Networked

A Contemporary History of News in Transition

Adrienne Russell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745649528
  9780745649511
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745637730
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Journalism, what happened? In the last decade, the industry and the profession have been rocked to the core. Newspapers as consumer product are as ripe for comic mocking and satire as are the techniques of the journalism profession. The contemporary death and life of journalism is the story of an historic cultural transition. We have lived through the end of the mass-media era and the beginning of the networked-media era. We took in news one way for a century and we simply don't do it like that anymore. Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition examines this moment in journalism, the conditions that brought it about and the characteristics that have shaped it and will shape its future. In crafting this sophisticated yet accessible study, new-media scholar Adrienne Russell draws on personal interviews with journalists and analysts at the center of the shift, examines innovative and revealing digital news projects, and underlines larger cultural changes that reflect the new news reality. Networked also examines emergent journalism practices that suggest the forces at work and the stakes involved in developments we have all experienced but, caught up in the rush of change, have had limited perspective to interpret.

1

Introduction

The Rise of Networked Journalism

The Gulf War was the best-covered war in history.

Dick Cheney (Frontline 1996)

Preface

Networked is about a transformative era in the history of media, the twenty-year period from 1990 to 2010, when the web rose and newspapers declined. The book centers on the transition as it has occurred in journalism. In networked journalism, members of various publics make journalism material that intersects, mixes, and is distributed to a new heightened degree. To me, networked journalism is journalism that sees publics acting as creators, investigators, reactors, (re)makers, and (re)distributors of news and where all variety of media, amateurs and professional, corporate and independent products and interests intersect at a new level. What’s more, the variety of forms and perspectives that make up news in this environment and the number of connections linking creators to one another have significant influence on the news and have expanded journalism as a category of information and genre of storytelling.

Others have described networked journalism simply as collaboration between professionals and amateurs (Beckett 2008; Jarvis 2006; Rosen 2009). Jeff Jarvis (2006), journalist and author of the high-profile blog BuzzMachine, writes that in networked journalism, “the public can get involved in a story before it is reported, contributing facts, questions, and suggestions. The journalists can rely on the public to help report the story.” Jarvis describes a trend where professional journalists accept input from the public while maintaining their authority over the news product, but this shift in the relationship between professionals and the public is just one element of the current changes taking place. Networked journalism is about more than journalists using a digitally equipped public as a kind of new hyper-source. It is also about a shift in the balance of power between news providers and news consumers. Digital publishing tools and powerful mobile devices are matched by cultural developments such as increased skepticism toward traditional sources of journalistic authority (Jenkins 2006; Russell et al. 2008). Contemporary journalism products and practices give new relevance to long-standing questions at the heart of what used to be called the journalism profession: How is truth defined and by whom? Which forms and practices of journalism yield the most credible product? How do consumers measure value among, on the one hand, elite media institutions, with their gatekeepers, resources, and professional codes and training, and, on the other, the bloggers and wiki-ists and emailers, with their editorial independence, collaborative structures, and merit-based popularity?

These questions became central to the debate about the 2003 Iraq War and about news of the war as it circulated on the internet, over the airwaves, and in print. Working at the time as a Networked Publics Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication, where my colleagues were researching new digital realities in youth and music and activist media cultures, for example, I came to view the heavily mediated culture of the news information industry as transformative, especially as I began to compare coverage of the 1991 war and coverage of the 2003 war. I grew to believe the similarities of the two eras underline the differences: there were two presidents Bush, two Persian Gulf wars, and two media environments.

The Old and New News

Gulf War 1991: High-Modernist Journalism

Coverage of the first Gulf War was characterized by the qualities of mass media – by the predominance of commercial and professional news product and a one-way communication model catering to a national community. Coverage of the second Gulf War was characterized by qualities of networked media – by an influx of independent and amateur news products and conversational models of communication organized around communities of interest.

The first Gulf War was not just a mass-media story, not even just another trademark mass-media story like Watergate or the O.J. Simpson chase and trial. It was more a culminating kind of story, an exclamation point to a chapter in communication history. The address delivered by President George H. Bush the night the war began, January 16, 1991, attracted the largest audience in the history of American television. Nielson estimated that 78.8 percent of the people in homes with television sets were watching and that record numbers of those viewers stayed tuned as the U.S. Air Force began its attack on Iraqi infrastructure (Carter 1991). The narrative strategy adopted by the broadcast stations was to simultaneously stoke the drama and sanitize the action. News staffs branded the event with dramatic music and titles based on Pentagon operation names like “Iraqi Freedom” and “Desert Shield.” Editors flipped among segments featuring Pentagon analysts, snapping and sparkling artillery over Baghdad, and fighter-plane footage of U.S. smart bombs delivering themselves through windows and doors of Iraqi buildings – technological footage that looked like a cerebral video-game, where each of the bombs snaked over the city toward the ground and ended in a silent flash. The intensity of the story was heightened by the fact that its subject was the first-ever “realtime” war, a media product made possible by new technology that enabled reporters to beam video over satellite feeds.

The practice of journalism as developed and promoted in the hundred years before the war – including sourcing preferences where authorities dominated, narrative structures that privileged the status quo, the rise of visual media culture, and the widespread adoption of broadcast technology – yielded consistent coverage of the war at the major news outlets, producing, in effect, a single narrative across media, a narrative that was, it turned out, easy to manipulate. The first Gulf War is often cited as an example of the revolutionary “CNN effect” in action, an instance where a popular twenty-four-hour international news channel significantly influenced public opinion and government policy (Belknap 2001; Livingston 1997). The idea is that by focusing continuous real-time media coverage on a particular conflict, international incident, or diplomatic initiative, the news media increase public awareness and political attention and accelerate the policymaking process. The press, in its role as the so-called “fourth estate” in representative political systems, however, has always had an influence on public opinion and policy. The CNN effect simply describes the intensification of already existing relations. The introduction of the twenty-four-hour news cycle did not mark a revolution in news media but rather a culmination, where practices were exaggerated and relations intensified, the lines separating journalists from the sources of their stories and the companies they worked for becoming increasingly blurred as a matter of perception if not of fact.

The Narrative

After the fact, journalists lamented that they lost control of the Gulf War story, that they had been docile and easily shepherded by their sources. Mostly they said they had failed to properly follow the long-established codes of the profession, which, if followed, would have yielded more complex and accurate coverage (Massig 2004). The story they missed in their post-war mea culpa reporting, however, was the “perfect storm” of long-gathering professional, technological, social, and political conditions that made the first Gulf War the ideal mass-media news story, not a low point, from that perspective, but a high point, less an aberration than an inevitability.

Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney saw the war from that perspective, describing it as “the best-covered war in history.”

We provided more information in near real-time than ever before in history in any conflict. The press was not happy with the way we did it because a lot of it we did direct to the American people. Our daily briefings for example that were covered live on television. They didn’t get to cover the war they wanted to cover but in fact the nature of modern combat, the fact you fight at dark at very high speeds across desert terrain, that means the old romantic notions of a reporter going out sort of traveling with the troops are a thing of the past and you have to, in fact, make arrangements for the press to cover that kind of an operation. It has to be done in conjunction with military and . . . I was interested in seeing that they got a chance to do their job but not at the risk of accomplishing the mission or at the risk of casualties to American troops. (Frontline 1996)

By “best-covered war,” Cheney meant it was the most tightly controlled and spectacularly delivered war coverage ever produced. The relatively few outlets that delivered versions of the war alternative to the dominant narrative did not benefit from the institutional backing and channels of distribution that helped saturate the world with Cheney’s “best-covered war.” That narrative of events came almost entirely out of briefings organized by the military and attended by reporters from major news outlets the world over. In Iraq, as opposed to Vietnam, for example, very few reporters were allowed to visit the frontlines or to conduct interviews with soldiers, and those visits and interviews were conducted in the presence of officers and subject to both prior approval by the military and later security editing. Indeed, these “information management” tactics came as part of a public relations strategy designed to avoid a repeat of what the military viewed as the public relations disaster of the Vietnam War (Hatchen & Scotton 2006; Kellner 1992).

By almost all measures, the Pentagon’s updated public relations approach had the intended effect on journalists as much as it did on the larger public. Opinion polls showed Americans overwhelmingly supported the war. According to a Pew survey (2003b), 77 percent felt the U.S. had made the right decision in attacking Iraq. One LA Times Mirror poll (1991) found that 50 percent of respondents considered themselves “obsessed” with war news and that nearly 80 percent felt the military was “telling as much as it could.” Perhaps because the duration of the invasion was so brief (January 17, 1991 to February 28, 1991), support for the war and trust in the military remained consistently high. Americans also became part of the war news at the pro-war rallies that were covered nightly on television. Anti-war protests, however, received comparatively scant coverage, in terms of column inches and broadcast time. The protests didn’t fit the narrative. They were made to seem aberrational or anti-American through context by editors who ran protest coverage alongside reports of anti-American demonstrations in the Middle East (Kellner 1992). On one side, viewers were presented with flag-waving choruses of pro-USA chants; on the other, flag stompings and burnings in effigy (Bishop 2006).

It was only much later that journalists, citizen groups, and official investigators succeeded in publicizing the extent and success of the Pentagon’s control of the war narrative. Pressed for information, the military admitted a year later that many of the war’s star weapons systems had not performed as well as reported. The Stealth bomber experienced technical difficulties and the Navy’s Cruise missiles struck not 90 percent of their targets, as the Pentagon claimed at the time, but only 50 percent (Hatchen & Scotton 2006: 142). It was not until January 6, 1992 that John MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, revealed in a New York Times op-ed some of the facts surrounding the compelling testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl identified only as Nayirah, whose allegations that Iraqi soldiers killed infant children in Kuwait were used to trump up support for the war. She had not been witness to a terrifying hospital raid by Iraqi soldiers. In fact she was the daughter of a Kuwaiti diplomat and her influential emotional Capitol Hill testimony was a fraud: the facts of the alleged raid had been exaggerated beyond recognition; and the Capitol Hill hearing itself had been a mock-hearing orchestrated by a PR firm and chaired by two sitting U.S. Representatives in its pay. But it all looked real on television. The Congressional setting, the men in suits posing questions behind microphones, and the tear-soaked testimony riveted television audiences primed to respond to the visual cues. Cable news flashed the testimony around the world as if it were taking place before a genuine committee hearing. Then-President Bush quoted Nayirah at every opportunity. Six times in one month he referred to “312 premature babies at Kuwait City’s maternity hospital who died after Iraqi soldiers stole their incubators and left the infants on the floor,” none of which was true (Ireland 1991) but all of which had been a very real news story.

High Journalism Brought Low

This perfect storm countered the goals of the mass-media news profession that emerged in the early 1800s in the United States, where newspapers were freed from reliance on political parties and touted as a potentially post-partisan educational medium that could bolster democracy. The advent of the penny press in 1833 signaled a new breed of newspaper based on a commercial model that sought mass readership (Schudson 1978; Schudson & Karl 1986). Benjamin Day, publisher of the first penny press paper, the New York Sun, expanded circulation of the paper by appealing to working-class readers with sensationalistic stories that dealt with the concerns of the masses. His writers reported on crime, local politics, natural disasters, labor struggles, and the cost of living, much of which had not been considered newsworthy previously. Advertisers were willing to pay for space and the Sun dropped its price from five cents to one cent, making it affordable to those outside the elite classes. The economic viability of sensationalism helped move newspapers away from reliance on political parties for financial support. The penny press industry brought in more advertisers and employees and intensified competition for news and for audiences.

But parallel to the rise of commercial news and mass circulation came the rise of professionalism (Schudson 1978; Schudson & Karl 1986). Research suggests the ideal of news objectivity came with the invention of the telegraph in the early 1840s and the subsequent birth in 1848 of the first American wire service, the Associated Press (AP). AP and other wire services attempted to produce reporting objective enough to be accepted by the politically varied papers that they served. Striving for objectivity did not, however, become the norm or practice in journalism until after World War I. Wartime propaganda and public relations campaigns convinced journalists that facts could not be trusted; that what they reported too often had been created for them to report by interested parties. Staged media events and the proliferation of government-sponsored information had shaped reporting and the opinions of reporters. In response, news writers formed an allegiance to rules and procedures alleged to result in objective reporting (Schudson 1978; Schudson & Karl 1986). According to journalism historian Michael Schudson, objectivity meant that “a person’s statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community” (1978: 7). The growing professional faith of journalists generated social cohesion and occupational pride, on the one hand, and internal social control, on the other. Journalists and editors, in effect, policed one another through promotion and lack of promotion, for example. By the 1920s, this pattern produced a self-conscious professionalism and a dominant ethic based on objectivity (Schudson 1978: 82).

Journalism scholar Daniel Hallin has famously referred to the subsequent era of American journalism – from the end of World War II until roughly the 1980s – as high modernism, and demonstrates that rather than being the natural or ultimate state of journalism, it was just a brief period based on very specific histori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The Rise of Networked Journalism
• 2. Participatory Journalism: The Wealth of Networks
• 3. From Personalization to Socialization
• 4. News Parody, Satire, Remix: When There’s Nothing to Do But Laugh
• 5. Public Life and the Future of News
• Index