Social Media and the Transformation of Political News Reporting: Commentary on Recent Developments in Australia”

Terry Flew, Professor of Media and CommunicationCreative Industries Faculty/Digital Media Research CentreQueensland University of TechnologyPresentation to Center for Applied Communication Studies, Sun Yat-Sen University, October 28 2016

Global Media Consumption 2010-17

Australian Media Consumption 2010-17

Studying Digital and Social Media

Artefacts• infrastructrues•devices• services•platforms

Practices• activities• uses• communication• information/knowledge

Social arrangements• institutions•organisations• laws/policies•politics/economics

From Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (eds.),Handbook of New Media (SAGE, 2006)

Media, Technology and Politics

Artefacts• infrastructrues•devices• services•platforms

Practices• activities• uses• communication• information/knowledge

Social arrangements• institutions•organisations• laws/policies•politics/economics

Journalists, politicians,political communicators and strategists

Media institutions, Political parties

Media platformsand technologies

From mass media to social media?

Mass communications media (20th century)

Convergent social media (21st century)

Media distribution Large-scale; high barriers to entry Internet dramatically reduces barriers to entry

Media production Complex division of labour; media content gatekeepers; professional ideologies

Easy-to-use Web 2.0 technologies; multi-skilling; small collaborative teams

Media power One way communications flow Greater empowerment of users/audiences

Media content Tendency towards standardised mass appeal content to maximise audience share

‘Long tail’ economics; de-massification and segmentation of media content markets

Producer/consumer relationship

Impersonal, anonymous and commoditised (audiences as target mass market)

Potential to be more personalised and user-driven (user created content – UCC)

Australian Case Study

• Politics, Media and Democracy in Australia: public and producer perceptions of the Australian public sphere

• Brian McNair, Stephen Harrington, Terry Flew and Adam Swift

• To be published by Routledge, 2017

Research Methodology• Australian Research Council

project 2013-16: • Interviews with political leaders

and journalists• 24 focus groups in eight

Australian cities• Content analysis of political TV

shows• Broad interpretation of “political

television” – included comedies and “infotainment”

The Australian Political MediasphereMainstream Political Media (major newspapers, Insiders, 7.30 Report)

Innovative formats (Q&A, The Project)

Satire and Infotainment (Mad as Hell, Kitchen Cabinet, Gruen Nation)

Insiders

• Traditional panel program on ABC TV

• Interview with leading politicians

• Senior journalists discuss current political issues

Digital Media Research Centre

Q & A

• Interactive panel program with live audience

• Viewers can send video questions

• Live Twitter feed on air during the program

Kitchen Cabinet

• Journalist Annabel Crabb goes to a politician’s home and they cook her a meal

• Most popular programs during 2013 and 2016 elections have been Kitchen Cabinet with political leaders

Stable electoral democracy: the two-party model

Stages of the Politics/Media relationship

"Golden Age"

• Stable party system

• Specialist political reporting

• Dominance of print media

Mediatization of politics

• more fluid political allegiances

• 'Presidential' mode of campaigning

• Dominance of broadcast media

• Rise of political 'spin'

A new age in politics/media?

• Resurgence of political populism

• Growing importance of social media

• Political 'neo-tribes'?

Mediatization of politics• ‘If you're the Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition, it’s a media job.’

(Russel Howcroft, Gruen Nation, 4 September 2013).

• ‘Guess what? There’s a whole bunch of people out there who you may be surprised to know don't watch Insiders but do listen to FM radio. And my job as the alternative prime minister is to communicate with the entire country’ (Kevin Rudd, quoted in Wilson, 2010: 98).

•‘You know that old line when Daniel Schorr, a prominent American journalist who came up through print, decided in the early years of television decided he was going to move across. And at his first job at CBS he said to the producer, “You know, I understand print fine, but television has got me a bit puzzled, what’s the secret?” And the producer said to him, “Well, the key to success on television is sincerity, and if you can fake that you’ve got it made.”’(Kerry O’Brien, interview, 29 August, 2014).

Mediatization of Politics

Mediatization of Politics (Mazzoleni & Schulz, 1999)• Growing influence of “news values” over political actors• Political agenda increasingly shaped by needs of media

institutions• Politicians compete for attention, not just with other

politicians, but with all other priorities of the media• Political communication needs to be conducted by media

experts• Political institutions and media institutions deal with each

other instrumentally

Problems with mediated politics• Politics becomes a branch of promotional culture, where

‘politics, markets, popular culture and media, civil society, work and individual social relations have all adapted to promotional needs and practices’ (Davis, 2013, p. 4)

• Elite source dependency of journalists (“political insiders”)• Managed communication with the media (“spin”)• Limited array of forms of reporting politics – soundbites,

pseudo-events, “horse-race” journalism

#faketradie

“Political leaders are beginning to resemble seaside comics who have failed to recognise that the deckchairs are empty. Repertoires that had them rolling in the aisles in the era of Churchill and Roosevelt – or even Nixon and Wilson – now look like mediocre impersonations.Not only are political speeches replete with linguistically risk-averse clichés borrowed from middle management – “facing important challenges”, “we’re listening very carefully”, “moving forward”, “all in it together”, “people who do the right thing” – but the semiotic production has been reduced to a constant replay of metaphors designed for idiots.Politicians wear hard-hats and orange protective jackets, as if to prove they thrive on the shop floor. Leaders have a routine habit of making speeches surrounded by “ordinary people” who look like involuntary participants in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.The surprise is surely not that whole sections of the population are turned off by these preposterous rituals, but that some people are still paying any attention.”• Stephen Coleman, “Donald Trump: Both the old crazy and the new normal”,

The Conversation, May 14, 2016

Political “spin”• And through history we’ve never had so many information like

now, and so little truth. (male and female participants, Focus Group #24, Brisbane, 18/5/15)

• I tend to take about ninety percent of what the politicians say as Chinese whispers. You know they’re not going to tell you the truth no matter what. Their job is spin. (Male participant, Focus Group #10, Lismore, 18/6/14)

• The spin machine is out there. These guys get their speeches written for them. (Female participant, Focus Group #9, Lismore, 17/6/14)

Spin and its Discontents

• What is now universally derided as “spin” is, in fact, a whole range of techniques that have evolved among politicians in response to changing media dynamics. In essence, these techniques, though highly manipulative, are inherently defensive. The more the media set out to trap politicians in order to generate entertainment content, the more politicians have to resort to dubious artifice to do their jobs (Tanner, 2011: 93).

•Journalists love to bag spin doctors. Bewailing the growth of the PR industry is one of our favourite pastimes … The incredible proliferation of spin, we tell ourselves, is a threat to journalism and to democracy. We’re right – but let’s now wallow in self-righteous despair. We in the media are key players in the spin cycle, not passive, powerless observers of it. At our best, we disrupt spin; at our worst, we encourage it (Knott, 2012: 53).

Focus groups on spin• And through history we’ve never had so many information like now, and so

little truth. (male and female participants, Focus Group #24, Brisbane, 18/5/15)

• I tend to take about ninety percent of what the politicians say as Chinese whispers. You know they’re not going to tell you the truth no matter what. Their job is spin. (Male participant, Focus Group #10, Lismore, 18/6/14)

•The spin machine is out there. These guys get their speeches written for them. (Female participant, Focus Group #9, Lismore, 17/6/14)

Spin-doctors and the media in Australia

• The biggest problem is just an outnumbering of spin-doctors versus journalists, which simply means that it’s harder for journalists to get to the bottom of what’s really happening, rather than reporting a version, however mild it might be, of the spin that they’re given. But this has been going on for decades. (Peter van Onselen, interview, 20 June, 2014)

• I think it’s overdrawn for theatrical effect [in programs such as The Thick Of It and The Hollowmen] but political and communications directors tend to be very powerful people in government, and they are certainly as a general rule more powerful than anybody in government except the Prime Minister, the Premier, or one of two senior ministers. (Bruce Hawker, interview, 19 June, 2014)

The populist challenge to the politics/media establishment

Digital Media Research Centre

“I have never voted. Like most people I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites …As far as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by obediently X-ing a little box”. (Russell Brand, New Statesman editorial, October 2013)

Digital Media Research Centre

Crisis of representative democracy? (UK General Election Voter Turnout)

Digital Media Research Centre

Decline in major party voting Australian Senate election Combined Liberal/LNP &

Labor Senate vote (%)

1983 85.4

2013 66.6

2016 63.6 (provisional)

The new politics of the street

Connective action• Connective action networks are ‘typically far more individualised and

technologically organised sets of processes that result in action without the requirement of collective identity framing or the level of organisational resources required to respond effectively to opportunities’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 750).

• “In this connective logic, taking public action or contributing to a common good becomes an act of personal expression and recognition or self-validation achieved by sharing ideas and actions in trusted relationships … This ‘sharing’ may take place in networked sites such as Facebook … Twitter and YouTube … Action networks characterised by this logic may scale up rapidly through the combination of easily spreadable personal action frames and digital technology enabling such communication. This invites analytical attention to the network as an organisational structure in itself” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, pp. 752-53).

Collective action and connective actionCollective Action Connective Action

Logic of formation Institutions/organisations to enable action around shared concerns (e.g. political parties)

Networks based around social media and “weak ties” – importance of “personal action frames”

Resource mobilisation

High – requires aggregation of resources to achieve political goals

Low – participants can “piggy back” off digital infrastructure of social media

Decision-making Formal and membership-based; office holders; elections

Informal: consensus sought through sharing of actions and ideas – allows for rapid “scaling up”

Alignment and identity

Individuals collectively agree to adopt a shared communal identity

Affective publics (Papacharrissi) – people choose to have a shared affinity with particular groups

Connective action and the new populism

Bernie Sanders – US Democratic Party Presidential contender

Jeremy Corbyn - UK Labour Party leader

The New Populism and the Media

• Populists typically construct an opposition between “the people” and “the elites” or ‘the political class”

• Mainstream media are a part of “the elites”, so they are distrusted as information sources

• Populist politicians and mainstream media have an ambivalent relationship to each other – most populists want to be in the media

• Social media can and do provide alternative outlets for populist politics

The New Populism

Donald Trump – US Republican Party Presidential candidate

Nigel Farage –UK Independence Party founder

Roberto Duterte, new Presidentof the Phillippines

Populism in Australian politics

Pauline Hanson

NickXenophon

ClivePalmer

Post-truth politics?

Populism and “post-truth politics”

• Political polarisation and the rise of “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles”

• Commercial success in media more about “niches” than mass audiences

• Social media data analytics can identify political preferences and deliver preferred news to you

• Populism tends to promote candidates representing extremes (“the base”) rather than the political centre

Focus group responses on social media• Through social media, the underdog, the public, they

can express what they’re saying and the corporate world has really no place in social media. It’s really kind of the public that push their opinions forward (R1, Focus Group 1, 6 March, 2012, Brisbane).

• Social media probably makes political debates more transparent, and puts more opinions out there. Then everybody’s a little bit more informed, they can see subjects from different points of view and angles. So there’s just more information (Focus Group 8, 3 June, 2014, Toowoomba).

Focus group responses on social media

• Used correctly, social media and the debates that the public have between the public, they can be very educational because you get lots of people’s points of view … [but] I’ve seen a lot of political discussions on social media spin out of control into just, insults, and kind of like it actually happens in politics. But, there’s a good and a bad. I mean, you’re never going to have a system that’s completely correct. But I think there can be some use to it if we find some way to make people stop and think before they post (R9, Focus Group 6, Brisbane, 24 May 2014).

• Social media is an infant market still. You know, it’s got a lot of maturing to do, and it is gradually, and I think maybe that’ll be a force to be reckoned with, we’ll democratise things (R6, Focus Group 15, Geelong, 25 February 2015).

Main Findings from Australian Case• Australian public are engaged with political process• Social media do not replace traditional media –

relationship is a more complementary one• Rise of hybrid formats to engage audiences in politics that

co-exist with more “serious” programs• Opinion journalism is increasing as the number of

political journalists employed in newsrooms declines• Public service media become important to counter

growth of “filter bubbles”