hundreds of thousands of liberal activists eager to criticize Trump on social media platforms. Presidential inaugurations usually see the incoming administration receive a light touch from journalists, but not on this occasion. From Spicer’s point of view, this required a response.
Like the story of Duff Goldman and the fake cake, what happened next reveals key aspects of the hybrid media system in flow. In particular, it provides further evidence for the theory of the political information cycle that I advanced in chapter 4. For Reuters’ journalism and the distributed social media commentary that it sparked were soon joined by a third force: the spectacle of a mass, online, coordinated protest in physical space, not only on the same hallowed ground of the National Mall, but also around the world. This protest—a global event, but also, as we shall see, an event that would have particular resonance in the nation’s capital, would seriously undermine Spicer’s ability to frame inauguration day as a great celebration of the Trump presidency.
In the weeks leading up to the Trump inauguration, a wide range of women’s and progressive civil society groups across the United States and many other countries had been planning what would become known as the Women’s March. The movement began on Facebook, the day after the November election, when a Hawaii resident, Teresa Shook, created an event page calling for a women’s rights march to protest against Trump for his widely reported misogynistic remarks during the campaign. Shook invited a few of her online friends to sign up. The following morning, she awoke to find that the link to the event had been distributed to women’s groups online, including Pantsuit Nation, a Facebook group that had been established to galvanize women’s supp
ort for 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Shook reported that, within a day of her post, the Facebook event page “went ballistic” (Kearney, 2016). These developments went largely unnoticed at the time, but Shook’s remark proved to be a fair assessment of what was to come.
As word of the planned protest spread online, a large coalition of organizations began to grow around it, including the AFL-CIO, Greenpeace, the National Organization for Women, Amnesty International, Planned Parenthood, and a range of much looser online movements such as 350.org, Hollaback!, and Free the Nipple. The coalition, which also attracted a range of celebrities including actors America Ferrera, Ashley Judd, and Scarlett Johansson, among many others, planned a coordinated march in multiple cities across the United States and worldwide.
By the week before inauguration weekend, there were more than 400 “partner” groupings listed on the Women’s March website. Underway was a plan to knit hundreds of thousands of what the organizers called “pussy hats”: bright pink winter caps with pointy “ears” that would immediately identify the protestors in photos and video of the event. The pussy hats mischievously referenced an extraordinary Washington Post article that had been published just weeks before election day. The piece had revealed archival video out-takes that showed how, in an interview with a television presenter, Trump had once bragged that, such was his fame, women would supposedly allow him to “grab them by the pussy” (Farenthold, 2016). The Pussy Hat Project (https://www.pussyhatproject.com) was the latest in a long line of movement repertoires that have built solidarity by defiantly reclaiming and reinventing a (sometimes) derogatory term. It started to look like the Women’s March might be a significant event involving large numbers, both in the United States and around the globe (Women’s March, 2017). The date was set for January 21, the day after the presidential Inauguration. The main U.S. march was to take place on the National Mall.
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