The Hybrid Media System Read online

  Praise for The Hybrid Media System

  “This is an important book, already cited as seminal in the field of political communication.”—Laura Roselle, Elon University, in Choice.

  “. . . mandatory reading for any scholar of contemporary political communication”—Catie Snow Bailard, George Washington University, in Political Communication.

  “. . . illuminating, reorienting, even analytically liberating.”—Regina G. Lawrence, University of Oregon, in Political Science Quarterly.

  “. . . dizzyingly multidimensional”—Mike Ananny, University of Southern California, in Journalism.

  “. . . great insights, a highly enjoyable reading experience, and excellent research”—Thomas Schillemans, Utrecht University, in Public Administration.

  “Chadwick’s measured analytical approach is one of the book’s great strengths.”—Philip M. Napoli, Duke University, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

  “Chadwick approaches media with considerable theoretical nuance and a rigorously empirical sensibility . . . a major contribution to advancing our understanding of media and politics.”—Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Oxford University, in Social Forces.

  “This is an important and timely book . . . will likely one day be measured by the weight of future scholarship that it inspires.”—David Karpf, George Washington University, in Information Polity.

  “Chadwick’s primary aim is to peel away the misbegotten dichotomies shaping so many current debates surrounding contemporary political communication and to present alternative frameworks that go beyond those dichotomies. In that aim, he is extraordinarily successful.”—Matthew Powers, University of Washington, in Media, Culture, & Society.

  “Big theory for understanding a complex political media environment”—Jason Gainous, University of Louisville, and Kevin Wagner, Florida Atlantic University, in The Journal of Politics.

  “. . . valuable, thought-provoking, and conceptually-compelling.”—Steven Livingston, George Washington University, in Perspectives on Politics.

  “Having read this, many textbooks feel dated to me now. This volume describes the organization, logic, and function of contemporary media in immediate and engaging terms. It is a must read for all students of media, and interested parties in general.”—Zizi Papacharissi, University of Illinois Chicago, on Roy Christopher’s Summer Reading List blog post.

  The Hybrid Media System

  Oxford Studies in Digital Politics

  Series Editor: Andrew Chadwick, Professor of Political Communication in the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture and the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University

  Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship

  Jessica Baldwin-Philippi

  Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization

  Jessica L. Beyer

  The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power

  Andrew Chadwick

  Tweeting to Power: The Social Media Revolution in American Politics

  Jason Gainous and Kevin M. Wagner

  Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism

  Andrew Hoskins and John Tulloch

  The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam

  Philip N. Howard

  Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring

  Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain

  Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy

  David Karpf

  The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy

  David Karpf

  Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy

  Daniel Kreiss

  Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama

  Daniel Kreiss

  Bits and Atoms: Information and Communication Technology in Areas of Limited Statehood

  Steven Livingston and Gregor Walter-Drop

  Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity

  Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and William W. Franko

  Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere

  Sarah Oates

  Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age

  Taylor Owen

  Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics

  Zizi Papacharissi

  The Citizen Marketer: Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age

  Joel Penney

  Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age

  Jennifer Stromer-Galley

  News on the Internet: Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century

  David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg

  The Civic Organization and the Digital Citizen: Communicating Engagement in a Networked Age

  Chris Wells

  Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

  Mohamed Zayani

  The Hybrid Media System

  POLITICS AND POWER

  SECOND EDITION

  ANDREW CHADWICK

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

  Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

  198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

  © Oxford University Press 2017

  First Edition published in 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

  You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Chadwick, Andrew.

  Title: The hybrid media system : politics and power / Andrew Chadwick.

  Description: Second edition. | New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014739 (print) | LCCN 2017016860 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190696740 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190696757 (Epub) | ISBN 9780190696733 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190696726 (hardcover : alk. paper)Subjects: LCSH: Communication in politics. | Mass media—Political aspects. | Internet in political campaigns.

  Classification: LCC JA85 (ebook) | LCC JA85 .C435 2017 (print) | DDC 320.01/4—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014739

  For Sam and Katie

  Contents

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. An Ontology of Hybridity

  2. All Media Systems Have Been Hybrid

  3. The Contemporary Contexts of Hybridity

  4. The Political Information Cycle

  5. Power, Interdependence, and Hybridity in the Construction of Political News: Understanding WikiLeaks

  6. Symphonic Consonance in Campaign Communication: Reinterpreting Obama for America
<
br />   7. Systemic Hybridity in the Mediation of the American Presidential Campaign

  8. Hybrid Norms in News and Journalism

  9. Hybrid Norms in Activism, Parties, and Government

  10. Donald Trump, the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign, and the Intensification of the Hybrid Media System

  Conclusion: Politics and Power in the Hybrid Media System

  List of Interviews

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Preface to the Second Edition

  My argument in this book is that political communication is journeying through a chaotic transition period induced by the rise of digital media. Understanding the systemic consequences of this transition—who wins, who loses, and under what conditions—requires a new agenda for both political communication research and the broader study of media and communication technologies. We are living through the era of the hybrid media system, and this book lays out an approach for studying it.

  In addition to a new preface, this second edition adds a substantial new chapter applying the conceptual framework to the extraordinary 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the rise of Donald Trump, as well as a revised concluding chapter.

  In this book, I begin from the perspective that there is a need to integrate the study of older and newer media in politics, and to develop holistic approaches that help map where the distinctions between older and newer matter, and where those distinctions are dissolving. There is also a need to examine renewed media—older media that adapt and integrate the logics of newer media. This requires a systemic perspective, but one based on specific illustrations of forces in flow, rather than abstract structural prejudgments and decontextualized statistical snapshots.

  The key here is a conceptual understanding of power, one that can be illustrated empirically. The hybrid media system is built upon interactions among older and newer media logics—where logics are defined as bundles of technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms—in the reflexively connected social fields of media and politics. Actors in this system are articulated by complex and ever-evolving relationships based upon adaptation and interdependence and concentrations and diffusions of power. Actors create, tap, or steer information flows in ways that suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable, or disable the agency of others, across and between a range of older and newer media settings.

  This book examines this systemic hybridity in flow—in information consumption and production patterns, in news making, in parties and election campaigns, in activism, and in government communication. I use a mix of methods: conceptual work, historical analysis, documentary analysis, real-time “live” online research, and insider ethnography. Throughout, the book is concerned with showing how theoretical concepts can be welded together to form a general analytical approach, a way of seeing things differently, which I term a “hybrid ontology.” This approach is used to guide the narrative and cases.

  In this book, I seek to transcend the scholarly divide that developed after the mass diffusion of digital media that began in earnest at the turn of the twenty-first century. The last fifteen years have witnessed an outpouring of research on the implications of digital media for politics and society. This has encompassed many important themes—political engagement, deliberation, election campaigning, collective action, organizational change, and media theory. A great deal of valuable research has been published during this period, but, as I try to show in this book, in the century’s second decade it became clear that the digital media “revolution” was being modulated in previously unforeseen ways by the adaptation and renewal of older media. The challenge now is to understand the implications of these intriguing arrangements for the conduct of political life.

  The approach I set out here integrates conceptual discussion and empirical inquiry. It provides a focus on the interactions between traditional and digital media logics and how these logics play out in political and media fields. It shows how the systemic hybridity of the current media system is the outcome of not only a range of struggles and conflicts, but also pockets of interdependence essential for the construction and maintenance of the system itself. In this book, therefore, the media system is understood as the socially constructed outcome of ongoing interactions and struggles between social actors, in which media technologies are always implicated. The media system is actively constructed by a large and diverse range of actors, but the system itself goes on to differentially empower and disempower individuals, groups, and organizations in discrete ways. Those who play important roles in the construction of key fields within the system are more likely to go on to exercise power within those fields.

  At the book’s heart are four key concepts. The first is hybridity. Developed from a reading and synthesis of the hybridity literature from across the social sciences, “hybrid thinking” offers an ontology that eschews dichotomous modes of inquiry and instead invites us to focus on the overlaps and the in-between spaces that open up between older and newer media technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms. The second conceptual innovation involves a particular take on power, one that stresses not only the importance of conflict and struggle, but also how media are used in relational processes of adaptation and interdependence in the pursuit of political goals. Two further concepts extend the analysis and build upon ideas that have been uniquely important for the discipline of communication since its inception: media logic and the idea of a media system. Reviving and adapting the classic media logic approach, I try to show how older and newer media logics in the reflexively connected fields of media and politics intertwine and coevolve in ways that empower and disempower actors in a wide range of settings. Finally, I establish the importance of a new, nonlinear perspective on systems thinking for political communication. I draw upon a diverse range of theorists from communication, political science, and sociology, including Max Weber, Jeffrey Alexander, Manuel Castells, David Altheide and Robert Snow, Bruno Latour, Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari, Lance Bennett, Pierre Bourdieu, Denis McQuail, Manuel Castells, Richard Grusin, Steven Lukes, David Easton, Robert Dahl, David Singh Grewal, Nick Couldry, Brian McNair, and Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye.

  Briefly, the structure of this book is as follows. I begin with a transdisciplinary analysis of the social science literature on hybridity, before moving to a discussion of power, systems, and media logics. I then move to a revisionist history of the development of media systems since broadly the fifteenth century, and an overview of the current communicative contexts in the United States and Britain. These opening chapters provide the theoretical foundations for the empirical work that makes up the core evidence of the book: the analyses of the bullygate scandal and Britain’s momentous first prime ministerial debates; the analysis of the rise and impact of WikiLeaks; the extended revisionist interpretation of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, which properly contextualizes the impact of digital campaigning; the ethnographic account of hybrid sense-making among British journalists, editors, bloggers, activists, civil servants, and party campaign workers; and the chapter explaining the role of the hybrid media system in enabling the rise of Donald Trump.

  I would like to restate my thanks to Angela Chnapko and the team at Oxford University Press in New York, and the colleagues who have supported this project since it began. Many of these are listed in the Acknowledgments section that follows this Preface, but as this second edition goes to press I would also like to add to that list by thanking the following people: Mike Ananny, Catie Snow Bailard, Matt Carlson, Simon Collister, Geoffrey Baym, Shelley Boulianne, Diego Ceccobelli, Elizabeth Dubois, Caitlin Evans, Jason Gainous, Homero Gil de Zúñiga, David Hendy, Bente Kalsnes, Regina G. Lawrence, Pedro Magalhães, Jörg Matthes, Gianpietro Mazzoleni, Declan McDowell-Naylor, Philip M. Napoli, Taberez Ahmed Neyazi, Kaarle Nordenstreng, Matthew Powers, Karen Sanders, Thomas Schillemans, Amy P. Smith, Kari Steen-Johnsen, Tomás Baviera Puig, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Dhavan V. Shah, Jonathan
Sullivan, Sidney Tarrow, Terri L. Towner, Augusto Valeriani, Ellen Watts, Chris Wells, and Danna Young.

  As the extraordinary 2016 U.S. presidential campaign unfolded, I researched and wrote with the encouragement and good humor of Sam and Katie.

  Andrew Chadwick

  March 13, 2017

  Acknowledgments

  The idea for this book goes back a long way, possibly all the way back to 1993, when I was a masters student in Margaret Scammell and Tom Nossiter’s course on political communication at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). More recently my thinking was shaped by participating in a seminar on “The Internet and the Death of Television?” held at Royal Holloway, University of London, in February 2008. The lively exchanges between the panelists and the audience that night convinced me of the need to break out of our silos and study how the interactions between older and newer media logics shape political life.

  I would like to express my gratitude to the following, who have, with their valuable criticisms, suggestions, and encouragement supported this book in a variety of ways during its development: C. W. Anderson, Nick Anstead, Emily Bell, Charlie Beckett, Yochai Benkler, Lance Bennett, Bruce Bimber, Bob Boynton, Robin Brown, Erik Bucy, Andrea Calderaro, Craig Calhoun, Bart Cammaerts, Manuel Castells, Sarah Childs, Lilie Chouliaraki, Christian Christensen, Simon Collister, Nick Couldry, Aeron Davis, Michael X. Delli Carpini, James Dennis, Bill Dutton, Jocelyn Evans, Steven Fielding, Deen Freelon, R. Kelly Garrett, Myria Georgiou, Rachel Gibson, John Gregson, Oliver Heath, Richard Heffernan, Matthew Hindman, Sarah Hobolt, Philip N. Howard, Oliver James, Mary Jacobus, Michael J. Jensen, Andreas Jungherr, David Karpf, Anastasia Kavada, Daniel Kreiss, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Steven Livingston, Robin Mansell, Helen Margetts, Alister Miskimmon, Karine Nahon, Sarah Oates, Ben O’Loughlin, Zizi Papacharissi, Barbara Pfetsch, Eaon Pritchard, Terhi Rantanen, Alexa Robertson, Laura Roselle, Chris Rumford, Alexandra Segerberg, James Stanyer, Damian Tambini, Cristian Vaccari, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Silvio Waisbord, Nathan Widder, and Andy Williamson.