“Yes We Can,” the mash-up of music, rap, and Obama’s New Hampshire primary concession speech—the most popular web video of the entire campaign—was a celebrity endorsement professionally produced by Jesse Dylan (the son of Bob) and Will.I.Am of the globally popular group The Black Eyed Peas. The film featured renowned Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson and successful musicians John Legend and Herbie Hancock, among several others. “Yes We Can” ’s release was coordinated with the Obama campaign team and orchestrated for mainstream media appeal. It has often been forgotten that it first appeared, not on YouTube, but on television’s ABC News Now (Wallsten, 2010: 169), though, given that ABC News Now is simultaneously streamed to the internet and mobile devices, “television” is, of course, a relative term. The campaign and Democratic bloggers were also crucial in creating the conditions for the virality of “Yes We Can.” Statements from the Obama campaign drawing attention to the video acted as spurs to a wider network of bloggers. As online viewing increased, television and newspaper journalists started to report the video’s popularity. This in turn brought further attention to it and it further increased the online viewings (Wallsten, 2010). By the end of the campaign “Yes We Can” had received almost twenty million viewings and more than 87,000 comments. Given its origins among musicians and Hollywood actors it should come as no surprise that this hybrid political–entertainment video so readily migrated to television.
THE REVEREND WRIGHT AFFAIR
The CNN–YouTube debates and the complex provenance of successful online campaign videos were important, but nothing quite illustrates how television content wends its way through online media as well as the Reverend Wright affair. This episode reveals how personalized, media-driven scandals can take on new dynamics in the context of the hybrid media system. This was a decisive episode in the campaign, one that almost fatally damaged Obama’s candidacy. High televisual drama across the national networks and the power of moving images became integrated with the migration and viral recirculation of those images across the internet, as YouTube became a central archival hub for content remediated from broadcast and cable news shows. Claims that broadcast television is “becoming a sideshow” in election campaigns (Cornfield, 2010: 209) are wide of the mark. The interdependent recombination of television and online video is what matters.
The affair’s origins were online. In late 2006, Fran Eaton, a conservative blogger who wrote for the online citizen journalism outlet the Illinois Review visited Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s Trinity Church in Chicago. Eaton published a blog post on December 31, 2006, criticizing what she saw as the church’s militantly pro-African American ethos. In mid-February 2007, Eaton appeared on WVON radio in Chicago, where she termed the church “black supremacist” and this sparked some national media coverage later that month. ABC News’s early coverage of Obama prominently featured Trinity Church. Then, Sean Hannity of Fox News decided to conduct a televised interview with a conservative New York blogger, Erik Rush, to discuss the matter. The following day, there was a fraught encounter between Hannity and Reverend Wright on Fox News. Wright was also mentioned in a headline-grabbing profile of Obama in Rolling Stone magazine and in an April 30 article in the New York Times (May, 2009: 83–85). At this stage, however, nobody had video footage of Wright’s sermons. Without pictures, the national networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—would not touch it.
The story of Obama’s pastor’s radical views about race relations in America therefore effectively lay dormant for eight months. Then, in January 2008, a column in the Washington Post discussed a lifetime achievement award Wright’s church had presented to controversial minister Louis Farrakhan. This development was also taken up by CNN. Within a few days CBS ran a minor story—the first on this by a national television network—about the links between Wright and Obama (May, 2009: 85). But again, no videos of Wright’s sermons were shown.
A print article in the Wall Street Journal of March 10, 2008, was the first to mention the existence of sermon videos (May, 2009: 85). At around the same time, a set of amateur-made videos of Wright’s sermons were being openly sold to members of the Trinity congregation and were bought independently by Fox News and the team of ABC’s chief investigative reporter Brian Ross. Fox aired an extended excerpt from one of the videos on March 12, 2008, and it published an accompanying text story on its website (Goldblatt, 2008). Brian Ross’s team at ABC were more thorough. They pored over the tapes and were given approval to run a three-minute package on the morning news the following day—March 13. Ross’s news sequence was the first time excerpts from several of the sermon videos were shown on a national network. Fox News then began running a wider variety of clips, and the Fox News and ABC sequences were soon remediated on YouTube, as individual users uploaded files and began to remix the clips with other content as a way of putting their own spin on Wright’s remarks. This mixture of television, television website video, YouTube television video, and remixed YouTube mash-ups was further circulated across e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter via simple links, but it was also syndicated as embedded video clips on political blogs.
Unsurprisingly, the ABC story—“Obama’s Preacher: the Wright Message?”—used heavily edited clips from the sermons. These clips provided the fuel for the majority of the YouTube content. Wright was exposed using fiery rhetoric to attack racism: “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” was his reaction to 9/11; “Not God Bless America. God Damn America!” and “US of KKKA” were his statements on the treatment of African Americans (facts44, 2008).
The Pew Research Center’s weekly News Interest Index poll a couple of weeks after the ABC story found that 51 percent of the American public had heard “a lot” and a further 28 percent “a little” about Wright’s sermons (Pew Research Center, 2008c). Annenberg survey data show that Obama’s favorability ratings also declined quite steeply as a result (Kenski, et al., 2010: 84–86).
This was a big moment for television but it was also an important moment for internet media. Fox and ABC broke the story on television, yet it had originated with Fran Eaton and her fellow conservative bloggers. And once televised it quickly acquired an internet dynamic, which in turn served to amplify television journalism’s contribution. By August 2008 there were more than two thousand Jeremiah Wright videos of one kind or another on YouTube, yet around 60 percent of these were simply clips from ABC and the three main cable television news channels (May, 2009: 81). A detailed content analysis of four hundred of the YouTube videos reveals an interdependent relationship between television and YouTube (May, 2009). Spikes in YouTube traffic were closely correlated with the release of new clips from the sermons and interventions by Obama and Reverend Wright. But these spikes tended to occur the day after the previous day’s television news stories. YouTube viewings continued to rumble through the remainder of the campaign, increasing the story’s longevity and audience reach. Television was also responsible for occasionally jolting the Wright affair back to life. The importance of YouTube was quickly recognized by older media. For example, when Bill Moyers interviewed Wright in late April, PBS decided to scoop themselves by posting their film on YouTube the day before it aired on television (May, 2009: 89).
Similarly, the Wright affair met with older media logic from the Obama campaign, but the campaign’s response also soon acquired a newer media logic that unsettled some long-held assumptions about what makes for effective communication in election campaigns. Obama decided to address the issue head-on, out of a fear that the sermon tapes would inflict irreparable damage to his prospects by putting racism at the center of the campaign. Rather than merely stage a traditional press conference as an attempt to fend off the accusation that he shared Wright’s views, Obama sought to reshape the news agenda by delivering a lengthy and complex speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The venue was chosen for its relatively small size because the campaign wanted to avoid the feverish atmosphere of an open rally. There were fewer than one hundred ordinary audi
ence members in the room; the rest were journalists. This was a speech aimed at the television-viewing public; an event made for television in the classic mold. Significantly, however, the event was not staged for live television. While it would be broadcast live on CNN, it would take place on a Tuesday morning, when few would be watching. The aim was to influence the lunchtime and evening television and radio news bulletins, the newspaper websites and political blogs, and the following day’s commentary cycle in the elite newspapers. The “more perfect union” speech did indeed receive a highly favorable editorial response in newspaper outlets.
But just as significant is what happened when the Obama campaign uploaded the CNN video to YouTube. Within the space of a day, Obama’s speech had attracted 1.3 million viewings and had appeared on Google’s “most-blogged” list. Within ten days the YouTube viewings had jumped to 3.4 million, then to more than 4.5 million as the primaries reached their crescendo in June. The speech symbolizes the new power of instant archiving and interpersonal sharing of online video. This was a hybrid media response: URLs and embedded links to the YouTube version of the television video, on which the CNN logo and even its news ticker were proudly emblazoned were circulated among family, friends, and work colleagues. It was a television moment, and yet it was also a rejection of the televisual approach to political sound-bites. The speech was thirty-seven minutes long and departed in significant ways from a traditional campaign speech. Its structure was relatively complex and it was delivered in a calm and reflective style. There was applause, but the audience—not a crowd—was small, and could barely be heard. And the web video was watched in its entirety by vast numbers—more than six million by the close of the campaign. On the New York Times website, full transcripts of the speech were e-mailed at higher rates than the story about the speech (Stelter, 2008).
In telling parallels with the awareness levels for Reverend Wright’s sermon videos a couple of weeks earlier, Pew’s News Interest Index poll for March 27 found that 54 percent of Americans had heard “a lot” and 31 percent “a little” about Obama’s reaction speech (Pew Research Center, 2008c). Annenberg election survey data also show that Obama’s favorability ratings improved markedly following this response (Kenski, et al., 2010: 84–86).
Wright made a further explosive intervention later in the campaign, when he appeared before assembled journalists at the National Press Club in Washington, DC to speak of how he believed that the U.S. government may have spread HIV among African Americans. This time Obama responded with outright condemnation. An assortment of Republican Political Action Committees and “527” groups, such as Our Country Deserves Better, ran television commercials during the final weeks of the general election campaign, rekindling the Wright issue for television news, online news sites, and bloggers (Kenski, et al., 2010: 87–88). But these were minor revivals. Obama’s earlier hybrid media response defused the scandal.
The Wright affair and the Philadelphia speech gave the Obama campaign important experience of the power of the web to bypass some of the traditional dictates of television’s reporting of politics. It demonstrated the effectiveness of longer, more reflective responses to media-driven scandals and it capitalized on YouTube’s growing role as an outlet for long-form as well as short-form genres in politics—a surprisingly important aspect of its role in the hybrid media system.
Fear and Loathing and “Citizen Journalism”: “Bittergate”
The Reverend Wright affair was soon joined by a further important episode illustrating the complex interdependence of older and newer media. This became known as “Bittergate” and it came as the 2008 primaries entered their final decisive phase.
During a wide-ranging discussion at a San Francisco fundraising meeting on April 6, 2008, Obama turned to discuss the plight of small-town America. He said “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them … And it’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” (Fowler, 2008).
This fundraising meeting was closed to the press and the discussion was deemed “off the record.” On this rare occasion, the press staff had not enforced its own policy of recording their candidate’s every utterance (Plouffe, 2010: 216) Unknown to them, an audio recording of the meeting was being captured on a handheld voice recorder by an amateur blogger and citizen activist named Mayhill Fowler. Part of a distributed team of “amateur” citizen journalists who were following the campaign under the Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” program, Fowler was in fact an experienced Democratic party supporter and had even donated to the campaign. Self-described as a “teacher, editor, and writer,” Fowler had followed Obama for a year, writing for her blog and filing opinion pieces for the Huffington Post, on an unpaid basis.
Fowler was not a journalist, nor was she a straightforward blogger or campaign volunteer. She had gained entry to the San Francisco event because she was known to the campaign, but she did not ask permission to record Obama’s remarks and she was not treated as a journalist by the press staff. Fowler had her own personal blog, but her involvement with the Huffington Post meant that there soon followed some internal editorial discussions with Post editor Arianna Huffington about the news value of the material Fowler had gathered. Following those editorial discussions, Huffington authorized publication in the certain knowledge that Obama’s remarks would have a huge impact on the news. “We recognized it was a politically volatile story and thought it would create news,” said Marc Cooper, one of Huffington Post’s deputy editors (Bradley, 2008). Cooper was right. CNN International picked up the story and started to broadcast packages featuring the most controversial section of Fowler’s audio file. Within a few hours the story had spread across the media system to cable and national network news shows, blogs, newspaper websites, Facebook, and Twitter. It played a major role in the Pennsylvania primary’s televised debate, as moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos repeatedly questioned Obama about his comments.
Bittergate reveals further key aspects of the hybrid media system in political campaigns. Anita Dunn, chief communications officer to the Obama campaign has described 2008 as a tipping point in news media’s treatment of politics. Cable television and the internet, she said, created “a bizarre national narrative” that was divorced from the “real campaign” (Dunn, 2009: 140). The picture she paints is of semi-professional bloggers covering the campaign from outside the official press corps, scanning YouTube and social media sites for leads, uploading multiple stories throughout each day, and requiring immediate responses to each story from the campaign. Professional journalists were compelled to compete in this febrile environment.
Bittergate was enabled by the affordances of small, difficult-to-detect recording devices and the ease with which audio files can be transmitted and manipulated, but these are not its most significant aspects. Fowler occupied an uncertain boundary space at the intersection of professional journalism, blogging, and political activism. The Huffington Post was a group blog, albeit one with aspirations to become a more fully fledged organization (a vision that was realized when it was bought by AOL in 2011 for $315 million). It was led by an editorial staff with experience of journalism and a keen awareness of what would raise the profile of the blog. But the Obama press team had no intention of treating Fowler as a journalist and it is not clear that she saw herself as one. A professional journalist, even if he or she had managed to gain entry to an event that was not for the press, would more than likely not have reported the remarks, because the meeting was categorized as off the record. On the surface, this was about conflict between the norms of older and newer media journalism, but its ultimate impact actually turned on the hybrid integration of these norms.
Rumors and Lies and Myths about the Internet
Similar d
ynamics are in play if we consider further the evolving division of labor among media in campaign reporting. A recurrent theme in the election coverage was that the internet is an unaccountable rumor mill populated by extremists able to inject invective and misinformation into public discourse free from the usual journalistic norms of professionalism and objectivity. In 2008, there were many examples of this in viral e-mails (for a long list see Castells, 2009: 483–486). The best example is the rumor that Barack Obama “is a Muslim.” But while a small number of right-wing blogs featured speculation about Obama’s religious faith as early as the summer and fall of 2006 (Google Blog Search, 2011), the emergence and popularization of the “Muslim” myth was far from a simple case of unaccountable and anonymous online zealotry.
The first recorded U.S.-sourced entry in Google News’s archive for “Obama is a Muslim” is from a February 4, 2007, story labeled “Obamaphobia” that appeared in the student-run Harvard Crimson (Google News Search, 2011). The Crimson’s piece was commentary on an earlier story, because in fact it was Insight, a well-known conservative print and online magazine owned by News World Communications (who, until 2010, also owned the Washington Times) that first sparked broad interest in the falsehood. In January 2007 Insight published a story claiming that an unnamed source in the Clinton campaign had revealed that Obama “had been educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage” (Insight, 2007). The Clinton campaign officially denied that it was the source for this article, but this was not enough to deter Fox News’s The Big Story, which ran the story two days later (Fox News, 2007). There then followed a period of intermedia conflict, as CNN ran an investigative piece debunking Insight’s (and now Fox News’s) findings. Such public discord over the basic facts of a story only served to raise its profile, and it rumbled on across blogs, YouTube, and online social network sites as the primary campaign progressed. We will never know the extent to which links to posts and viral e-mails were responsible for keeping the issue alive; the e-mails seem to have been particularly important (see Emery, 2011). But we can say with some certainty that two further older media interventions made a significant contribution to the circulation of this information.
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