Four “traditional” yet instant polls, all using transparent sampling methods, were published within a few minutes of the end of the debate. These were based on a variety of methods. YouGov/the Sun used an online survey of its pre-recruited panel of viewers (YouGov, 2010). ComRes/ITV News used automated phone calls to poll a pre-recruited panel of 4032 members of the public (ComRes, 2010). The Times/Populus relied on a pre-recruited online panel from which it sampled 1004 individuals (Populus, 2010). Angus Reid used an online panel, whose responses were filtered directly and in real time onto its website—before its poll had actually ended (Angus Reid Public Opinion, 2010). All of these polls showed Nick Clegg to be the clear debate winner. Conservative leader David Cameron came second in all but one. Fifteen minutes after the debate drew to a close, ITV’s 10 p.m. news revealed the results of its ComRes post-debate poll. The results gave Clegg 43 percent against Cameron’s 26 percent and Gordon Brown’s 20 percent (ITV News, 2010b). This poll showed the extent of Clegg’s breakthrough and went on to play a crucial role in shaping stage four of the political information cycle.
If the real-time information was opaque or flawed, what can be said of these post-debate polls? All were conducted by reputable polling companies who subscribe to the British Polling Council’s code of practice. Yet because they are so influential in determining journalists’ interpretive frames—perhaps rightly so when the only alternative sources of immediately available information are post-debate interviews with politically biased personnel from the parties—we need to consider the inevitable compromises that accompany rapid reaction polling. Some of the potential pitfalls are illustrated by the ComRes/ITV poll conducted right after the third debate on April 29. This had Cameron as the debate winner with 36 percent, Clegg with 33 percent, and Brown with 26 percent. But the voting intention profile of this poll’s sample was not representative, at least if judged in the context of other polls conducted around the same time: 36 percent of respondents in this poll were Liberal Democrat supporters, 35 percent were Conservative supporters, and just 24 percent preferred Labour (Gibbon, 2010). If we assume that supporters of a particular party are more likely to have favorable attitudes toward their party leader’s performance in a televised debate, the profile of a poll sample becomes an important variable in shaping its results. In this case, the results inflated Clegg’s rating. Although the internet has enabled polling companies to publish their methods for all to read, in the scramble to present the results, journalists and presenters only rarely highlight these methods.
AUGMENTATION
Stage four of the debate’s political information cycle consisted of more detailed post-debate analysis and commentary by broadcasters and the newspapers. First up was the BBC’s flagship long-form public affairs show, Newsnight. An hour after the debate it featured a blow-by-blow dissection by the news anchor and two journalists, an expert round table including former party communication advisers, and a session with a now-obligatory “body language expert” and the Times restaurant and television reviewer, A. A. Gill (BBC2, 2010a). By this point, the major newspaper editors were making decisions about the front pages of the following day’s print editions and their websites were updated with analysis of the debate. The overwhelming majority of the next day’s papers, including the Conservative-supporting outlets, contained coverage of the Clegg “surge” (Chapman, 2010; Daily Star, 2010d; T. N. Dunn, 2010; Grice, 2010; Lyons & Beattie, 2010; Pierce, 2010; Porter, et al., 2010; Watson & Coates, 2010; Watt & Wintour, 2010; Yelland, 2010).
For broadcasters, the debate’s influence on routine news values was immediate. The morning after the debate, as the print editions of the papers were absorbed, the major agenda setters—BBC Radio 4’s Today program, BBC Five Live, and the ITV and BBC breakfast television shows—were saturated with commentary. The Today program’s morning prime time slot, just after Radio 4’s 8:00 a.m. news bulletin, was devoted to a feature based on Frank Luntz, an American opinion pollster and political consultant long-favored as a BBC pundit (BBC Radio 4, 2010a). The night before, Luntz had run his own thirty-two-person reaction-dial “focus group” for the Sun newspaper, complete with its own real-time worm chart. The Sun filmed Luntz and the panel at work and prominently displayed an edited video clip on their website the next day. Luntz’s and his panel’s verdicts were unequivocal: Nick Clegg was the winner, by a large margin (Luntz, 2010).
Friday’s daytime and evening broadcast news bulletins were accompanied by continuing online discussion on the most popular political blogs—Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes, Conservative Home, Labourlist, Left Foot Forward, and Liberal Democrat Voice (Conservative Home, 2010a; Fawkes, 2010; Labourlist, 2010; Left Foot Forward, 2010; Liberal Democrat Voice, 2010). By now, YouTube featured several hundred edited video clips that had been uploaded by the news organizations, the parties, and members of the public (YouTube, 2010). Twitter users continued to label their messages with the #leadersdebate, #ge2010, #ge10, and #ukelection hashtags (Twapperkeeper, 2010b). This continued throughout the remainder of the campaign, and took an interesting twist, as we shall see.
By Friday evening, BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 News all led on a different story—the closure of UK airports caused by a volcanic ash cloud in Iceland. But Nick Clegg’s victory came a close second. In-depth reporting on Friday evening included Channel 4 News’s FactCheck feature, which covered exaggerated claims concerning the wastefulness of local police forces made by David Cameron during the debate. As has become the norm, the FactCheck team of reporters used Twitter throughout the day to post “teasers” and interact with potential audience members about the content of their evening bulletin (Channel 4 News, 2010a) (For more on the general significance of FactCheck see chapter 8). Friday evening’s coverage also saw the first installment of an extraordinary miniseries on Channel 4’s 7:00 p.m. news show. Entitled “Britain’s Next Boss,” this featured a studio audience and three expert guests: “entrepreneur James Caan, comedienne and now leadership consultant Ruby Wax, and business psychologist Dr. Adrian Atkinson.” As presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy explained: “Who’s got the personality to lead this country, the character to deal with a crisis? On Britain’s Next Boss we’ll put the three main party leaders under the microscope … This show is a policy-free zone, because some of the biggest tests of a prime minister are on things never mentioned in manifestos.” The expert panel began with commentary on sound- and image-bite excerpts of the previous night’s leaders’ debate. Broadcast media logic prevailed.
The remainder of stage four stretched across the weekend into Monday and in turn went on to frame the build-up to the second debate which came during the third week of the election campaign. Friday’s commentary and analysis fed into the weekend newspaper journalists’ copy deadlines and editors’ final decisions on the contents and layout of the weekend print editions. The Sunday morning political television shows shoveled up the fallout from Thursday evening’s debate and used it as a means of emphasizing the importance of the second debate, which was scheduled for just four days later. Once again, the dominant frame was Clegg’s remarkable performance in the televised debate.
CONTESTATION
Following a weekend of remarkably positive broadcast and newspaper coverage from organizations across the entire political spectrum, the Liberal Democrats started the third week of the campaign with a huge boost in the (traditionally conducted) opinion polls. Some polls placed them on an almost equal footing with the Conservatives; in most, Labour were unexpectedly relegated to third place (T. Young, 2010). The Sun carried Nick Clegg’s victory on its Monday morning front page (T. N. Dunn, 2010). Suddenly, the election had become a genuine three-party contest and this unleashed much soul-searching commentary among the press, especially the pro-Conservative papers such as the Daily Mail, the Times and the Daily Telegraph. Broadcast journalists, too, began to exercise much greater scrutiny over the Liberal Democrats’ policy platform. This was palpable in the BBC’s major news shows, which were now characterized by a
“who is the real Nick Clegg?” frame (see for example BBC Radio 4, 2010b).
It was primarily television that played the predominant role in the Liberal Democrats’ surge by raising public awareness of Clegg’s approach as leader and of the Liberal Democrats as a party. Yet there were early signs that the internet was also playing an important role. The Liberal Democrats became the first UK party to have a Facebook group—albeit an unofficial one—to recruit a higher number of members than the dues-paying membership of the party itself. The group, “We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, We Can Get the Lib Dems Into Office!” had been founded just two days before the first television debate by a young Liberal Democrat activist, Ben Stockman (We Got Rage Against the Machine to Number 1 . . . , 2010). Taking its name from the successful online charitable fundraising campaign to prevent the winners of 2009’s X-Factor talent show from reaching the number one slot in the music charts, the Facebook group quickly grew to more than 100,000 members within just three days of the first debate. This placed it way ahead of the other parties’ Facebook groups and fan pages, official or otherwise, and the group went on to reach 165,000 members by election day three weeks later. While the earlier online campaign against X-Factor had been a matter of newer media logic confronting older media logic (in this case the inauthenticity of television talent shows), the Liberal Democrats “Rage” group was very different. Here it was a case of newer media mobilization coming to the aid of what were seen as broadcast media’s authentic representations of Clegg in the television debate.
Some of the post-debate polls seemed to reveal that the Liberal Democrats had picked up significant new support from voters under the age of thirty-five (Helm & Asthana, 2010b). Clegg presented himself as a “fresh” alternative to what he continually described as the “old parties,” and this was based upon a narrative of what he termed “real change.” The “Rage” Facebook group was evidence of this “outsider” appeal. Weakly aligned voters, especially the young to middle-aged, educated, middle-class citizens that dominate online politics, were looking for something resembling a movement for reform. A hung parliament was the prize, leading to electoral reform as a condition of Clegg entering into a coalition with Labour or the Conservatives.
The increase in support for the Liberal Democrats greatly unsettled the Conservative-supporting newspapers, who were now torn between reflecting the rise of Clegg—clearly a major political story with a popular grassroots frame—or turning their fire on the Liberal Democrats. This tension was soon resolved. Within a couple of days, and once it became clear that “Cleggmania” was not likely to falter in the short term, the right-wing newspapers turned, producing torrents of critical coverage in the run-up to the second debate. For example, the Daily Mail ran an extraordinary series of stories on Clegg. One suggested that the Liberal Democrats’ leader had uttered a “Nazi slur” on Britain in 2002 when he had suggested that victory in the Second World War had made it more difficult for the British to accept that other European countries were more prosperous (Shipman, 2010). The piece remarked that Clegg had “a Spanish wife, a Dutch mother and a Russian grandparent, [and] began his career as a Brussels bureaucrat and moved to Westminster after a spell as a Euro MP.” The “debate” section of the Mail’s site was dominated by articles on the Liberal Democrats and Clegg, from “Dirty Tricks of the REAL Nasty Party” (Oborne, 2010) to “How the LibDems Would Release 60,000 Convicts” (Slack, 2010) and “The LibDems are a Party Full of Shadow Lobbyists” (Waghorne, 2010).
Worse was to come for Clegg. The night before the second televised leaders’ debate, the Telegraph announced on its website that its debate-day front page would feature what it framed as an investigative scoop: a report that Clegg had received party donations from three businessmen directly into his personal bank account (Winnett & Swaine, 2010). The Telegraph had trawled through the vast archive of documents it had bought in order to run its months-long series of exposés on MPs’ expenses in mid-2009. Clegg was given a chance to respond to the story before the Telegraph published. His office issued a holding statement saying that he had used the money to pay for a member of staff and that these donations were reported in the parliamentary register of members’ interests. The Telegraph’s online article was quickly circulated late that night via the Conservative Home website and on Twitter. It was also picked up within minutes by BBC Newsnight’s political correspondent, Michael Crick, who, at around 10:35 p.m., and in a taste of what was to follow, hinted that in his view it was an unremarkable revelation (BBC2, 2010b).
But during the following morning—the day of the second televised debate—there unfolded an extraordinary series of events that reveal how newer media logics can intervene in areas where older media logics seem to be supremely powerful. As news of the Telegraph’s “scoop” reverberated through media and online networks, it became obvious that some journalists—on both the right and the left—were becoming skeptical of the Telegraph’s front-page story. By mid-morning, a satirical online flash campaign had emerged on Twitter, reflecting and further reinforcing this skepticism. Tens of thousands sardonically added the hashtag “#nickcleggsfault” to their status updates. These messages ranged from political observations to ludicrous statements such as “We’ve run out of houmous #nickcleggsfault,” or “Have hairy toes, #nickcleggsfault” (Twapperkeeper, 2010a). By the middle of the day #nickcleggsfault had become the third most popular shared hashtag, not just among the then 7.5 million Twitter users in the UK, but the entirety of Twitter’s then 105 million global users.
Suddenly, through a combination of elite and activist skepticism, the Telegraph was thrown on the defensive. Sensing that the Clegg donation story was not being as well-received as he had hoped, the paper’s deputy editor Benedict Brogan took the unusual step of issuing a defense on the paper’s political blog. By that stage, however, the BBC’s Radio Four presenter, Evan Davis, had posted on Twitter: “Extraordinary. Twitter parodies undercut media attacks on Clegg (#nickcleggsfault). Telegraph ends up defending itself” (E. Davis, 2010). Later that afternoon, the BBC’s digital election correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, published a blog post about the #nickcleggsfault meme, adding further fuel to the Twitter campaign (Cellan-Jones, 2010).
Later that evening, just before Clegg walked on stage in Bristol for the second leader’s debate, his office produced bank statements proving that there had been no financial wrongdoing. The Telegraph’s intervention was over. The publication of Clegg’s financial records was the most important direct factor in blunting the story’s impact and keeping it off the evening television news, but this came in the context of a growing awareness among elite journalists, spurred in part by the online mobilization among activists earlier in the day, that the Telegraph’s story was not all it appeared to be and was driven by excessive partisan bias. The Telegraph’s expenses “scoop” thus collapsed as a result of harmonious interventions in older and newer media settings.
As the election campaign progressed, the second and third live televised prime ministerial debates closely followed the pattern established by the first, with real time broadcast and live streaming and real-time online activist and journalist interventions becoming firmly embedded in the hybrid mediation of the events. Within fifteen minutes of the beginning of the second debate, the Liberal Democrats uploaded Clegg’s one-minute opening statement to YouTube and posted links to it on Facebook and Twitter (Libdemvoice, 2010; Pack, 2010). Once again, campaign communications staff and journalists could not resist interacting before the debate had ended, but others were willing to use social media backchannels to reveal this. For example, Daily Mirror reporter Kevin Maguire reported on Twitter that the Conservatives’ press officer Paul Stephenson was “trying to brief hacks in the Bristol centre while [the] debate’s on” (Maguire, 2010). Snap polls and sentiment tracking played an even greater role in the second and third debates. Sky News dropped Fizzback after the first debate, for unknown reasons, but immediately after the second and third debates Sky
announced the results of its YouGov instant poll, which placed Cameron first, closely followed by Clegg and Brown. Broadcast interviews were once again constantly framed by this instant poll. And by the time of the second debate, the BBC and Sky had joined ITV in foregrounding their own small audience panels with sentiment dials and worm charts.
Britain’s first ever live televised prime ministerial debate fundamentally changed the dynamics of the 2010 British election campaign. While the Liberal Democrats’ poll surge fell away during the final week of the campaign, “Cleggmania” had three important tangible effects on the outcome of the election. First, the Manchester debate established that precious commodity—campaign momentum—for the Liberal Democrats. The Conservative and Labour leaders were on the back foot until very late in the race. Brown was a consistent loser in the media commentary and the snap polls following all three debates. Cameron was widely perceived to have disappointed during the first two events; he staged a strong recovery during the third, but this came just a few full campaigning days before polling day. Second, because the Liberal Democrats ended the campaign with a 3 or 4 percent increase from where their share of the popular vote had stood in pre-campaign polls, they avoided being wiped out in some seats by the electoral swing to the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats’ total of fifty-seven seats could easily have been substantially lower had they not benefited from the boost provided by the prime ministerial debate. Third, the debate greatly enhanced Clegg’s overall credibility with the media and the public, smoothing the Liberal Democrats’ historic transition into coalition government with the Conservatives, and Clegg’s personal rise, against the odds, to the position of deputy prime minister alongside prime minister David Cameron on May 11.
The Hybrid Media System Page 17
