The rest of this book examines in more detail a range of examples of hybridity in flow in the contemporary media systems of Britain and the United States. I begin in the next chapter with an interpretation of some of the momentous events surrounding the British general election of 2010.
4
The Political Information Cycle
The means of communication which are the signs of the highest forms of civilization are the most perfect by aid of electricity simply because they are instantaneous. There is no competition against instantaneousness.
—Erastus Wiman, President of the Great Northwestern Telegraph Company of Canada, 18991
During the weekend beginning Friday February 19, 2010, just weeks before the start of the 2010 British general election campaign, Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown became the subject of an extraordinary media spectacle. Quickly labeled “bullygate,” the crisis was sparked by revelations in a then-unpublished book by Andrew Rawnsley, one of Britain’s foremost political journalists (Rawnsley, 2010a). Though some of Rawnsley’s book had been leaked to the press three weeks earlier, and leaked once more during the afternoon of Saturday, February 20, extended extracts were printed in the paper edition of the Observer, one of Britain’s oldest and most respected newspapers, as part of its “relaunch” edition on Sunday, February 21. Coming a week before Rawnsley’s book’s official publication date, these extracts were timed for maximum impact. They centered on the prime minister’s alleged psychological and physical mistreatment of colleagues working inside his office in Number 10, Downing Street.
Bullygate was potentially the most damaging political development of the entire Brown premiership, not only due to its timing—on the verge of a closely fought general election—but also due to its shocking and personalized nature. These were potentially some of the most damaging allegations ever to be made concerning the personal conduct of a sitting British prime minister. The Bullygate affair became a national and international news phenomenon, dominating the headlines in all British news media, as well as those on CNN, Fox, ABC, and CBS news in the U.S., and thousands of outlets across the globe.
But during the course of that weekend beginning February 20, and into the early part of the following week, the Bullygate affair took several momentous twists and turns. New players entered the fray, most notably a body known as the National Bullying Helpline, whose director made the extraordinary claim that her organization had received phone calls from staff inside Number 10 Downing Street. This information created a powerful new frame during the middle of the crisis. As the story evolved, events were decisively shaped by mediated interactions among politicians, nonprofit group leaders, professional journalists, bloggers, and citizen activists organized on Twitter. What were seemingly clear-cut revelations published in a national newspaper became the subject of fierce contestation, involving competition, conflict, and partisanship, but also processes of interdependence, among a wide range of actors and in a wide range of media settings. Over the course of a few days, doubts about the veracity of the bullying revelations resulted in the collapse of the story.
Just a few weeks later, on April 15, 2010, Britain held its first ever live televised prime ministerial debate. Arguably the most important single development in the mediation of British politics since the beginning of television election coverage in 1959, the debate came during one of the most intriguing and closely fought general election campaigns in living memory. The debate—the first of three, though none of the others had its dramatic impact—altered the course of the election, propelling the third-party Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg into the media spotlight as his party rose in the opinion polls immediately following his “winning” performance. News and commentary on the three prime ministerial candidates’ performances was orchestrated, produced, co-produced, packaged, and consumed across online, newspaper, and broadcast media in real time during the event, but this news and commentary was also integrated into later stages of the media coverage. News frames developed in real-time interactions were mobilized and augmented and eventually became the subject of fierce contestation between the right-wing press and centrist and left-of-center online activists organized on Twitter and Facebook. At the epicenter of this hybrid media storm was a large ad hoc Facebook group established spontaneously by political activists in support of Clegg after the debate performance, and a right-wing newspaper backlash, including a supposed investigative scoop by the Conservative-supporting Daily Telegraph which claimed that Clegg had received party donations from three businessmen directly into his personal bank account. The story was denied by Clegg, but more importantly it quickly became the focus of a widespread online flash campaign that eventually forced the Telegraph’s deputy editor to issue a defense on the paper’s blog within a matter of hours of the article being published. Shortly afterward, in a manner similar to the Bullygate story of a few weeks earlier, the story of Clegg’s expenses collapsed.
These two episodes—Bullygate and Britain’s first prime ministerial debate—provide compelling windows on Britain’s hybrid media system. This chapter provides an analysis of how these episodes were mediated. It is based in large part upon what we might term “live ethnography”: close, real-time, observation and logging of a wide range of newspaper, broadcast, and online material, including citizen opinion expressed and coordinated through online social network sites (for a discussion of the emerging practice of “live” research see Elmer, 2012). In the case of Bullygate, this observation took place as the story broke, evolved, and faded, over an explosive five-day period in late February 2010. In the case of the prime ministerial debate, the fieldwork covered the processes of mediation before, during, and shortly after the main event itself, but extended through the week that followed—a period dominated by the uncertainty and flux caused by Clegg’s instant media breakthrough. Throughout, I provide a detailed narrative reconstruction of the key interactions among politicians, broadcasters, newspapers, and key online media actors.
This chapter provides evidence of the increasingly hybrid nature of political news production today. But it extends the analysis and sources of evidence away from the organizational settings that are so often typically seen as the loci of news making. The chapter identifies subtle but important shifts in the balance of power shaping this field. A crucial arena in which this balance of power now plays out is what I call the “political information cycle.” Political information cycles are becoming the systemic norm for the mediation of important political events. They are an essential element of the hybrid media system.
From the News Cycle to the Political Information Cycle
Originally, “news cycle” simply meant the predictable daily period between the latest and the next issue of a newspaper; a time for gathering, writing, editing, compiling, selecting, and presenting new material or new developments related to recent coverage. However, “news cycle” has since become a concept widely used but seldom theorized, despite the fact that much of the influential early work on the sociology of news production in newspaper and broadcasting implicitly or explicitly describes cyclical routines and the importance of time (see for example Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Gans, 1979; Golding & Elliott, 1979; Molotch & Lester, 1974; Roshco, 1975; Schlesinger, 1978; Tuchman, 1978). Philip Schlesinger, writing of how “time concepts are embedded in their production routines,” even went so far as to dub the news media a “time-machine” (1977: 336).
These pioneer studies of news production revealed much about immediacy, timeliness, the professionalized mastery of deadlines, and competition between outlets over sources and angles. But none could have foreseen the extent to which journalism was transformed during the 1990s and 2000s. The emergence of “rolling” broadcast coverage and the internet have generated heated discussion of the so-called “24-hour news cycle.” New technologies—satellites, e-mail, digital content management systems, for example—have led to the compression of news time, and single daily news cycles are becoming rarer. There has
been a growing strategic awareness among politicians that timely intervention during certain stages in the gathering and production of news is more likely to produce favorable outcomes (see, for example Barnett & Gaber, 2001; Sellers, 2010; S. Young, 2009) and the growing interpenetration of political and journalistic elite practice has been driven by the temporal rhythms of radio and television (Barnett & Gaber, 2001: 42–46). But while the news cycle has been the subject of some major critical studies (Davies, 2008; Kovach & Rosenstiel, 1999; Rosenberg & Feldman, 2008), it is more common to see the “24-hour” prefix briefly mentioned only in passing, as a kind of shorthand in normative analyses of the harmful effects of journalists’ clamor to be first to the story, the incessant manufacturing of fresh angles to prevent things turning “stale,” and the monitoring and “churning” of other outlets’ content or PR releases in a process said to lead to “content homogeneity” and poorly sourced stories (A. Bell, 1995; Boczkowski & De Santos, 2007; Davies, 2008; Garcia Aviles, et al., 2004; Jones, 2009; Klinenberg, 2005; Kovach & Rosenstiel, 1999; Patterson, 1998; Redden & Witshge, 2010).
Irrespective of their approach, however, those who have explored the news cycle have hitherto been united by the fundamental assumption that the construction of political news is a tightly controlled game involving the interactions and interventions of a small number of elites: politicians, officials, communications staff, professional news workers, and, in a small minority of recent studies, elite bloggers (Barnett & Gaber, 2001; Callaghan & Schnell, 2001; Davies, 2008; R. Davis, 2009; Gans, 1979: 116–146; Golding & Elliott, 1979; Messner & DiStaso, 2008; Molotch & Lester, 1974; Patterson, 1998; Roshco, 1975; Schlesinger, 1977, 1978; Sellers, 2010; Stanyer, 2001; Tuchman, 1978; S. Young, 2009). While these elite-driven aspects of political communication are still very much in evidence, I want to suggest that recent shifts require a reinterpretation of the importance of time, timeliness, and cyclical processes in the power relations shaping news production. Ultimately, however, this may require a different set of assumptions and observations about how news is now made.
Political information cycles possess certain features that distinguish them from “news cycles.” They are complex assemblages in which the logics—the technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms—of supposedly “new” online media are hybridized with those of supposedly “old” broadcast and newspaper media. This hybridization process shapes power relations among actors and ultimately affects the flows and meanings of news. The concept of assemblage, as I use it here, builds upon and extends some of the ways in which it has been employed in recent studies of political campaigning and mobilization. In his ethnographic study of congressional campaigning, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen writes of how the concept of assemblages allows us to see a campaign’s “relational character; and to grasp how interdependent, loosely coupled elements develop the capacity to pursue personalized political communication together, all the time retaining their distinct character as they eschew formal organization and fail to solidify into anything one would recognize as a single entity or institution” (R. K. Nielsen, 2012: 28). Similarly, C. W. Anderson’s book on the evolution of metropolitan journalism in the United States explores how digital technologies have facilitated assemblages combining long-standing local news organizations and other areas of journalism-like practice, such as neighborhood blogs, citizen media associations, local charitable bodies, and activists (C. W. Anderson, 2013).
The idea of assemblage originates in the social theory of Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari. Delueze and Guattari argued that assemblages can be understood as the ever-evolving confluential expressions of specific “machinic” forces of many varying kinds, such as, for example, technologies, language, architecture, rituals, flows of information, and even bodily functions (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). This perspective has also been influential for actor–network theory’s idea of hybrid networks, which I discussed in chapter 1. But my thinking here owes more to the sense in which the concept of assemblage has been employed by Manuel DeLanda, who argues for the broad value of the idea for the social sciences. Of key importance is the assumption that there are permeable boundaries between different modular units of any given collective endeavor, and the meaning and force of any individual modular unit—whether it be a technology, a frame, a message, and so on—of that endeavor can only be understood in terms of its relations with other modular units. As DeLanda writes: “We can distinguish … the properties defining a given entity from its capacities to interact with other entities … These relations imply, first of all, that a component part of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different.” Assemblages, then, are “wholes characterized by relations of exteriority” (DeLanda, 2006: 10; emphasis in original). Deleuze and Guattari provide the example of books, which only function as “books” through their relationship with a whole range of other ideas, technologies, cultural forms, and collectivities of social actors. It is a book’s relations of exteriority that defines its function (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004: 4). In a similar vein, William Bogard has written that “assemblages are multiplicities of interfaces” (2009: 17). I understand assemblage to be simultaneously a process and an event. As this chapter shows, assemblages are composed of multiple, loosely coupled individuals, groups, sites, and temporal instances of interaction involving diverse yet highly interdependent news creators and media technologies that plug and unplug themselves from the news-making process, often in real time.
Certain points flow from this conceptualization. Political information cycles may involve greater numbers and a more diverse range of actors and interactions than news cycles as they are traditionally understood. They are not simply about an acceleration of pace nor merely the reduction of time devoted to an issue, though these facets are certainly evident. Rather, they are characterized by more complex temporal structures. They include many non-elite participants, most of whom now interact exclusively online in order to advance or contest specific news frames or even entire stories, sometimes in real-time exchanges but also during subsequent stages of the cycle of news that follows a major political event or the breaking of a story. As I argued in chapter 2 and have previously noted in relation to digital media and mobilization (Chadwick, 2007), the presence of vast searchable online archives of news content means that stories or fragments of stories can lay dormant for weeks or even months before they erupt and are integrated into the cycle. The sources of these pieces of information may be very diverse.
Broadcasters and newspapers now integrate non-elite actions and information from the online realm into their own production practices and routines. Using digital tools, non-elite activists may sometimes successfully contest television and press coverage of politics. The more that professional broadcast and newspaper media actors use digital services like Twitter and Facebook, the more likely it is that broadcast and newspaper media will become open to influence by activists who use those same tools. Yet television and newspaper journalists also seek to be selective in their own coverage, as they try to outperform new media actors in incessant and often real-time power struggles characterized by competition and conflict, but also negotiation and interdependence. In contrast with the older idea of the news cycle, much of this now takes place in public or semi-public online environments.
Political information cycles work on the basis of cross-platform iteration and recursion. This serves to loosen the grip of journalistic and political elites through the creation of fluid opportunity structures with greater scope for timely intervention by online citizen activists. Some of these timely online interventions are at the individual-to-individual level and have often fallen beneath the radar of news studies, in both older and newer media environments. The combination of news professionals’ dominance and the integration of non-elite actors in the construction and contestation of news at multiple points in a political information cycle’s lifespan are important characteristics of contemporary p
olitical communication. The overall aim here is to explore the ongoing interactions between older and newer media logics, how these interactions shape an important news event over the periods of time that come before and after the event itself, and how framings and interpretations are created, and later reinforced or contested, in intra-elite and/or elite-activist news-making assemblages.
#Bullygate
The Bullygate political information cycle effectively began with what is now a familiar dynamic in the political news environment: the publication of leaked content from a “tell-all” book (Rawnsley, 2010a) on the front page of the Mail on Sunday on January 31, 2010, three weeks before the Observer published its extended extracts on Sunday, February 21, and four weeks before the book’s official publication date of March 12. The Mail’s article reported that the Rawnsley book contained three specific claims about the prime minister’s behavior toward his staff in Number 10. These were that Brown: “Hit a senior aide who got in the way as he rushed to a reception at No10”; “physically pulled a secretary out of her chair as he dictated a memo to her”; and “hurled foul-mouthed abuse at two aides in his hotel room in America in a state of semi-undress after reports that he had been snubbed by President Obama” (Walters, 2010a). Despite its appearance on the front page of the Mail’s paper edition, the story’s reception is best described as muted. The main Conservative Party supporting blog, Conservative Home, linked to the piece, and Britain’s most-read political blog, the right-wing libertarian Guido Fawkes, published a brief post (Fawkes, 2010; Montgomerie, 2010c), but the story effectively lay dormant until Saturday, February 20.
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