Media hyperactivity drives a news story
Hillary Clinton does a mea culpa for RFK assassination comment/Associated Press
The uproar last weekend over Hillary Clinton’s glancing reference to
Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination is an example of how the dynamic of
journalism is being changed by the digital medium.
For those who don’t watch much TV, and might have missed it, Clinton
was campaigning in South Dakota last Friday and stopped in to talk
with the editorial board at the Argus Leader newspaper in Sioux
Falls.
About 20 minutes into the interview, which the Clinton campaign made
available via streaming video, she was asked why she was continuing
her campaign in the face of Barack Obama’s insurmountable dominance
in elected delegates. In an analytical tone, noting that long primary
seasons have not been unusual, she said, “My husband did not wrap up
the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere
in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was
assassinated in June in California.”
The remark drew little attention from the reporters following her
campaign, who were watching at the New York senator’s next stop, a
supermarket in Brandon, S.D. But back east, a New York Post writer
picked up on it and slapped it on the Web. It was quickly linked to
by the Drudge Report, then Politico and other political Web sites
grabbed it.
Back in Brandon, while reporters were sitting through Clinton’s
standard stump speech, their Blackberrys started buzzing with calls
from editors asking them, “The Web says Hillary admitted waiting
around in case somebody shoots Obama — get reaction!”
Clinton issued a brief regret that her remarks may have been misconstrued,
followed up later by a more detailed mea culpa, but by then it was
the lead story on television and front pages, continuing to be a
white-hot topic through the weekend.
The story at first was little-noted by reporters on the scene (the
initial story by the Associated Press, which is where the
Times-Standard gets most of its national political news, didn’t even
mention it), and the editor at the Argus Leader said it was clear her
remarks to them referred to the time line of Kennedy’s primary
candidacy, and not to his assassination.
But that didn’t stop pundits from saying that while Clinton may not
be wishing for something bad to befall Obama, it indicated some
psychological obsession that would effectively end even outside
chances of her nomination, not to mention hopes of a
vice-presidential spot on the ticket.
Some observations:
• With online news, the highest value is in getting other Web sites
to link to yours, driving traffic and thus enhancing advertising
value. Thus, the emphasis is on speed, not context, and on what’s
hot, not what’s necessarily important.
• Thus, it’s the Web that is increasingly driving the American news
agenda, not print or broadcast media. Where once the campaign
narrative was framed by in-depth stories that may have taken months
to gather, it is now dominated by the trivial. (The examples this year
are too many to list.)
• John Harris of Politico, a political Web site — in noting that
elite media such as the New York Times and ABC News that once set the
agenda “now take their cues from the newer, more daring ones” —
doesn’t think the story was worth the hype. “If this really was a big
story,” he wrote, “then the media has blown it for months. Clinton
made similar remarks to Time magazine back in March.”
The truth is, as Harris notes, Clinton’s mistake was not in saying
something beyond the pale, but in saying something that if pulled
from context would sound as if it were beyond the pale.
Meanwhile, serious and relevant stories, such as Obama’s foreign
policy views, or McCain’s health report, or Clinton’s financial
crisis sink with barely a notice.
The Times-Standard ran a modest story about Clinton’s apology on our
inside campaign page, which is where it should have been.
But on our Web site, we also recognize driving traffic is important.
That’s why we upload breaking stories throughout the day, and know
that stories attracting outside links — a mountain lion attack on a
hiker, a killer whale’s seal raid on a Trinidad beach, giant oysters,
or any story related to marijuana — result in thousands of hits.
It’s uncertain where this trend toward hyperactive media consumption
may lead us. But when it comes to important issues such as choosing a
president, it does not seem conducive to wise decisions.
