The Hybrid Media System Read online

  Outline of the Book

  In this book, my overall goal is to blend theoretical and conceptual discussion with detailed analysis of the hybrid media system in flow. The book unfolds as follows.

  In chapter 1, I outline what I term an “ontology of hybridity”: a way of approaching the study of the social world that moves us away from “either/or” thinking toward “not only, but also” thinking. I show how this ontology of hybridity develops out of diverse and multidisciplinary strands in the social sciences and how the themes and dispositions of this body of research may, with appropriate theoretical and empirical development, generate new ways of exploring some of the classic concerns of political communication. Hybrid thinking also serves as a platform for my understanding of the three other central conceptual themes of this book: power, the idea of a system, and media logics, all of which are discussed in this chapter.

  Chapter 2 explores what hybridity has meant in practice throughout the history of media. This story goes back a long, long way, but this chapter focuses on some key developments since the fifteenth century. I present these neglected histories of media hybridity not only because previous interactions between older and newer media are interesting in their own right, but also, more importantly, because history provides some significant conceptual pointers that go on to inform the contemporary studies that make up the rest of the book. Chapter 2 is not designed to be an all-encompassing traditional narrative history, but rather serves as a revisionist account of intriguing episodes in hybrid media. It shows how the technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms of older and newer media have often been deeply intertwined, and how periods of important change have been shaped by continuities with the past. The social and technological dynamics these histories reveal are instructive for understanding the hybrid media system of the present era, to which I turn in chapter 3.

  Chapter 3 builds upon the themes of chapter 2, but goes beyond it to establish the contemporary context for the analyses of political communication that follow in chapters 4 through 10. This chapter sets the scene for these more detailed illustrations of the hybrid media system by focusing on the changing nature of audiences, shifting patterns of media use, the salient structural characteristics of broadcasting, newspaper, and online media, and the emergence of new hybrid forms of mediality.

  Following chapter 3, the emphasis shifts toward deeper exploration of key events and processes that reveal the hybrid media system in flow. Chapter 4 proposes a new approach to political news making based on what I term the “political information cycle.” The chapter examines the mediation of two extraordinary news events of the 2010 British general election campaign: the Bullygate scandal and Britain’s first ever live televised prime ministerial debate. I show how political information cycles are built on news-making assemblages that combine older and newer media logics. They are composed of multiple, loosely coupled individuals, groups, sites, and temporal instances of interaction, involving diverse yet highly interdependent news creators that plug and unplug themselves from the news-making process, often in real time. Using original data gathered during two intensive periods of live qualitative research, I show how the hybrid mediation of politics now presents new opportunities for non-elite actors to mobilize and enter news production through timely interventions and sometimes direct, one-to-one, micro-level interactions with professional journalists. I also show how these new power relations must be set within the context of professional politicians’ and professional journalists’ ongoing status, prestige, access, expertise, and influence.

  Chapter 5 builds on several of the themes of chapter 4’s account of news making. Here, however, I take a different tack by examining the extraordinary rise to prominence of WikiLeaks in the first and second decades of the twenty-first century. This chapter tells the story of the symbiotic relationship that emerged between WikiLeaks, its network of supporters, and those professional journalists who were so crucial to the success of the 2010 war logs and embassy cables “megaleaks.” But this chapter goes beyond WikiLeaks’ role in news making to consider the strengths and weaknesses of its sociotechnical model and its norms of operation for political organization, mobilization, and influencing the news agenda more generally. I show how the effective resources for taking action in the hybrid media system in this case emerged from the relational power and interdependence among WikiLeaks, the newspaper and broadcast media, and the distributed online networks of activists that mobilized in support of both WikiLeaks and the professional journalists during the U.S. government’s unprecedented attempts to censor the internet during late 2010 and early 2011.

  Chapters 6 and 7 expand further upon the theme of political organization by considering recent developments in the field of American election campaigning. In chapter 6, I provide a detailed reinterpretation of the fabled 2008 Obama for America campaign and show how this became a decisive period in the ongoing construction of the hybrid media system in American media and politics. I argue that the Obama campaign’s significance in building a new model for successful presidential campaigning lay not in its use of the internet per se, but in how it so rigorously integrated online and offline communication, grassroots activism and elite control, and older and newer media logics. Obama for America displayed a keen and hitherto neglected awareness of the continuing power of older media logic in election campaigns.

  Chapter 7 continues the revisionist approach of Chapter 6, but paints the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign on a broader canvas. Through a detailed analysis of key episodes in the mediation of the campaign, I show how the real-space spectacles of candidate appearances continued to generate the important television, radio, and newspaper coverage that remains so crucial for projecting the power of a candidate and conveying enthusiasm, movement, authenticity, and common purpose to both activists and nonactivists alike. I discuss how these television-fueled spectacles now also integrate with newer media logics of data-gathering, online fundraising, tracking, monitoring, and managed volunteerism. A major theme running through this chapter is the growing systemic integration of the internet and television in presidential campaigns. Indeed, although traditional newspaper organizations still play an important role, as revealed in my revisionist interpretation of the framing of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, it is the tension-riddled but increasingly integrated duopoly of television and online video that is the most significant development in this field. Chapter 7 also shows how the hybrid media system can shape electoral outcomes by providing new power resources for campaigns that can create and master the system’s modalities—and severe penalties for those who cannot. But this same system also provides resources for journalists who seek to challenge campaigns and hold them to account, and for citizen activists who are occasionally empowered by newer media to intervene on their own terms, away from formal political and media structures, and through spreading forms of expression inspired by not only the field of entertainment, but also professional investigative journalism.

  In chapters 8 and 9, I examine the book’s main themes from another perspective, when I employ an ethnographic approach to explore in more detail the hybrid media system’s evolving norms. Here the context switches back to Britain and I draw upon evidence I gathered from insider interviews in 2010, 2011, and 2012 with those working in a sample of organizations at the heart of Britain’s media-politics nexus in London. Chapter 8 examines the fields of news and journalism; Chapter 9 political activism, election campaigning, and government communications. During this fieldwork I met party communications staff; journalists; program makers and editors working in radio, television, newspaper, magazine, and news agency organizations; independent bloggers; the director of a prominent public relations company; senior regulatory staff at the Office of Communications (OFCOM) and the Press Complaints Commission (PCC); communications staff working inside government departments and in the Prime Minister’s Office in Number 10 Downing Street; and members of the renowned progressive
political activist network, 38 Degrees. This ethnography revealed much boundary drawing, boundary blurring, and boundary crossing, as the logics of older and newer media interact, compete, and coevolve. I show how this boundary work is creating compelling new hybrid norms for the conduct of news making among professional journalists and “amateur” bloggers, and for the conduct of political activism, election campaigning, and government communications. I reveal how integrated divisions of labor between older and newer media practices are emerging in the daily work of actors in these fields, and how the different types of integration are sometimes bolstering and sometimes weakening the power of those whose dominance rests upon older broadcasting and print media practices.

  Chapter 10, “Donald Trump, the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign, and the Intensification of the Hybrid Media System,” loops back to the concerns of chapters 6 and 7, but extends the conceptual framework to cover the extraordinary 2016 U.S. election. It shows how Donald Trump’s rise and Hillary Clinton’s downfall were enabled by key aspects of the hybrid media system. The chapter deciphers the main components of Trump’s digital campaign, in particular its shift toward an intensive Facebook advertising strategy and its use of targeted advertising to try to reduce turnout among potential Democrat voters. It shows how Trump was able to translate his celebrity capital into political capital through the use of social media, particularly Twitter, to influence press and television coverage. The chapter also sets out three fields of dysfunctional hybridity, in which a confluence of older and newer media logics came to threaten democratic norms: the rise of “fake news,” automated bot (software robot) activity during the televised debates, and the role of politically motivated hacking and a newly resurgent—and increasingly belligerent—WikiLeaks. On a more optimistic note, chapter 10 also discusses how hybrid media played a decisive role in the Women’s March, the biggest single-day protest in U.S. history. I show how the march, when integrated with the actions of professional fact-checking journalists, became an important part of the January 2017 counter-inauguration that subverted Trump’s ability to set the agenda during his first week in office.

  Finally, in the Conclusion to this volume, I draw together the book’s main arguments about hybridity, power, systems, and media logics.

  1

  An Ontology of Hybridity

  Hybridity offers a powerful way of thinking about politics and society, a means of seeing the world that highlights complexity, interdependence, and transition. It captures heterogeneity and those things that are irreducible to simple, unified essences. It eschews simple dichotomies and it alerts us to the unusual things that often happen when the new has continuities with the old. The original Greek sense of the hybrid as something that questions conventional understandings and the accepted order suggests how the metaphor usefully unsettles some of our fixed conceptions. Hybridity is inevitably associated with flux, in-betweenness, the interstitial, and the liminal. It is about being out of sync with a familiar past and a half-grasped future. It provides a useful disposition for studying political communication.

  Hybridity’s Origins

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word hybrid has its origins in Latin and in ancient Rome. From the very beginning, the term has held connotations of the unusual or exotic. During the late nineteenth century the Encyclopedia Britannica referred to its Greek usage for “an outrage on nature” (Warren, 1884). Latinized versions of hybrid began to work their way into English texts during the early seventeenth century, and the first recorded usage emerged in the 1601 translation of the Natural History, first published in a.d. 79 by Roman statesman and philosopher Pliny the Elder. Pliny’s thirty-seven-volume work includes a series of bizarre animal and part-human creatures drawn from far-flung corners of the globe, descriptions of which he had gathered during his traveling conversations with storytellers. Pliny’s imagining of the hybrid as the unusual continued to exert an influence through to the late medieval period. Traces of this connotation survive to this day.

  During the seventeenth century, hybridity acquired a racial meaning as a label for mixed racial inheritance. More importantly, however, during this period the term’s meaning was “transferred,” and it began to be used in a figurative sense to describe any entity derived from “heterogeneous or incongruous sources” or with “a mixed character.” The formal codification of the word and the acquisition of its modern scientific meaning began in 1775, when John Ash’s English dictionary included the definition “begotten between animals of different species, produced from plants of different kinds.” The same sense was used in 1801 by U.S. president Thomas Jefferson, and in 1828 a botanical definition was included in Noah Webster’s famous American Dictionary of the English Language. This usage of hybrid spread during the mid-nineteenth century and found its way into the writings of several scientists, including most notably Charles Darwin, as it gradually acquired a more neutral inflection associated with the expanding science of genetics.

  These two broad sets of usages—the specialist one common in scientific discourse, especially genetics, and the figurative one characteristic of literary, artistic, and everyday discourse—continued throughout the twentieth century and into the contemporary period. Specialized associated meanings include, for example “hybrid computer,” used in the 1950s to describe machines that combined emerging digital technologies with the features of older analog computers based on hydraulics, mechanics, or simple electronics.

  There are limits to etymology. But this brief sketch hints at several useful preliminary aspects of hybridity as a metaphor for thinking about politics and society. It is intriguing that the figurative meaning of the term emerged early in its English usage. This points to the attraction of the metaphor as a tool for capturing heterogeneity. Hybridity alerts us to the unusual things that happen when distinct entities come together to create -something new that nevertheless has continuities with the old.

  Hybridity in the Social Sciences

  In recent decades, hybridity has diffused across a diverse array of social science disciplines and fields, as well as broader categories of social and political thought; it is one of the few genuinely interdisciplinary trends. The idea is now endowed with a loose but identifiable set of themes about the workings of the social world. In other words, thinking in terms of hybridity amounts to something like an ontology, where ontology is understood as a theoretical disposition that enables us to ask and answer some new and different questions about the nature of contemporary society. A central appeal of this ontology of hybridity is its means of capturing and explaining the significance of processes that might be obscured by dichotomous, essentialist, or simply less flexible orientations.

  I use ontology here in a very basic sense. A philosophical term, originally from metaphysics, it refers, in the words of Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday, to “assertions or assumptions about the nature of being and reality: about what ‘the real world’ is.… ” Ontologies often contain “hierarchical relations” as “certain entities may be assigned prior existence, higher modality, or some other privileged status” (Chandler & Munday, 2011). Ontologies are necessary because, as John Scott and Gordon Marshall argue, “Any way of understanding the world, or some part of it, must make assumptions (which may be implicit or explicit) about what kinds of things do or can exist in that domain, and what might be their conditions of existence, relations of dependency, and so on.” (J. Scott & Marshall, 2009: 531).

  In political science, comparativists have recently turned to the concept of “hybrid regimes” as a means of quelling growing frustration with the steadily expanding range of cases that display messy mixtures of democracy and authoritarianism. For example, Larry Diamond (2002) argues that many countries now have regimes that are best seen as “pseudodemocratic.” There has been a proliferation of “adjectival” regime types, such as “competitive authoritarianism.” In Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s extensive study, this captures the integrated coexistence of what appear to be forma
l democratic rules, such as free and fair elections, with religious or military elite coercion, excessive patronage, and the flouting of the rule of law by those in power (Levitsky & Way, 2010). A key theme here is transition. Many African, Asian, and Latin American countries have embarked on what, during the early phases, appeared to be journeys toward liberal democracy. But for a variety of reasons some regimes have become frozen in a pseudodemocratic stasis that those living in the West may find counterintuitive and normatively objectionable, even though these regimes are stable and broadly legitimate (Karl, 1995). As Richard Sklar (1987: 714) has argued, democracy is “an increasingly complex form of political organization. From that perspective, every country’s democracy is, at best, a composite fragment. Everywhere, democracy is under construction.” Political scientists have therefore started to question teleological assumptions about the inevitability of democratic transition. Increasingly, the focus is on hybridity as a “new and resilient” type of regime (Brownlee, 2009: 517; see also Ekman, 2009).

  This literature contains several important assumptions that have broader relevance for the study of media and politics. The static and universalizing analytical frameworks for the categorization of regimes and systems that were dominant during the Cold War era have now been jettisoned in favor of more complex, differentiated approaches. Hybrid regime theory reveals how democratic and authoritarian political practices intermesh and simultaneously coevolve. An important part of this shift is a renewed emphasis on understanding how regimes transition from one to another, how old and new institutional forms and behaviors blend and overlap, and how messy those transitions are when judged against fixed and abstract criteria. The notion of a hybrid system draws attention to change and flux, the passing of an older set of cultural and institutional norms, and the gradual emergence of new norms. But hybridity is not always and everywhere a state of obvious transition. In the case of systems that began to democratize but then froze at some point along the way, hybrid status has become the norm because it offers a lasting settlement enjoying broad legitimacy, or it concretizes the balance of power among societal groups. Alternatively, hybridity may be based on the creation and continuance of what are termed “reserved domains.” These are areas where elites have the capacity to retain strategic control over pockets of resources essential to their ongoing power and influence, and they exist alongside domains in which elites tactically cede control (Valenzuela, 1992). As we shall see throughout this book, attempts to create reserved domains are an important part of the struggle for preeminence among those associated with older and newer media logics.