This goes beyond the simple fact that citizens are now able to express themselves online in public forums. In the hybrid media system, older media’s systemic integration and their expectation of citizen expression often make the difference. Internet-driven norms of networking, flexibility, spontaneity, and ad hoc organizing have started to diffuse into our politics and media, and these norms are generating new expectations about what counts as effective and worthwhile political action. Changing practices in the world of older media, particularly television, increasingly mesh with these online norms. Nobody should pretend that these behaviors are equally distributed; it is primarily political activists and the politically interested who are able to make the difference with newer media and/or inventive combinations of older and newer media.
Equally, nobody should pretend that this transition comes without costs. As we saw in chapter 10, the 2016 U.S. campaign brought into focus developments that were dysfunctional for the democratic formation of public opinion: fake news, debate bots, and state-sponsored hacks and leaks. As we move forward, these and other developments are likely to lead to calls for a return to the controlled certainties and elite gatekeeping of the broadcast era. Explaining the impact on public opinion of dysfunctional hybridity and the growth of megaplatforms—Facebook and Google in particular—while placing such developments in the context of the genuinely positive democratizing effects of digital media uses will be a major challenge for researchers over the coming years. One line of inquiry will involve asking if the commercial megaplatforms that now dominate so much of the online realm should be subject to more stringent controls, in much the same way that companies whose byproduct is environmental pollution are rightly subject to pressure from mobilized citizens and regulation by government.
But one thing seems certain: there is no going back. The logics of digital media have been genuinely disruptive, even though that disruption has been modulated by the logics of older media, and the hybrid media system has unleashed practices that undermine democratic norms.
Many of the shifts in political life that have occurred since the 1950s were based upon an acceptance of the power of the broadcasting-newspaper duopoly. During the heyday of the broadcast era from the 1960s to the 1990s, this preeminence hardened into an increasing self-confidence and self-awareness, particularly among television media, that they were revealing to publics what was self-evidently important about politics. But the duopoly’s preeminence has now become partially undermined, as we have seen throughout this book. Indeed, when those associated with older media seek to co-opt the practices of newer media, they always face the risk that they steadily sow the seeds of their own destruction by granting legitimacy to newer media logics. In some respects, this was the lesson of Trump and 2016. The challenge now is to reclaim and promote the internet’s long-established traditions of openness, voluntarism, and democratic engagement, as a means of combating the harmful effects of the growth of megaplatforms. But in a suitably hybrid response, it is also time to bolster professional media organizations, so that they are better able to uphold democratic norms and avoid becoming dependent upon platforms for the distribution of news. At the same time, we must also recognize that social media have been hugely important in the organization of pro-democratic citizen engagement.
The complex interactions among media logics matter more now than the preeminence of a single media logic. Political communication has entered a new, more complex, and unsettled era, in which power has become more relational, fragmented, plural, and dispersed. The hybrid media system exhibits not only chaos, nonlinearity, and disintegration, but also surprising new patterns of integration. This is the “particulate” idea of hybridity that I introduced in chapter 1. Older and newer media logics sometimes flow independently, but increasingly flow together, creating arrangements for the conduct of political communication that are, on balance, more expansive and inclusive than those that prevailed during the twentieth century.
Interviews
Interviewees disguised by pseudonyms requested anonymity. The gender of anonymous interviewees should not be implied from their pseudonyms.
1. Adam Bienkov, blogger at Tory Troll, March 2010.
2. “John,” senior official, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, April 2010.
3. “Kate,” former official, the Prime Minister’s Office, April 2010.
4. Ed Richards, Chief Executive, Office of Communications (OFCOM), April 2010.
5. “Frank,” journalist, the Independent, April 2010.
6. Stephen Abell, Director of the Press Complaints Commission, April 2010.
7. James Crabtree, senior editor, Prospect magazine, April 2010.
8. “Oliver,” former official, Cabinet Office, April 2010.
9. Craig Elder, Conservative Party communications team, May 2010.
10. Will Straw, founding editor of the Left Foot Forward blog, May 2010.
11. “Bill,” senior official, Cabinet Office, May 2010.
12. Staff, 38 Degrees (group discussion), May 2010.
13. Hannah Lownsbrough, Campaigns Director, 38 Degrees, May 2010.
14. Johnny Chatterton, Digital Campaigns Manager, 38 Degrees, May 2010.
15. David Babbs, Executive Director, 38 Degrees, May 2010.
16. “Mike,” director of the London office of an international public relations agency, June 2010.
17. “Jean,” former trade union press officer, June 2010.
18. Alice Tarleton, journalist, Channel 4 News, June 2010.
19. “Neil,” former official, the Prime Minister’s Office, June 2010.
20. “Cynthia,” former campaign official, the Labour Party, June 2010.
21. “Mary,” senior campaign official, the Labour Party, June 2010.
22. “Jay,” former senior official, OFCOM, July 2010.
23. “Tony,” former senior executive, ITN, July 2010.
24. “Karen,” former editor, Channel 4 News, July 2010.
25. David Stringer, Westminster Correspondent, the Associated Press, October 2010.
26. “David,” senior campaign official, the Labour Party, January 2011.
27. Kevin Marsh, former editor, BBC Radio 4 Today program, June 2011.
28. “Jim,” former senior journalist, BBC News, June 2011.
29. James Ball, journalist, investigations team, the Guardian, September 2011.
30. “Carol,” an editor at the Guardian, September 2011.
31. Laura Kuenssberg, former Chief Political Correspondent, BBC News; Business Editor, ITV News, January 2012.
Notes
Introduction
1. For a full list of interviews, see List of Interviews at the end of this volume.
Chapter 2
1. Marvin (1988: 3).
2. Bolter and Grusin (1999: 271).
3. McLuhan (1964: 8).
Chapter 3
1. This section on Britain draws in part upon a paper I co-authored with James Stanyer, and which we presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in August 2010 (Chadwick & Stanyer, 2010).
Chapter 4
1. Quoted in Marvin (1988: 193).
2. A note about method. Studying political information cycles presents a significant challenge to researchers. Newspaper journalists now frequently post multiple updates to stories throughout the day and night, and news sites have widely varying archive policies. The technological limitations of journalists’ content management systems, as well as editorial policy, determine whether and how updates, additions, headline alterations, and picture replacements are signaled to readers. Most blogs and a minority of mainstream news outlets, such as the Guardian and the Financial Times, are transparent about an article’s provenance. However, practices vary widely, and it is common to see outdated time stamps, the incremental addition of paragraphs at the top or bottom of stories, and headline and URL changes to reflect new angles as they emerge. Sometimes entire stories will simply be overwritten, even th
ough the original hyperlink will be retained. All of these can occur without readers being explicitly notified.
Several “forensic” strategies were used to overcome these problems. In addition to monitoring key political blogs and the main national news outlets’ websites, the free and publicly available Google Reader was used to monitor the RSS feeds and the timings of article releases from February 20 to February 25, 2010, for the following outlets: BBC News (Front Page feed), Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Mail on Sunday, News of the World, Observer, Sun, Sunday Express, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, and the Times. Links were followed back to newspaper websites to check for article modifications, updates, and deletions. Google Reader consists of an effectively unlimited archive of every RSS feed, dating back to when a single user first added it to Google’s database. Evernote, free and publicly available software, was used to store selected newspaper articles (see http://www.evernote.com).
The broadcast media archiving service, Box of Broadcasts, was used to store content from Channel 4 News, BBC News at Ten, the BBC 24-Hour News Channel, and ITV News, enabling the analysis of pivotal moments during the flow of events on February 20, 21, and 22. This service is available to member institutions of the British Universities Film and Video Council (see http://bobnational.net). Where they exist, links to public transcripts of television and radio shows have been provided.
The Twitter search function at http://search.twitter.com was monitored in real time, using a number of queries, such as “national bullying helpline,” “#rawnsleyrot,” and “#bullygate.” From when the Twitter search service began and the time of the fieldwork, Twitter only made public the results from approximately three weeks prior to running a query, and at the time of the fieldwork no robust and publicly available means of automatically extracting and archiving individual Twitter updates existed. To circumvent these limitations, screen outputs of selected Twitter searches were captured in real time and stored in Evernote. Readers may email the author for a link to this online archive. In April 2010, after the initial fieldwork was conducted, Google launched its Google Replay Search, which later became Google Real-Time Search but was withdrawn in July 2011. This enabled searches of the Twitter archive going back to early February 2010 and it presented the results in a timeline format, though it cannot automatically account for changes to the names of individual Twitter accounts; these must be followed up manually. Where possible, the Google Replay Search service was used to track and present publicly available links to key Twitter updates. Twitter updates are reproduced throughout in their original, often ungrammatical and incorrectly punctuated form.
Chapter 5
1. Rusbridger (2011).
2. Quoted in Khatchadourian (2010).
3. Leigh & Harding (2011: Ch. 11, para. 19).
4. Collateral Murder was published in two versions—a seventeen-minute edited package uploaded to YouTube and released to the press, complete with guidance notes, and a thirty-nine-minute “full-version.” The video footage, taken from the on-board camera of a U.S. Apache helicopter, captured that aircraft’s role in events during a July 2007 attack on a small group of people in a residential area of Baghdad. Two of these people were armed with rifles; one was carrying a camera lens that appears to have been mistaken for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Two Reuters journalists, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noo-Eldeen, were killed during the attack—Chmagh as he sought to crawl from danger into a van that arrived to rescue the wounded following the first phase of the attack. Ten others lost their lives, and two young children, who were passengers in the van, were badly wounded and later taken to a hospital. After the event, in a bid to find out what had happened to their staff and to learn more about the extent to which the Apache helicopter had been under threat, Reuters asked the U.S. military to release the video. This was repeatedly refused. Reuters staff were eventually permitted to watch an edited version of the footage, but this omitted the crucial second phase of the attack when the van containing the children, which was trying to evacuate the wounded, was destroyed by gunfire.
Chapter 6
1. M. Powell (2008).
2. Plouffe (2010: 277).
Chapter 8
1. See List of Interviews. Several of these interviews were conducted on the basis that a subject’s remarks could be attributed. Several were conducted on the understanding that most of the remarks were attributable but others were not. The rest were conducted on a completely confidential basis and on condition that I would preserve the subject’s anonymity at all times. Where I cannot name an individual due to a confidentiality agreement, I use basic terms to convey a sense of that person’s professional role and typical working practices.
Chapter 9
1. Interview 21, June 2010.
2. See List of Interviews.
Chapter 10
1. Two Wikipedia entries provide robustly evidenced accounts of the scale of the protests, including a comprehensive list of all of the locations. See “2017 Women’s March,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Women's_March and “List of 2017 Women’s March locations, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2017_Women's_March_locations. Retrieved January 27, 2017.
2. A database of 560 false claims Trump made during the campaign was compiled by the Toronto Star’s Washington Bureau chief, Daniel Dale. See https://www.thestar.com/news/world/uselection/2016/11/04/donald-trump-the-unauthorized-database-of-false-things.html#analysis. Retrieved March 13, 2017. A database of “The 319 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter” was compiled by New York Times reporters Jasmine C. Lee and Kevin Quealy. See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html. Retrieved March 13, 2017.
3. Ibid.
4. As of February 2017, Trumpshow.info had been hacked and defaced by Anonymous, the online activist network. For a discussion of Anonymous, see chapter 5.
5. See Buzzfeed reporter Craig Silverman’s online spreadsheet listing the top fifty fake news articles from 2016 at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sTkRkHLvZp9XlJOynYMXGslKY9fuB_e-2mrxqgLwvZY/edit#gid=652144590. Retrieved March 9, 2017.
6. The first six paragraphs of this section draw on part of a study I co-authored with Ben O’Loughlin and Cristian Vaccari (Chadwick, et al., 2017).
7. The Wikipedia entries for “WikiLeaks,” “2016 Democratic National Committee email leak,” and “Podesta emails” are a well-documented factual account of the 2016 hacks and leaks.
Conclusion
1. The Waterboys, “This Is the Sea.” Chrysalis Records, 1985.
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