In the build-up to its publication of the Rawnsley extracts on Sunday February 21, the Observer was in the process of a widely advertised “relaunch” in a bid to reverse the long-term decline in its readership. This was, therefore, partly a matter of intermedia competition between the paper and its rivals among the Sunday press. The Rawnsley extracts were an opportunity to increase exposure and boost readership for the paper’s first relaunched edition. Indeed, this strategy was reflected in the paper’s deliberate exclusion of the extracts from its free online edition until two days after they had appeared in the printed edition, though, as we shall see, due to the widespread recycling of the story online across all outlets, this tactic failed.
The British media’s regular politics, commentary, and opinion cycle now reaches a crescendo with the weekend newspapers and the Sunday political television shows. Sunday newspapers feature the heavyweight commentary and columnist content in British political news. Yet “the Sundays” are now essentially published well in advance because online editions are released to the web throughout Saturday evenings. As a result, the Sundays now play an increasingly important role in defining the news agenda for the equally influential Sunday morning political television, particularly the BBC’s 9:00 a.m. Andrew Marr show, but also Adam Boulton’s 11:30 a.m. show on Sky News, and the BBC’s midday Politics Show.
Aware that the bullying revelations were about to be published, in the run-up to the weekend beginning February 19, the Labour government took three steps to preempt what would likely become the dominant news agenda. First, a week earlier, Brown appeared in an extended and highly personalized interview on the popular Piers Morgan’s Life Stories television chat show on ITV. This appearance was widely regarded as part of a strategy to “humanize” the prime minister in the wake of criticisms that he had kept too much of his private life hidden and lacked a “common touch” among the electorate. Second, Brown granted an exclusive in-depth interview to Brian Brady, the Independent on Sunday’s Whitehall Editor and a long-standing reporter on the insider politics of the Labour Party. The interview, which was broadly favorable to the prime minister and timed to coincide with the publication of the Observer’s extracts, was used by Brown to deny the allegations that he mistreated his staff. Third, Brown attended a Labour Party rally at the University of Warwick—one of several such pre-election events—at which he gave a headline-grabbing speech in front of professional reporters from both broadcasting and newspapers, as part of the official launch of Labour’s election theme: “a future fair for all.”
Soon after the Warwick speech had ended (at around midday Saturday) Brown participated in an exclusive recorded interview with the well-known Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy, as part of a package for that evening’s television news bulletin to be aired at 7:10 p.m. Extraordinarily, Guru-Murthy quizzed the prime minister on whether he “hit” his staff. Brown strongly denied this, saying: “I have never hit anyone in my life” (Channel 4 News, 2010b). As soon as the interview was completed, Oliver King, a program editor for Channel 4 News, posted a message to his Twitter account stating that his channel had secured the “only network TV interview” with the prime minister that day, and that it would be shown on television that evening (King, 2010). The interview was in fact uploaded to the Channel 4 News website at 4:00 p.m., some three hours before the interview was actually broadcast on television (Channel 4 News, 2010d). The video’s publication was accompanied by a Twitter update linking to the file from Ed Fraser, another program editor at Channel 4 News (Fraser, 2010a). The story of the prime minister’s first public refutation of the bullying allegations therefore actually broke online, three hours before the “exclusive” “broke” on television, and long before the Sunday’s Observer went to press.
Within twenty minutes of the appearance of the Channel 4 video online on the Saturday afternoon, three essentially identical wire stories emerged on the websites of the Daily Mirror, the Daily Star, and the Daily Express. These repeated the allegations that had been leaked in the Daily Mail at the end of January, but added Brown’s refutation from the Channel 4 interview from earlier that day (Daily Express, 2010; Daily Mirror, 2010a; Daily Star, 2010c). Thus, by the time Guru-Murthy’s exchange with the prime minister was broadcast on Channel 4’s early evening news bulletin (Channel 4 News, 2010b), the Bullygate story’s momentum had already started to build, and it was spurred on by the fresh angle provided by Brown’s decision to address the allegations head-on. The Channel 4 interview with Brown continued to provide fodder for other journalists in the run-up to the publication of the online editions of the Sunday newspapers at midnight (see for example News of the World, 2010).
But long before the Sundays appeared, further important details of the Observer’s extracts started to emerge on Twitter and blogs. Ed Fraser of Channel 4 News posted a message at 9:33 p.m. stating that Brown allegedly received an “unprecedented reprimand” for his behavior from the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, Sir Gus O’Donnell (Fraser, 2010b). This information was not yet in the public domain. Fraser had access to a “pre-release” of the Observer extracts and had decided to post this new information to Twitter—during a period when it was likely to have the greatest impact, and certainly before the Observer was publicly available (Fraser, 2010c). Within ten minutes, Fraser’s tweet had been widely recirculated (retweeted) and had been linked to from the popular Conservative Home blog (Montgomerie, 2010a). A further potentially damaging piece of information—that Britain’s most senior civil servant had allegedly conducted an internal investigation into Brown’s behavior—broke on Twitter and was now driving the story, forcing Downing Street and the Cabinet Office to issue a statement of denial to journalists at 10:27 p.m. (The statement was not published: its precise timing was revealed by the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, on BBC television’s Ten O’Clock News on Monday February 22, 2010).
At this point, interactions on Twitter began to assume a much greater importance in the flows of information. At 11:14 p.m., Labour’s new media spokesperson, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bristol East, Kerry McCarthy, started to use her Twitter updates to post the hashtag “#rawnsleyrot.” Her aim was to popularize the tag as a means of discrediting the bullying allegations before they were published (McCarthy, 2010b). At that stage, McCarthy was one of the most popular MPs on the social network service, with more than 6000 followers (as this goes to press she has 14,500 followers). Despite it being close to midnight on a Saturday evening, the #rawnsleyrot hashtag was quickly circulated among her followers.
As is now the norm among the British press, the broadsheet Sunday newspapers published their full online editions between midnight on Saturday and 3:00 a.m. on Sunday, several hours before the printed editions were widely available across the country. The Observer carried a brief “teaser” as the lead item on its website, in the hope that readers wanting more would buy the relaunched paper edition at the newsstands, but there was sufficient detail in these excerpts for the public to be aware of the story’s sensational nature. The article contained several key pieces of information. Aside from the by-now public allegation that Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell had allegedly investigated the prime minister’s behavior and had warned him to change his approach, the article chronicled a series of other alleged episodes. These included when an aide allegedly feared that Brown was about to “hit him in the face”; when Brown allegedly grabbed Gavin Kelly, his deputy chief of staff, by his jacket and “snarled” into his face; and when Brown allegedly “roughly shoved aside” and swore at Stewart Wood, a senior adviser on foreign affairs (Helm & Asthana, 2010a). The broadly centrist Independent on Sunday ran its Brian Brady interview featuring Brown denying the allegations. The Conservative-supporting Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph ran articles that had been updated at the last minute to include the details of the alleged mistreatment, Brown’s Channel 4 interview from Saturday afternoon (the Telegraph simply embedded Channel 4’s video), and Downing S
treet’s late-night statement of denial (Oakeshott, 2010; Sunday Telegraph, 2010c).
On Sunday morning a torrent of media coverage appeared, as news outlets scrambled to cover the bullying revelations for fear of missing the weekend’s main story. Broadcast news plugged into the emerging news-making assemblage. At 9:41 a.m., in an attempt to shape the news for the remainder of the day, senior government figure Lord Mandelson, then minister for business and innovation and a key architect of the Labour Party’s media strategy since the 1980s, appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show to defend the prime minister and to deny the bullying allegations. Mandelson’s argument was that the Observer’s relaunch and the imminent publication of Rawnsley’s book had created perfect publicity opportunities for both author and newspaper, and that the story was essentially an overblown stunt (BBC, 2010a). This appearance had an immediate impact on the political information cycle. Within a couple of hours, the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday, the Sunday Mirror, the Sun, and the Sunday Times had all reported Lord Mandelson’s television intervention. Mandelson’s defense was in turn reinforced by the appearances of Harriet Harman, then deputy leader of the Labour Party, on Sky News’s Sunday Live with Adam Boulton at 11:30 a.m., as well as the appearance of the then home secretary, Alan Johnson, alongside Andrew Rawnsley, on the BBC’s midday Politics Show (BBC, 2010c; Churcher, 2010; Coates, 2010b; Sky News; Sun, 2010; Sunday Telegraph, 2010d). Both Harman and Johnson, as one would expect of cabinet colleagues, made strong statements in support of the prime minister. The dominant frame was therefore shifting away from Brown’s personal denials and toward the supportive messages of the cabinet. The BBC’s most senior political journalist, political editor Nick Robinson, posted what can best be described as a cautious article to his blog at 12:30 p.m., shortly after Johnson and Rawnsley had left the BBC’s television studios. In the absence of new information, Robinson effectively hedged his bets: “what is not in dispute here is the description of how the PM behaves,” he wrote, but he also went on to state that “we don’t and may never know” if there was an internal investigation into Brown’s behavior (Robinson, 2010a). Though things were finely balanced, the government and its supporters were successfully contesting the story. Even though by this stage it was evident that this major political news, potentially the biggest for years, was receiving saturation coverage across all platforms, including the 24-hour television stations, BBC News and Sky News, it still pivoted on who was more believable: Rawnsley or Brown and the government. This uncertainty was reflected in the coverage during the Sunday afternoon, as several more newspaper articles reported the allegations and Lord Mandelson’s refutations from the early morning Andrew Marr show (Barker, 2010; Brogan, 2010). In short, by Sunday afternoon, the story appeared to be fizzling out.
ENTER THE “NATIONAL BULLYING HELPLINE”
It was at this point that the political information cycle took a remarkable twist, as interactions in the online and broadcasting modules of the assemblage drove the news production process.
Following MP Kerry McCarthy’s late-night instigation of the #rawnsleyrot hashtag campaign on Twitter, an online community consisting of political activists eager to defend or attack the Observer’s revelations had quickly emerged on Twitter. They used a variety of hashtags, including #rawnsleyrot, #bullygate, and #rawnsleyright, among others. Elite bloggers had also joined the fray. For example, Conservative supporters Iain Dale and Tim Montgomerie continued to update their blogs and link to new developments via Twitter throughout the Sunday afternoon (Conservative Home, 2010b). Many professional journalists were also engaged in the Twitter conversation, scanning updates in the hunt for tip-offs in advance of the Sunday evening television news bulletins.
But at 4:52 p.m., Lucy Manning, ITV News’ television political correspondent, posted the following to Twitter: “National Bullying Helpline tells ITV News they have had several calls from staff at Downing Street complaining about bullying culture” (Manning, 2010). This was the first time this explosive new information was made public. Though the BBC would later claim that it broke the story on television (BBC News, 2010c), if breaking a story means being the first to make it public, it was actually Manning who broke the National Bullying Helpline story—on Twitter. Fifty-six seconds after Manning’s tweet, the first person to retweet her message was none other than the tell-all book’s author, Andrew Rawnsley (Rawnsley, 2010b). Within thirty minutes, Manning’s tweet had been retweeted by twenty-eight other Twitter users. These included: Conservative Party Chairman Eric Pickles, Conservative MP David Jones, and Conservative blogger Iain Dale. But the remainder were, to judge by their Twitter profiles, a mixture of journalists, local political activists, bloggers, and the politically interested from across Britain, all united by the fact that they followed the journalist Lucy Manning on Twitter (Google Replay Search, 2010b). Within an hour, sixty Twitter users had issued updates referring to the National Bullying Helpline. Although data on the number of followers each of these Twitter users had at the time are unavailable, it is safe to assume that, while bearing in mind that the data are skewed by individuals with large followings (Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy then had more than twenty thousand) the number of Twitter users potentially exposed to this information, before it came anywhere near a rolling news television screen, ran into the hundreds of thousands. Moreover, as we shall see, the interactions between professional journalists and these various groups of online “amateurs” went on to have a decisive impact on events.
The National Bullying Helpline information was of crucial importance. No longer was it simply a case of Brown’s and the government’s word against Rawnsley’s. Now, there appeared to be an impeccably independent third party, a charitable trust working for a good cause, which it was presumed had kept a log of telephone calls that could be traced to Number 10. This had all the makings of a sensational development in the story.
The majority of the sixty Twitter users who engaged with ITV journalist Lucy Manning’s message during that first hour after she broke the helpline news simply retweeted her message. However, as the conversation developed, several individuals began to add their own information and comments. At 5:27 p.m., Twitter user Sarah Nuttall, who is not a journalist but a copywriter based in Goole, East Yorkshire, commented: “Oh dear & the Patron of the National Bullying Helpline is …. wait for it …. Ann Widdecombe. Be afraid. Be very afraid Mr Brown!” (Nuttall, 2010). Ann Widdecombe was at that time a well-known Conservative MP (she retired her seat in 2010), and a television presenter, author, and former Home Office minister. Sarah Nuttall’s message was quickly retweeted by several others, including, at 5:30 p.m., Carole Benson, a mature student of history at Teesside University in the northeast of England. Nine minutes after Benson’s message, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, the Channel 4 News television presenter, intervened on Twitter: “been looking into ‘National Bullying Helpline’ after the Downing Street claim. they have 2 Tory Patrons and Cameron quote on website,” he said (Guru-Murthy, 2010).
On the surface, these events appear to be unrelated. What do a copywriter from East Yorkshire, a student from Teesside, and a senior journalist from Channel 4 News have in common? The answer is this: Sarah Nuttall was the first to point out that the National Bullying Helpline seemingly had links with the Conservative Party. Carole Benson retweeted Nuttall’s message. Krishnan Guru-Murthy followed Carole Benson on Twitter and read her update (Doesfollow, 2010). A few minutes later, Guru-Murthy sent out a speculative tweet to his twenty thousand followers, pointing out the National Bullying Helpline’s Conservative links. Due to the size of Guru-Murthy’s following, a Twitter storm ensued, with tweets and retweets of Manning’s original tweet about the National Bullying Helpline and Guru-Murthy’s tweet about its “Tory patrons.” A point that was to later emerge as important—that the National Bullying Helpline may have breached its clients’ confidentiality—was also raised by Sacha Zarb, a Labour-supporting events manager based in northern England (Zarb, 2010). Ne
w angles and information were therefore quickly introduced into the political information cycle and these were to recur as the National Bullying Helpline news went mainstream over the next few hours and into Monday morning’s headlines.
Inside the BBC and ITN newsrooms, journalists had been considering if, when, and how to run with this new National Bullying Helpline information. The chief of the helpline, Christine Pratt, had contacted BBC and ITV news earlier in the day (BBC News, 2010c). But it was not until 5:48 p.m. that the BBC, in an effort to preempt Lucy Manning’s scoop that she first aired on Twitter but was now lining up for the BBC’s arch rival ITV News’s 6:00 p.m. bulletin, posted an online video in which Christine Pratt claimed that employees inside Number 10 had called her organization (BBC News Online, 2010b). Two minutes later, the BBC Politics Twitter account linked to the BBC news website’s video of Pratt. At precisely the same moment, BBC television “broke” the National Bullying Helpline story when its news channel, which was at that stage in the middle of running a live special broadcast of film and television stars on the red carpet at the London BAFTA awards, updated its foot-of-screen news ticker with the message: “The BBC understands that staff working in the prime minister’s office have called an anti-bullying charity to complain about the way they have been treated” (BBC, 2010b; BBC News, 2010a).
The Hybrid Media System Page 14
