The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  Like the inauguration weekend Women’s March with which I began this chapter, the context for this hybrid confluence of forces was also global. As the evidence for Russian intelligence involvement in the Fancy Bear and Guccifer 2.0 hacks piled up (Entous, et al., 2016), the realization dawned that a foreign state had developed the power to intervene in an American election. But that power did not derive from the Russian government’s position as a unified actor exerting its influence in the international system; nor did it derive from a direct infiltration of the electoral process. Instead, it emerged diffusely and indirectly, from a set of social relations that comprised different actors with different motivations, but through whom power could flow and be used to penetrate the U.S. border. This was an assemblage of lax security, email servers, databases, fake websites, covert hacker networks, human frailty, state action, the incentives that drive professional media, and Assange’s and WikiLeaks’ desire to gain revenge on Hillary Clinton for her role in pursuing his prosecution following WikiLeaks’ 2010 leaks. It created new and surprising vulnerabilities for American democracy.

  Conclusion

  The 2016 presidential campaign saw the intensification of the hybrid media system. The main actors—the candidates, campaign workers, journalists, partisan activists, protestors, and hacker networks—actively shaped the media system in which they played such decisive roles.

  Early on, Trump’s campaign gained a reputation for being disorganized and chaotic, but, as we have seen, its strategy evolved considerably during the transition from the primaries to the general election, when Trump developed an extensive Facebook advertising program. In an important shift away from the Obama years, Trump raised significant money online but did not use it to prioritize buying television advertising, spending only a fraction of what Clinton spent in 2016 (and Obama in 2012). Instead, Trump invested heavily in his Facebook advertising campaign, not least because he was able to rely on television and print media to provide him with a great deal of earned coverage. Shifts in the underlying technologies of Facebook’s advertising platform tools—Lookalike Audiences and dark posts—enabled this rebalancing of older and newer media logics. An important aspect of this was the “voter suppression” strategy Trump’s data scientists used to target messages to deter likely Clinton supporters. While the precise influence of this approach is difficult to determine, we saw that there was some evidence that turnout fell among African American voters. It seems likely that future campaigns will intensify their focus on Facebook. Without new regulation, the use of ever more diverse sources of data alongside Facebook’s already rich behavioral data will be difficult to resist.

  Trump himself proved to be adept at exploiting the power resources that the hybrid media system provides. He translated his cultural capital, accrued through his business advice books and television celebrity, into the political field, and he used his celebrity persona to enthuse his social media following. This social media visibility, in turn, enabled Trump to break through early enough in the crowded Republican primary to emerge as a contender, even in the absence of strong fundraising and opinion poll numbers. As we have seen, Twitter was particularly important for translating Trump’s illiberal Apprentice ethos of “It’s Not Personal, It’s Just Business” into the campaign. This integrated with Trump’s television and print media appearances and the spectacle of his rallies, with their racial slurs, personal insults, and the kind of audience participation that inevitably caught the attention of professional journalists eager to report on not only crowd enthusiasm but also Trump’s violations of established norms. Trump exploited the real space-internet-television nexus. Journalists, perhaps dazzled by the bizarre, responded by reporting, often critically, on these extraordinary interventions and the social media “buzz” that encircled them, further reinforcing the sense that Trump was a person to be reckoned with, whatever one’s views, and, of course, further reinforcing Trump’s claims that elite media were biased against him. But journalists were in a difficult position. To have ignored Trump would have been a dereliction of duty. Trump did not use social media to “bypass” professional media; he used social media to influence professional media. As we saw, this was not disintermediation, but intermediation.

  In 2016, the hybrid media system also enabled, and was partly reshaped by, a trio of developments that served to undermine liberal democratic norms: fake news, bot activity during the televised debates, and a series of hacks and leaks that destabilized the media-politics elite and damaged Clinton’s chances. As we have seen, these phenomena were dependent upon the new logics of digital media, but, as was the case with professional journalists’ reporting of Trump, these were integrated with older media logics.

  Hypercompetition’s effects on the elite news industry, the convergence upon click-bait journalism, and the power of Facebook and Google as platforms came together in the case of fake news. These developments raise serious questions about the role of platforms in the formation of public opinion.

  The intensity of the dual screening experience and the integration of social media commentary in journalists’ framing of televised media events has incentivized the use of social media bots. On a more positive note, however, there is important evidence that in 2016 any potential harm was offset by the fact that human social media activity flooded the Twittersphere during the crucial periods closest to the live broadcast, when publics and journalists were likely to be most attentive.

  The new vulnerabilities created by the growth of state-sponsored, politically motivated hacking and WikiLeaks’ disregard for the norms of professional journalism converged with the motivations of congressional representatives, FBI director James Comey, journalists, and an insurgent right-wing online news network to help keep Clinton’s email server story and the DNC and Podesta Gmail hacks in the spotlight for long periods during the campaign. Clinton’s cause was not helped by the extraordinary second television debate, when 67 million television viewers saw the studio audience break debate protocol by applauding Trump’s line, “Because you’d be in jail.”

  And yet, despite these troubling developments, it pays to end this chapter by recounting how it began—with two interrelated stories of counter-power from the inauguration weekend of January 2017. As we saw, a fusion of lifestyle politics, popular culture, Twitter, Instagram, and professional journalism animated the hybrid contestation of Trump’s plagiarized ceremonial cake. Fleetingly, the #cakegate hashtag became a memetic metaphor that liberal activists and professional journalists used to undermine Trump by confronting many of the symbolic resources on which the celebrity tycoon had built his persona and his campaign strategy. It was also fitting that #cakegate ended with a concrete act of political agency: a fundraising deal to channel funds to the Human Rights Campaign.

  But by far the most significant story of counter-power from inauguration weekend was the Women’s March. This was a digitally enabled mobilization and a media event that was truly global in scale but which, through a mix of mediated and physical agency, condensed its force upon Washington’s National Mall. With the assistance of Reuters’ photographers, journalists on the ground, fact-checkers at the nation’s most respected news organizations, and citizen testimony, the Women’s March demonstrably undermined the White House’s claim that the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd had been the largest ever for an incoming president. The outcome was a counter-inauguration that revealed the chaos of Trump’s press strategy, while also laying down the sedimentary online activist networks upon which future mobilization would depend.

  Conclusion

  Politics and Power in the Hybrid Media System

  That was the river, this is the sea.

  —Mike Scott1

  In this book, I have endeavored to show that political communication in Britain and the United States is now shaped by what is best described as a hybrid media system. By exploring a range of examples of this systemic hybridity in flow, in interactions and exchanges in the fields of news making, election
campaigning, citizen activism, and government, I have shown how the interactions among older and newer media logics—where logics are understood as bundles of technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms—shape the power relations among political actors, media, and publics. Power in the hybrid media system is exercised by those who are successfully able to 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.

  The hybrid media system is based upon conflict and competition between older and newer media logics, but it also features important pockets of interdependence among these logics. Actors in the interpenetrated fields of media and politics simultaneously generate and shape the very hybridity that they then seek to exploit. As I argued in chapter 1 and have shown throughout, systems must be constructed, enacted, and re-enacted, in ongoing acts of modification that over time become significant. Power in political communication is relational. It is shaped by hybrid networks of social and technological actants whose agency derives from their interdependence with other social and technological actants in interactive exchanges.

  Political communication actors constantly mobilize, but also constantly traverse the networks and logics of older and newer media to advance their values and interests. They do this in order to access the network power that resides in the norms and practices that animate these networks (Grewal, 2008; see also chapter 1 in this volume). To revisit my definition from chapter 1, power in the hybrid media system should be understood as the use of resources of varying kinds, which in any given context of dependence and interdependence enable individuals or collectivities to pursue their values and interests, both with and within different but interrelated media.

  As I have demonstrated, the patterns of interaction between older and newer media logics are complex, heterogeneous, and variegated, both within and across fields. Hybridity empowers and it disempowers. But what, then, are the implications of all this for the different fields upon which I have focused?

  In the field of news making, hybridity is creating an emergent openness and fluidity, as grassroots activist groups and even lone individuals now use newer media to make decisive interventions in the news-making process: in real-time assemblages in the case of the political information cycles I identified in chapter 4; through a mix of sociotechnical assemblages and elite/insider negotiation in the case of WikiLeaks, which I covered in chapter 5; and through the emergence of new hybrid norms among amateur bloggers and professional journalists that I identified in chapter 8. The hybrid media system exhibits a balance between the older logics of transmission and reception and the newer logics of circulation, recirculation, and negotiation.

  And yet, all of this must always be set in the context of the ongoing power of professional broadcasting and newspaper organizations, who are in many respects successfully co-opting newer media logics for their own purposes, while at the same time restating and renewing the logics that sustained their dominance throughout the twentieth century. While actors associated with newer media have come to see that they can exert power by adapting their norms and practices as a route to embedding themselves in positions of fruitful and negotiated engagement with actors associated with older media, this process also works in the other direction: older media have found important resources in newer media and will continue to do so. Hybridity also empowers those associated with older media logics, provided they are willing to restate their significance—and adapt.

  Grassroots activism fueled by newer media logics must be set in the context of the broad and continuing power of the political and media elites who have carved out reserved domains that enable them to control what are still the main vehicles for politics in a liberal democracy: organized parties, candidates’ campaigns, and of course the extremely powerful, and increasingly renewed, mass medium of television. These political and media elites had much to lose from the emergence of newer media logics at the end of the twentieth century, not least because these logics disrupted what had become, even with the onslaught of media fragmentation that began during the late 1980s, relatively fixed and settled patterns of interaction among elite political actors and elite broadcast and newspaper media. Older media’s adaptation means that while power in the hybrid media system is relational and based on cooperation, divisions of labor, and interdependence with newer media, this interdependence is often asymmetrical (Keohane & Nye, 1989; see also chapter 1 in this volume). In some areas, older media logics continue to powerfully shape practice, though it is important to stress that this dominance is newly contingent and prone to fracture. The key point is that this contingency is now integrated into the media systems of Britain and the United States and it is not going to disappear in the near future.

  Asymmetrical interdependence is most evident in the field of parties and election campaigning. Here, as I showed in my reinterpretation of the momentous 2008 U.S. presidential election in chapters 6 and 7, the ethnography of hybrid norms in chapters 8 and 9, and the account of the 2016 U.S. campaign in chapter 10, not only must the power-diffusing aspects of digital media be set alongside the rationalizing and centralizing aspects, the overall systemic balance in campaigning is still skewed toward older media logics, particularly the televisual styles of campaigning and war-room practice, the ascendancy of which dates from the 1960s. There is a growing systemic integration of television and the internet that sometimes empowers online expression but also renews war-room televisual logics. Those able to decisively intervene in the online flows of political information are often drawn from the official campaigns or are professional journalists. There is now an established role for online activism at the grassroots, but this role is often on the campaign leadership’s own terms. Perhaps this would have been a more difficult argument to make in the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, when the overwhelming weight of commentary was about how the internet had revolutionized election campaigning and how the Obama model would go on to inform a new style of governance based on openness, transparency, and grassroots mobilization. These ideas proved difficult to fully embed in government and on the campaign trail in 2012. We might question whether newer media logics of transparency and grassroots empowerment were ever in fact the whole story of the 2008 election. Putting 2008 and Obama in the context of the hybrid media system draws attention to how it is perfectly possible to run an internet campaign that uses all relevant media, most notably television, to blend centralization, control, and hierarchy with decentralization, devolution, and horizontality. It also enables us to see how the impact of newer media are always shaped by assumptions carried forward from the use of older media.

  The 2016 U.S. campaign saw this system intensify, but there were also decisive new departures. Trump performed a rebalancing of older and newer media logics. He relied on social media to influence print and broadcast media agendas, but he also developed a “purer” form of digital media strategy with a focus on Facebook analytics and advertising.

  Asymmetrical interdependence between older and newer media logics is also evident in British parties and campaigns. Here, my fieldwork revealed the increasing integration of older and newer media campaign roles, and this is an important development. But also evident are new lines of division between “strategic” and “tactical” norms about the uses of the internet. Strategic norms position the idea of internet-fueled grassroots engagement at the center of the party’s ground campaign and appeal to the new media divisions; tactical norms, where the internet is used to grab the attention of older media, appeal to senior politicians and their traditional press officers. Trump in 2016 was the master of both strategic and tactical norms.

  In my assessment, the prospects for power diffusion in the field of election campaigns are much less certain than in the fields of news making, activism, and mobilization. This is not to say that the tactical norms cannot lead to important patterns of integration between
the internet and older media, particularly real-time television integration that encompasses citizen activism. But as I showed in chapters 9 and 10, this is, in any case, often driven by the logics of the broadcast-era war room.

  Today, we might ask whether the average citizen interested in influencing politics but without ambitions for high political office should join a political organization or create a Twitter account and start interacting with others in the diverse assemblages that now increasingly make political news and set the agenda. Then again, perhaps this, too, is missing an important part of the hybrid picture. For, as I showed in my discussion of the political activist movement 38 Degrees in chapter 9, and the Women’s March and counter-inauguration in chapter 10, the hybrid media system creates new opportunities for political organizations to combine older and newer media logics in compelling and effective new ways. It is not a case of “either/or” but of “not only, but also.”

  I started this book from the perspective that hybrid thinking could be useful for moving beyond dichotomous modes of thought and might enable us to understand how the older and the newer are layered into each other in political communication. The key to this, I believe, is to try to be as specific as possible about the combination of media logics in flow in any given event, process, or context. I have shown how newer media practices in the interpenetrated fields of media and politics adapt and integrate the logics of older media practices in those fields; and, conversely, how older media practices in the fields of media and politics adapt and integrate the logics of newer media practices. There is complexity and there is mess. Overall, though, it seems to be inescapable that political communication in Britain and the United States is more polycentric than during the period of mass communication that dominated the twentieth century. Though there are important (and arguably growing) constraints on the power of non-elites, and the logics of older media continue to be powerful in shaping politics, the opportunities for ordinary citizens to use media to influence the form and content of public discourse are, on balance, greater than they were during the stultifying duopoly of broadcasting and newspaper logics.