Every few years, Flow’s editors select our favorite columns from the last few volumes. We’ve added special introductions and included the original comments to the piece below. Enjoy!

Flow Columns Editor Caroline Leader:
Jayson Harsin’s exploration of WikiLeaks provides a wide shot of the famed web scandal within a larger political, global and ideological landscape. By presenting five theses, his article creates endless potential for further research. WikiLeaks on its own is one of those mouth-watering “texts” that presents both a complicated web of government control, international relationships and public figure grandstanding, but also reduces these seemingly intricate associations to playground behavior. For all the proclamations of “security threats” and “acts of terrorism” attributed to Assange’s actions, Harsin deftly identifies the factors that are really at play: reputations and status. And this is what I truly love about the article: that it identifies concepts with which we are familiar—self-interest, personal gain, relational back scratching—but also recognizes how the cables of communication are twisted by perception, interception, and power.

Harsin reveals not only the political importance of this journalistic phenomenon, but also the vital interplay between new and old media forms. As he explains it, WikiLeaks relied on both the underground, fast-paced nature of online communication and the credibility of traditional print sources to gain exposure. Also, it upset what has historically been an airtight relationship between government and some elite press sources, which expose certain facts at certain times in order to create a narrative that serves national interests. What WikiLeaks reminded us, according to Harsin, is that the “rising power of new media production” could be “transforming hitherto well-contained spectacular public spheres and their democracies.”

While I may devolve into simplistic comparisons in this short explanation, Harsin seeks no easy answers and opens up a larger conversation about convergence culture, political economics in journalism, and more generally the power economics at the center of press coverage and diversion tactics.

Regardless of whether one agrees with allegations that Wikileaks is an international security threat, a new media-facilitated champion of democratic accountability, or that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is a rapist, it is an unmistakably rich object of media and political analysis. Arguably, l’Affaire Wikileaks (hereafter WA) holds lessons about changing relations between new and old media forms and production; attention, circulation, media capital and celebrity; political economy and journalism; and even democracy and international relations.

The WA above all begs attention to attention.1 The affair, not just the material released, became a huge agenda-setter in 2010. Several news organizations dubbed it a “top” story of 2010.2 In Canada, Wikileaks founder Assange was voted top newsmaker of the year by senior editors at Postmedia Network newspapers and canada.com.3 Even more impressively, Assange was nominated for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.4 Other global news organizations, such as France’s Le Monde, named him person of the year.

European public opinion was split nearly 50/50 over Wikileaks’ releases, amid widespread government charges that Wikileaks had jeopardized international security. Meanwhile, sparring continues between renowned British investigative journalist Nick Davies and Bianca Jagger over Assange’s alleged sexual abuse. A sore spot in that exchange is the way celebrities can, via new media attention, influence public perception and opinion, despite, as Davies argues, who has the facts (i.e. professional investigative journalists). Now consider Wikileaks’ Google statistics (01/09/11):

• Blogs: 8,560,000
• Discussions: 1,440,000
• News: 17,800
• Videos: 12,000
• Images: 26,200,000
• Everything: 72,000,000
• Compare Hillary Clinton everything: 10,900,000

The very reason Wikileaks evokes such strong split reactions in public opinion, and such widespread old journalism support, symbolizes dreams and realities in this increasingly globalized convergence culture (CC). For many who support Wikileaks, it may well symbolize precisely the rising power of new media production transforming hitherto well-contained spectacular public spheres and their democracies. Instead of the old back-scratching relationship between journalism and professional politics (with grassroots movements struggling to get media attention using Civil Rights Era strategies), now supposedly non-elites could start up a Wiki and start producing a profoundly new kind of democratic accountability formerly relegated to Habermasian ideal types. Wikileaks symbolized how “We the People” can matter again, via new media production and circulation technologies from the website, to video and photo-editing, the cell phone to the laptop. From the beginning, Wikileaks claimed a public service. According to the original and current web page, Wikileaks “publish material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of our sources anonymous, thus providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices.” On the other hand, WA symbolizes the ongoing formidable power of old elites to re-frame agendas and govern by public opinion polling.

Leaving aside the theories of why citizens and government might identify/be disgusted with Wikileaks, the dynamics of attention acquisition suggest several points peculiar to CC, about which I’ll offer five theses.

First, information-brokering political sites can become new primary definers of public agendas and even for old news/journalism, their democratizing quality being that their agents are not professional journalists or politicians. But, for circulation and audience they rely on older news organizations and their resources for re-distribution.5 Thus, with their founder and unofficial director hounded by subpoenas and their site (and mirror sites) under multi-government cyber-attack, Wikileaks chose to release documents—from July 2010 to the present—to select elite global news organizations who would officially leak the classified material (perhaps also as legal strategy): New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, and then in November, Le Monde. Here, e-democracy depends on old news for media capital and thus public significance.

Second, to return to Bianca Jagger, the attention economy that made Wikileaks a top story of 2010 and Julian Assange runner-up for Time Person of the Year is also a parasitic celebrity CC. Out of celebrity retirement to publicize the defense of Wikileaks came Daniel Ellsberg, the U.S. military analyst who notoriously/heroically released the government-embarrassing Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg claimed, “The truth is that every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”6 Other global celebrities adding to Wikileaks’ media capital, public opinion support and circulation include Noam Chomsky and Republican Congressman Ron Paul, the latter of whom proclaimed: “Lying is not Patriotic.”7 Established opinion leader-celebrities, or simply celebrities who may wield media capital to become political opinion leaders enhanced the media capital and circulation of Wikileaks and Assange as well as their own media capital in a synergistic dynamic.8

But Assange’s own rhetorical-PR gifts in using CC for celebrity capital should not be overlooked. Assange/Wikileaks could have dumped the thousands of documents on their site each time and tweeted them or notified old news sources. Instead, he time and again used interviews (or tweets) to prime news organizations and larger audiences for an upcoming release, which of course would rarely be everything he had, whether it was “5 GB” on Bank of America, an “insurance file” whose key would be publicly released to unlock all files in the event of harm to Wikileaks or himself or thousands of documents inappropriate for synchronous release because names were being removed to protect innocents. Assange has reproduced TV serial-style intrigue, teasers at end of an episode to build his media capital and tantalize salivating audiences.

Third, the reaction of primary defining, resource-rich government sources, for media content production, monitoring, and recirculation, reveals the existing obstacles “politico-cultural” producers face trying to set/frame elite news agendas, address audiences and create publics/counterpublics. The response was hardly one of rational-critical debate, with those like Hillary Clinton calling Assange an international “security threat,” basically implying what bolder voices such as Rep. Peter King, Chair of the Homeland Security Committee, spouted less subtly: Assange is a terrorist.9 American public opinion followed the governmental frame: nearly 60% said they wanted Assange prosecuted.

While prominent journalist Nick Davies defended the British arrest of Assange as based on substantial rape charges, the timing of the accusations do indeed bear the qualities of a classic rumor bomb.10 As with rumor bombs like “Obama is a Muslim” or “Shirley Sherrod is a racist,” the targets are forced to react quickly, not on their own terms, perhaps even responding with their own tables-turning accusations or rumor bombs. Thus, if Assange is guilty of rape, the timing of international governmental support for an Interpol arrest warrant, after thousands of diplomatic cables had been released, may be met with public cynicism. On the other hand, international 50/50 public opinion splits suggest the power of governments and elite news to frame and influence public opinion. Despite the rhetorical flourishes of Ron Paul, Noam Chomsky and Bianca Jagger, how often was international news agenda occupied with a rational defense by the United States and other countries/political actors of the lies and misleading elite projects revealed in the documents? Of course, the strategy is to deflect attention.

Fourth, the condemnation of Wikileaks by state actors as oppositional as the U.S. and Iran might give some spectators pause, wondering if despite perceived differences, international elites are tremendously invested in maintaining technocracy amid vague semblances of representative democracy and in setting policy agendas without the meddling of newcomer actors in/of e-democracy. Is it not telling that Russia’s Putin condemned the Assange arrest and opposition to Wikileaks as “un-democratic,” while Russian President Medvedev declared Assange should receive the Nobel Prize?11 The evidence suggests a threat to elite international relations and also the opportunity for some elites to capitalize on that threat for their own foreign policy agendas (instead of Russia, it’s the U.S. they would have accused of being undemocratic in the international court of opinion).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fifth, we see more evidence of how the great potential of cultural production/agency is constrained by a powerful political economy of media presentation and attention. Just look at the dramatic movement between hosts; Wikileaks’ old hosts being the target of possible state-resourced hacks, their move to Amazon, who subsequently shut it down allegedly for violation of policy, and then their move to French company OVH where they are currently under unresolved legal attacks by the French government. Appearance on the Internet is not guaranteed simply because one has a laptop, or even the money to purchase a domain name.

Another economic-power issue involves funding. Last December, Paypal refused to take any more donations to Wikileaks (which runs on donations); a few days later Swiss bank Postfinance announced it was freezing Assange’s assets totaling 31,000 Euros; then Mastercard and Visa refused to handle donations, followed by Bank of America.

And yet again, one can’t overlook how a popular Internet response did not let this political economy go unchallenged. Some analysts cite the Streisand Effect to explain Wikileaks, where any attempt to censor the Internet is met with efforts to reproduce/re-circulate the material under threat.12 This is precisely what happened last December when hundreds of mirror sites appeared as “Operation Payback.” Anonymous groups of supporters have also periodically attacked and hacked the sites of Wikileaks’ detractors, again in December under the banner of “Operation Avenge Assange.”

Heroic or villainous, Assange and Wikileaks are indisputably a sign of the times.

Image Credits:
1. Wikileaks Twitter Feed Screen Capture / Twitter
2. Julian Assange / Reuters
3. Daniel Ellsberg / AP
4. Bianca Jagger / Reuters

Original comments:

Caroline Ferris Leader said:
Great article, Jayson. I am especially interested in your section on nations with seemingly disparate goals and ideologies jumping on the anti-Assange bandwagon. Despite differences, it seems that we’re working with a global system where each nation’s must news media feels obligated to give a canned respond in order to gain credibility as a meaning-making state.
-January 20th, 2011 at 6:44 am

Please feel free to comment.

1. Throughout this article, I’m building on my theory of convergence culture and politics articulated in “That’s Democratainment: Obama, Rumor Bombs and Primary Definers,” in Flow, in which I critically engage several other theorists. For an outline of the characteristics of the Rumor bomb concept see my articles in Flow.
2. The Los Angeles Times top 100 stories had Wikileaks’ July 25 release of thousands of classified military intelligence documents dating from 2004-2009 at 52 (That’s before Obama’s announcement ending combat in Iraq, Glenn Beck’s rally to “restore honor,” and the Ground Zero Mosque).
3. Additionally, Assange was ranked fourth in an Ipsos-Reid poll of 1,044 Canadians, and an informal survey of editors revealed six out of 10 Postmedia publications felt Assange “had affected profoundly how information is seen and delivered.” Found in “Wikileaks’ Julian Assange is 2010’s Top Newsmaker, Montreal Gazette, Dec. 26, 2010, retrieved 9 Jan. 2011 at http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/WikiLeaks+Julian+Assange+2010+newsmaker/4027279/story.html#ixzz1AYnfotxA
4. Time Magazine’s Person of the Year award went to another new media celebrity, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
5. As McChesney and Nichols, among others, have recently argued, non-professional news sites statistically do not generate news, because they don’t have the resources and training; they re-circulate and comment on it. However, Wikileaks has shown the opposite potential in convergence culture, to set old news agendas. Yet, one can argue that it is still dependent on that old news media redistribution for its media capital. See McChesney, Robert and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism (Philadelphia: Perseus., 2010).
6. Daniel Ellsberg et. Al, “Daniel Ellsberg Praises Wikileaks,” SF Gate, Dec. 7, 2010. Retrieved 9 January 2010 at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/opinionshop/detail?entry_id=78596
7. Ron Paul, “Lying Is Not Patriotic,” Anti-war.com, Dec. 10, 2010. Retrieved 9 January, 2011 at http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2010/12/09/lying-is-not-patriotic/
8. For an important argument that claims media capital may trump capital in other fields (via Bourdieu’s field theory), see Nick Couldry, “Media Meta-Capital: Extending the Range of Bourdieu’s Field Theory,” Theory and Society 32 (5-6), 653-677; see my discussion of the concept here: http://flowtv.org/2010/10/thats-democratainment/
9. Michael Moore, “Why I Am Posting Bail for Julian Assange,” Huffington Post, Jan. 9, 2011, Retrieved 9 January 2011 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/why-im-posting-bail-money_b_796319.html
10. For an outline of the characteristics of the rumor bomb concept see my articles in this journal: http://flowtv.org/2008/12/the-rumor-bomb-on-convergence-culture-and-politics-jayson-harsin-american-university-of-paris/, http://flowtv.org/2010/10/thats-democratainment/; and Jayson Harsin “The Rumor Bomb ‘John Kerry is French, i.e. Haughty, Foppish, Socialist, and Gay,” The Diffusion of Social Movements, eds. Rebecca Givan and Susan Soule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
11. The sources were double-checked after consulting “Wikileaks,” Wikipedia, retrieved 9 January 2011 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#cite_note-282
12. Agence France Presse, “How Wikileaks Stays Online Despite Disputes,” Montreal Gazette, Dec. 10, 2010, retrieved 9 Jan. 2011 at http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/world/WikiLeaks+stays+online+despite+disputes/3944441/story.html

Recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have shown the fertile and increasingly well-tilled area of research into digital culture and socio-political protest.1 However, the real-time scholarly responses are always (if prudent) qualified as preliminary. The answers to many research questions are traditionally captive to time.2

Central to studying socio-political uprising have been the categories of circulation and attention (where mobilization and action beyond digital networks is often assumed, and stylistic qualities of texts are almost completely ignored). Spikes in digital attention are easily observed. What is more difficult to understand is the way in which digital media were used by producers/consumers/prosumers, how they related to circulatory networks, old media, whether their circulation of particular cultural productions was important, how, for whom, and why.

A major violent protest just turned five, the French “banlieue” riots of late 2005, which have been called the most important riot in the history of contemporary France.3 The riots have raised important questions about the intertwined role of new and old media forms, their circulation and impact for organizing/mobilizing as well as telling a different story.

For five years now, studies have trickled from the traditional research journal apparatuses, increasingly painting a detailed picture of what happened in November 2005. Some of my own work has focused on the convergent relationship of old news media and new digital media in the way the events were mediated, (re-) circulated and contested in a variety of ways for a variety of audiences, French national as well as global.4 Across several essays, I have attended to circulation while also trying to account for the rhetorical qualities of particular cultural productions that help them circulate.5 Here I synthesize this work, beginning with the treatment of the riots in the mainstream news (MSN) before moving to the blogosphere, and then to an important DIY machinima film which made tours of international MSN and the Internet, critiquing the events and MSN framings. Together my three projects demonstrate the digital cultural production’s important but limited capacity to circulate widely, offer alternative accounts, and even mobilize, all extremely challenging for traditional political economy of circulation, ideological criticisms of news, as well as (inter-) textual analysis of film. I argue these relationships constitute a new geometry of media circulation and attention.

The so-called banlieue riots began on Oct. 28, 2005 and continued at least through November 15. What they were actually about was disputed, as were the rioters’ identities, though MSN predominantly featured teenagers in poor neighborhoods around the periphery of Paris and some other French cities.6 From one critical perspective, the riots were a sign of the problems with the French model of integration, of the exclusionary aspects of mediaspheres7, of the promise and limitations of new media in providing access to diverse actors of the liberal public sphere to identify themselves on their own terms. I have performed studies of dominant frames employed by the most-watched news network in France, TF1, compared them to new media news and debate about the riots, all in conjunction with other scholarship that has been emerging in the last five years about the riots. My study of TF1 news demonstrates that the frames indicating causes of the riots are overwhelmingly the same ones offered by the main government spokesperson, then Secretary of the Interior and now President Nicholas Sarkozy. In addition, while other frames and discourses about causes/problems and solutions of the riots, and identities of rioters themselves circulated in alternate new media public spheres, those terms for understanding the riots set the agendas neither of MSN with larger audiences nor of government official and elected public policy makers.

Recent studies have demonstrated that the mainstream press in both France and the U.S., often following the frames offered by conservative politicians such as then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, widely reported that that the 2005 French riots were the product of spontaneous gratuitous violence or economic conditions, past lax socialist immigration and criminal policies, and/or were masterminded by gangs or repeat-offender petty criminals.8

A significant portion of articles offered descriptions of the scene, emphasizing violence. Others focused on the government’s response to the crisis, its larger political implications and its ultimate cost. The emphasis on violence fits dominant global news values of violence, where primary definers are privileged sources, and also theories of postmodern spectacular/neo-tribal society enthralled with the violence.9 Other studies of riots frames in several global newspapers, including French ones, found MSN ignoring racial tensions (in employment, housing, political and media representation) and other social problems that have undermined the French republican integration model. Finally, my study of TF1 coverage found frames similar to those of the press studies. These MSN frames are counter to accounts given by rioters themselves, as ethnographic research has demonstrated.10

Contrary to audiences of MSN, many others within and outside of France who sought up-to-date and ideally less institutionally processed information and commentary on the riots turned to blogs like Bondy Blog and Skyblog. Perhaps the most innovative commentary on the riots to circulate the blogosphere and YouTube, then mediated by global MSN, was the machinima film The French Democracy (hereafter TFD), a dramatization of the lives of three young, French minorities and the indignities they suffer that trigger their participation in the riots.

27-year-old Alex Chan made TFD with a game called The Movies, which allows players to create their own stories with the games characters and sets. Chan has explained his motivation in ways that suggest he aimed to address a domestic French audience and especially a more global audience formed around the circulation of global news coverage. At a 2006 Machinima film festival, Chan told the audience that he made the film because he was upset by the media’s (domestic and foreign) depiction of the rioters as monsters, which he wanted to correct by humanizing them and providing what he claimed was a more accurate and eyewitness account.11 In an interview in 2007, he complained that MSN ignored the reality right in front of them and chose instead to report the story in the words of the Minister of the Interior, Sarkozy. He also explained why he opted for machinima as his medium for an alternative account of the riots and their causes: “Through these tools you can get some more spontaneous reaction or reflection”, he said, ”not from mass media but from a simple citizen like me”. The film was globally hailed as a breakthrough; the first ever political machinima. Placed on-line November 22, 2005, it had received over one million views a month later.12

Yet, TFD demonstrates how the Internet’s potential public spaces are objects of struggle, to direct viewers to other sites that are nodes in different networks of subjectivity. Chan’s own frames were not just struggling against MSN’s, but against resource-rich political interests on the Internet. Thus the UMP conservative party in power at the time (and still today, under Sarkozy) bought Google ads for the key search terms scum (racaille), riots (émeute), incivility (incivilité), burned cars (voiture brulée), and housing projects (cité), directing visitors to the UMP party’s website, where they were encouraged to sign a petition to support Nicholas Sarkozy’s policy on the banlieue.13

Click here to view the embedded video.

The film succeeded in making the global MSN agenda (from Manila to New York and London), and spurred them to publicly re-evaluate their religious and historically acontextual frames in stark contrast to Chan’s. Equally important, TFD illustrates limits of the geometries of production and consumption. The global attention to this DIY film and its very differently identified actors and motivations did not boomerang back to the dominant French mediasphere and its public sphere. Thus, my conclusions also indicate problems subordinate groups continue to encounter with regard to liberal freedom of assembly and speech, without attention and circulation. If counterpublics and their constituents are constantly labeled and misrecognized by a dominant public sphere’s media apparatuses, despite minoritarian expressions, then the extreme communication of violence/riots may be a predictable outcome to exclusion, while the meaning and political use of such violence will be struggled over.

Image Credits:
1. Riot Police in Paris
2. Rioters in Paris
3. Nicolas Sarkozy on TF1
4. Protestors
5. Alex Chan YouTube video

Please feel free to comment.

1. Many thanks to Nick Couldry for very useful critical feedback in response to an early version of part of this research at the International Communication Association conference, Montreal, Canada, 2008.
2. Of the recent uprising in Tunisia, Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, wrote in Foreign Policy, “I don’t deny that the Internet may have played a role in publicizing the protests in Tunisia; it’s just that the conditions in which the protests took place do not strike me as those where the leaders of the protest movement had to post updates on where to meet and when. Maybe I am wrong, but it all seemed to be somewhat chaotic and decentralized. Once again, it would be great to see more data on this.”
3. See Mucchielli, L. 2009. Autumn 2005: A Review of the Most Important Riot in the History of French Contemporary Society. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 35(5): 731-751.
4. My project has been multi-tiered involving frame analysis of coverage on the (by far) most watched French TV station (TF1); a study (with Adrienne Russell) of the counternarrative and old-new media circulation and re-mediation of a machinima film on the riots; and (with Waddick Doyle) a critical theoretical analysis of this data in the context of French post-colonialism and contemporary race relations. This article sums up the three riots projects and builds on some of my other work on convergence culture and politics presented in Flow. See Harsin, J. 2011. Wikileak’s Lessons for Media Theory and Politics. Flow, 13.6 ; and That’s Democratainment: Obama, Rumor Bombs, and Primary Definers. Flow 10.8.
5. The research agenda around the category of circulation has been launched and debated by Gaonkar and Povinelli and more recently by Straw. See Gaonkar, D. and E. Povinelli. 2003. Technologies of public forms: Circulation, transfiguration, recognition. Public Culture (15)3, 385-397; and Straw, Will. 2010. Cultural Production and the Generative Matrix: A Response to Georgina Born. Cultural Sociology. July: 209-216.
6. Depicted almost invariably from a visual and linguistic point of view of the government and police.
7. For the concept of mediasphere, see Hartley, John. The Uses of Television. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
8. Rioufol, I. 2005. Cités: Les Non-Dits D’une Rébellion. Le Figaro, 4 November, URL (consulted 5 June, 2009) Available at Lexisnexis.com; Snow, D.A. & Vliegenthart, R. & Corrigall-Brown, C. 2007. Framing the French riots: A Comparative Study of Frame Variation. Social Forces 86 (2) 385-415; Darling-Wolf, F. 2008. HOLIER THAN THOU, News of Racial Tensions in a Trans-national Context. 9 (3): 357-373; and
9. Hall, Stuart et al, Policing the Crisis : Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978; For a critique and revision of the theory see Schlesinger, Philip. “Rethinking the Sociology of Journalism: Source Strategies and the Limits of Media Centrism,” Public Communication, ed. Marjorie Ferguson. London: Sage, 1999. On postmodern violence and spectacle see La Rocca, F. 2006. Langage Visuel et émeute. Sociétés 4(94): 19-25; and Maffesoli, M., Rita F., A. Megill, and M. G. Rose. 2004. The Return of the Tragic in Postmodern Societies. New Literary History 35(1): 133-149 (consulted 3 August 2009) Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost.
10. See Garcin-Marrou, I. 2007. Des “Jeunes” et des “Banlieues” dans la Presse de l’Automne 2005: Entre Compréhension et Relegation. Espaces et Sociétés, ½ (128-129): 23-37; Mucchielli, L. and Abderrahim A.O. (2007) ‘Les Emeutes de L’automne 2005 Dans les Banlieues Francaises du Point de Vue des Emeutiers’, Revue Internationale de Psychosociologie. 13(2):137-155.
11. Antheaume, A. 2007. Qui Es-Tu, Alex Chan?’, 20 minutes, 15 April URL (consulted 28 April 2007) Available at http://www.20minutes.fr/article/151832/Culture-Qui-es-tu-Alex-Chan.php; Lee, R. 2006. Meet the Machinmakers’, Gamasutra, 21 November. URL (consulted 15 March, 2007) Available at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20061121/lee_01.shtml; Lechner M. 2005. The French Democracy ou la création populaire face aux émeutes des banlieues. Libération, 12 December, URL (consulted 10 January 2006) Available at http://www.liberation.fr; Ethnographic and interview methods have demonstrated similar findings about a mismatch between widely circulated media explanations of motivation and rioters’ explanations. See Garcin-Marrou 2007 and Mucchielli and Abderrahim 2007.
12. Totilo, S. 2005. First Film about Riots Comes Courtesy of a Video Game. MTV News, December 5, URL (consulted 2 April 2006 ) Available at http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1517481/20051205/story.jhtml
13. Dumont, E. 2005. L’UMP Renchérit Sur «Racaille» Pour Soutenir Sarkozy via Google. Zdnet.fr, 7 Nov, URL (consulted 30 July 2006) Available at http://www.Zdnet.fr

Regardless of whether one agrees with allegations that Wikileaks is an international security threat, a new media-facilitated champion of democratic accountability, or that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is a rapist, it is an unmistakably rich object of media and political analysis. Arguably, l’Affaire Wikileaks (hereafter WA) holds lessons about changing relations between new and old media forms and production; attention, circulation, media capital and celebrity; political economy and journalism; and even democracy and international relations.

The WA above all begs attention to attention.1 The affair, not just the material released, became a huge agenda-setter in 2010. Several news organizations dubbed it a “top” story of 2010.2 In Canada, Wikileaks founder Assange was voted top newsmaker of the year by senior editors at Postmedia Network newspapers and canada.com.3 Even more impressively, Assange was nominated for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.4 Other global news organizations, such as France’s Le Monde, named him person of the year.

European public opinion was split nearly 50/50 over Wikileaks’ releases, amid widespread government charges that Wikileaks had jeopardized international security. Meanwhile, sparring continues between renowned British investigative journalist Nick Davies and Bianca Jagger over Assange’s alleged sexual abuse. A sore spot in that exchange is the way celebrities can, via new media attention, influence public perception and opinion, despite, as Davies argues, who has the facts (i.e. professional investigative journalists). Now consider Wikileaks’ Google statistics (01/09/11):

• Blogs: 8,560,000
• Discussions: 1,440,000
• News: 17,800
• Videos: 12,000
• Images: 26,200,000
• Everything: 72,000,000
• Compare Hillary Clinton everything: 10,900,000

The very reason Wikileaks evokes such strong split reactions in public opinion, and such widespread old journalism support, symbolizes dreams and realities in this increasingly globalized convergence culture (CC). For many who support Wikileaks, it may well symbolize precisely the rising power of new media production transforming hitherto well-contained spectacular public spheres and their democracies. Instead of the old back-scratching relationship between journalism and professional politics (with grassroots movements struggling to get media attention using Civil Rights Era strategies), now supposedly non-elites could start up a Wiki and start producing a profoundly new kind of democratic accountability formerly relegated to Habermasian ideal types. Wikileaks symbolized how “We the People” can matter again, via new media production and circulation technologies from the website, to video and photo-editing, the cell phone to the laptop. From the beginning, Wikileaks claimed a public service. According to the original and current web page, Wikileaks “publish material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of our sources anonymous, thus providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices.” On the other hand, WA symbolizes the ongoing formidable power of old elites to re-frame agendas and govern by public opinion polling.

Leaving aside the theories of why citizens and government might identify/be disgusted with Wikileaks, the dynamics of attention acquisition suggest several points peculiar to CC, about which I’ll offer five theses.

First, information-brokering political sites can become new primary definers of public agendas and even for old news/journalism, their democratizing quality being that their agents are not professional journalists or politicians. But, for circulation and audience they rely on older news organizations and their resources for re-distribution.5 Thus, with their founder and unofficial director hounded by subpoenas and their site (and mirror sites) under multi-government cyber-attack, Wikileaks chose to release documents—from July 2010 to the present—to select elite global news organizations who would officially leak the classified material (perhaps also as legal strategy): New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, and then in November, Le Monde. Here, e-democracy depends on old news for media capital and thus public significance.

Second, to return to Bianca Jagger, the attention economy that made Wikileaks a top story of 2010 and Julian Assange runner-up for Time Person of the Year is also a parasitic celebrity CC. Out of celebrity retirement to publicize the defense of Wikileaks came Daniel Ellsberg, the U.S. military analyst who notoriously/heroically released the government-embarrassing Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg claimed, “The truth is that every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”6 Other global celebrities adding to Wikileaks’ media capital, public opinion support and circulation include Noam Chomsky and Republican Congressman Ron Paul, the latter of whom proclaimed: “Lying is not Patriotic.”7 Established opinion leader-celebrities, or simply celebrities who may wield media capital to become political opinion leaders enhanced the media capital and circulation of Wikileaks and Assange as well as their own media capital in a synergistic dynamic.8

But Assange’s own rhetorical-PR gifts in using CC for celebrity capital should not be overlooked. Assange/Wikileaks could have dumped the thousands of documents on their site each time and tweeted them or notified old news sources. Instead, he time and again used interviews (or tweets) to prime news organizations and larger audiences for an upcoming release, which of course would rarely be everything he had, whether it was “5 GB” on Bank of America, an “insurance file” whose key would be publicly released to unlock all files in the event of harm to Wikileaks or himself or thousands of documents inappropriate for synchronous release because names were being removed to protect innocents. Assange has reproduced TV serial-style intrigue, teasers at end of an episode to build his media capital and tantalize salivating audiences.

Third, the reaction of primary defining, resource-rich government sources, for media content production, monitoring, and recirculation, reveals the existing obstacles “politico-cultural” producers face trying to set/frame elite news agendas, address audiences and create publics/counterpublics. The response was hardly one of rational-critical debate, with those like Hillary Clinton calling Assange an international “security threat,” basically implying what bolder voices such as Rep. Peter King, Chair of the Homeland Security Committee, spouted less subtly: Assange is a terrorist.9 American public opinion followed the governmental frame: nearly 60% said they wanted Assange prosecuted.

While prominent journalist Nick Davies defended the British arrest of Assange as based on substantial rape charges, the timing of the accusations do indeed bear the qualities of a classic rumor bomb.10 As with rumor bombs like “Obama is a Muslim” or “Shirley Sherrod is a racist,” the targets are forced to react quickly, not on their own terms, perhaps even responding with their own tables-turning accusations or rumor bombs. Thus, if Assange is guilty of rape, the timing of international governmental support for an Interpol arrest warrant, after thousands of diplomatic cables had been released, may be met with public cynicism. On the other hand, international 50/50 public opinion splits suggest the power of governments and elite news to frame and influence public opinion. Despite the rhetorical flourishes of Ron Paul, Noam Chomsky and Bianca Jagger, how often was international news agenda occupied with a rational defense by the United States and other countries/political actors of the lies and misleading elite projects revealed in the documents? Of course, the strategy is to deflect attention.

Fourth, the condemnation of Wikileaks by state actors as oppositional as the U.S. and Iran might give some spectators pause, wondering if despite perceived differences, international elites are tremendously invested in maintaining technocracy amid vague semblances of representative democracy and in setting policy agendas without the meddling of newcomer actors in/of e-democracy. Is it not telling that Russia’s Putin condemned the Assange arrest and opposition to Wikileaks as “un-democratic,” while Russian President Medvedev declared Assange should receive the Nobel Prize?11 The evidence suggests a threat to elite international relations and also the opportunity for some elites to capitalize on that threat for their own foreign policy agendas (instead of Russia, it’s the U.S. they would have accused of being undemocratic in the international court of opinion).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fifth, we see more evidence of how the great potential of cultural production/agency is constrained by a powerful political economy of media presentation and attention. Just look at the dramatic movement between hosts; Wikileaks’ old hosts being the target of possible state-resourced hacks, their move to Amazon, who subsequently shut it down allegedly for violation of policy, and then their move to French company OVH where they are currently under unresolved legal attacks by the French government. Appearance on the Internet is not guaranteed simply because one has a laptop, or even the money to purchase a domain name.

Another economic-power issue involves funding. Last December, Paypal refused to take any more donations to Wikileaks (which runs on donations); a few days later Swiss bank Postfinance announced it was freezing Assange’s assets totaling 31,000 Euros; then Mastercard and Visa refused to handle donations, followed by Bank of America.

And yet again, one can’t overlook how a popular Internet response did not let this political economy go unchallenged. Some analysts cite the Streisand Effect to explain Wikileaks, where any attempt to censor the Internet is met with efforts to reproduce/re-circulate the material under threat.12 This is precisely what happened last December when hundreds of mirror sites appeared as “Operation Payback.” Anonymous groups of supporters have also periodically attacked and hacked the sites of Wikileaks’ detractors, again in December under the banner of “Operation Avenge Assange.”

Heroic or villainous, Assange and Wikileaks are indisputably a sign of the times.

Image Credits:
1. Wikileaks Twitter Feed Screen Capture / Twitter
2. Julian Assange / Reuters
3. Daniel Ellsberg / AP
4. Bianca Jagger / Reuters

Please feel free to comment.

1. Throughout this article, I’m building on my theory of convergence culture and politics articulated in “That’s Democratainment: Obama, Rumor Bombs and Primary Definers,” in Flow, in which I critically engage several other theorists. For an outline of the characteristics of the Rumor bomb concept see my articles in Flow.
2. The Los Angeles Times top 100 stories had Wikileaks’ July 25 release of thousands of classified military intelligence documents dating from 2004-2009 at 52 (That’s before Obama’s announcement ending combat in Iraq, Glenn Beck’s rally to “restore honor,” and the Ground Zero Mosque).
3. Additionally, Assange was ranked fourth in an Ipsos-Reid poll of 1,044 Canadians, and an informal survey of editors revealed six out of 10 Postmedia publications felt Assange “had affected profoundly how information is seen and delivered.” Found in “Wikileaks’ Julian Assange is 2010’s Top Newsmaker, Montreal Gazette, Dec. 26, 2010, retrieved 9 Jan. 2011 at http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/WikiLeaks+Julian+Assange+2010+newsmaker/4027279/story.html#ixzz1AYnfotxA
4. Time Magazine’s Person of the Year award went to another new media celebrity, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
5. As McChesney and Nichols, among others, have recently argued, non-professional news sites statistically do not generate news, because they don’t have the resources and training; they re-circulate and comment on it. However, Wikileaks has shown the opposite potential in convergence culture, to set old news agendas. Yet, one can argue that it is still dependent on that old news media redistribution for its media capital. See McChesney, Robert and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism (Philadelphia: Perseus., 2010).
6. Daniel Ellsberg et. Al, “Daniel Ellsberg Praises Wikileaks,” SF Gate, Dec. 7, 2010. Retrieved 9 January 2010 at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/opinionshop/detail?entry_id=78596
7. Ron Paul, “Lying Is Not Patriotic,” Anti-war.com, Dec. 10, 2010. Retrieved 9 January, 2011 at http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2010/12/09/lying-is-not-patriotic/
8. For an important argument that claims media capital may trump capital in other fields (via Bourdieu’s field theory), see Nick Couldry, “Media Meta-Capital: Extending the Range of Bourdieu’s Field Theory,” Theory and Society 32 (5-6), 653-677; see my discussion of the concept here: http://flowtv.org/2010/10/thats-democratainment/
9. Michael Moore, “Why I Am Posting Bail for Julian Assange,” Huffington Post, Jan. 9, 2011, Retrieved 9 January 2011 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/why-im-posting-bail-money_b_796319.html
10. For an outline of the characteristics of the rumor bomb concept see my articles in this journal: http://flowtv.org/2008/12/the-rumor-bomb-on-convergence-culture-and-politics-jayson-harsin-american-university-of-paris/, http://flowtv.org/2010/10/thats-democratainment/; and Jayson Harsin “The Rumor Bomb ‘John Kerry is French, i.e. Haughty, Foppish, Socialist, and Gay,” The Diffusion of Social Movements, eds. Rebecca Givan and Susan Soule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
11. The sources were double-checked after consulting “Wikileaks,” Wikipedia, retrieved 9 January 2011 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#cite_note-282
12. Agence France Presse, “How Wikileaks Stays Online Despite Disputes,” Montreal Gazette, Dec. 10, 2010, retrieved 9 Jan. 2011 at http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/world/WikiLeaks+stays+online+despite+disputes/3944441/story.html

A recent survey shows nearly 20% of Americans now believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. That’s about 56 million Americans, a number that has climbed considerably since 2008 (to say nothing of the 43% or 120 million Americans who are “unsure”).1 The bigotry of the phenomenon aside, its durability points to the use of rumor bombs (RBs) to elect and govern, and to the role of a new kind of authoritative source therein.

In 2008, FlowTV published my article on the RB, in which I analyzed issue-agendas that convergence culture produced in the 2008 presidential election, including the RB that Obama is a Muslim (RBOIAM). I argued there was an agenda-setting interplay between old and new media technologies, enabled by YouTube, Adobe Photoshop, and Facebook, among others associated with the revolution in cultural production, distribution, and reception—all of which have been associated by some with a new democratizing agency but which I insisted has economic, political rhetorical, and social constraints. 2 Since then, other RBs have exploded in American media culture with greater and lesser damage (e.g. “death panels” RB regarding Obama’s healthcare bill, and the “racist” Shirley Sherrod RB).

Now I argue not only that accounts of democratizing cultural production must confront the contingencies of distribution in a context of information warfare (exemplified by RBs); but, further, that Hall’s concept of “primary definers,” significantly criticized in media- and cultural studies of the late 80s and early 90s, returns with a new applicability in convergence culture (CC), with the caveat that primary definers/opinion leaders have changed.3 “Primary definers” refers to elite sources who define hegemonic issues and frames for journalists who repeat and alter them. The media capital they wield complicates theories of democratizing media production and distribution in the forging of widely attended issues in public spheres.

First, a brief recollection of RB. This infowar concept explains the salience of public issues in CC, where more accessible productive and distributive agency afforded by new media technologies converges with globalizing news business trends (infotainment) and negative politics, where character and trust direct consent and support. This fiduciary rapport refers to both the subject of the rumor and media form providing the encounter, whether on a blog, website, radio or TV talk show, prestige press story, YouTube/Facebook/Twitter post, or a personal email from friends, family, organization, or unfamiliar source.4

In this context, the very definition of news is changing.5 As of March 2010, 37% of Americans say they have contributed to news creation, commented on news or shared it via social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter (Pew Center, March 1, 2010). User-driven news content sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Delicious create newsworthiness via popularity. Consider the interface for social media YouTube: from top-bottom “Recommended videos” (based on search history), “featured videos,” and then a popularity section that actually resembles categories of traditional news: Entertainment, News and Politics, Sports, Music and “Most Viewed.”

Surveys on issue salience in the 2008 election suggested a significant influence of web-imbricated infotainment and RBs on public discourse.6

Obama securing the Democratic nomination was the most salient event. But at least two infotainment issues rounded off the top 6:

• Vice-Presidential candidate Palin’s “pregnant teenage daughter”
• Rev. Wright’s speeches

The top ten offered another infotainment event, Sarah Palin hosting the late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live (#8 with 56% having heard “a lot”). Rounding out the top 20 were Rev. Wright’s videos and the RB that Obama was close friends with 60s radical-dubbed “terrorist” William Ayers. Other tabloid issues included “McCain and female lobbyist” (#25), Saturday Night Live skits parodying Palin (42%, #34), and the New Yorker cover restating RBOIAM and a terrorist (41%, #36). RBOIAM was the 31st most salient issue/event overall in the campaign, despite far more stories appearing about other events on TV news. This suggests the Internet’s agenda-setting power via YouTube, blogs, conservative sites, forums, and through viral email.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Among those who say Obama is a Muslim, 60 percent learned about his religion from the (old) news and the Internet, suggesting that their opinions are fueled by misinformation in CC. Some of these “stories” originated on the Internet (RBOIAM), while others originated in old news media and then reached millions through YouTube clips posing as evidence, and further circulated through various viral social media and email.7

To understand how RBOIAM exemplifies an emergent primary definer in a political geometry of distribution/media capital, one must accept the qualification that the distribution/diffusion of democratized cultural production is not at all democratic, but often depends on powerful network nodes. These nodes are similar to Hall’s primary definers.

While Campaign 2008 has been celebrated for the diversity of news content and the ability of non-elites to set news agendas and share information, from “Obama Girl” videos to the first YouTube “debates,” the origins of many RBs do not appear to be from novice opinion-makers at all. Andy Martin, Jerome Corsi, Daniel Pipes, and Debbie Schlussel, all key nodes in the network of “Obama is a Muslim” RB circulation, are also all professional conservative newsmakers with popular blogs, books, and mainstream newspaper editorials and cable “news” show appearances.8 These opinion leaders exemplify a new authority via media capital and attention.

Technorati ranks blogs’ “authority,” where “authority is calculated based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data” over time. Authority is on a scale of 0-1000, where 1000 is “the highest possible authority” (http://technorati.com/what-is-technorati-authority/). Daniel Pipes has a technorati authority of 683 (5/20/2010), while Debbie Schlussel=730. Compare their authority with the Huffington Post, which ranks 959. Liberal news site Daily Kos=780; Wonkette=706; Nobel Prize winner and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman=751; Bill Moyers Journal=488; 3-time Pulitizer Prize for Journalism winner Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times ranked only 527. RBer Andy Martin’s “Contrarian Commentary”=119.

Free Republic , where the Muslim RB allegedly first appeared, is a conservative political news clearinghouse, where anyone can post a story. According to the web information company Alexa, Free Republic ranks 1,026 in the U.S. (with 8,397 sites linking to it). Compare that ranking to conservative commentator Michelle Malkin whose site ranks 2,179 in U.S. (www.alexa.com, 5/20/2010). It is very close to “liberal” Talking Points Memo (Joshua Micah Marshall’s site) which has a rank of 1,092. It may be closer to something like liberal Daily Kos’s 1,077 rank with regard to type of posts permitted. However, unlike Free Republic, Daily Kos has a dozen editors who post content (which didn’t stop them from launching the RB that Sarah Palin faked a pregnancy).

Taking RBOIAM as case study, the question of cross-media agenda-setting (noted in the polls on salient issues) may be less about broad democratic agenda-setting of issues (democratic accessibility to production and distribution) in the campaign and now presidency and more about a totally different emergent dynamics of gatekeeping and influence, the primary definers of which do get “stories” from non-professional information-gatherers but then choose to re-circulate them more broadly in society with greater authority based in popularity and attention, what Couldry refers to as “meta-media capital.”9

Click here to view the embedded video.

In a pre-digital media age,10 Pipes, Corsi, Martin, Schlussel, all major conservative information brokers and opinion leaders holding no position in any major political organization or academic institution would not have received the hearing they did get in the contemporary digital age.11 That some of them did not directly appear on traditional news agendas is beside the point (though networks like Fox and CNN frequently feature these opinion leaders, as Lexis-Nexis transcript searches demonstrate). Rather, they broker and source news.

CC appears to be producing episodes of two-step+ flows and “multi-axial” agenda-setting, which is unlike the trust-based face-to-face influence of community opinion leaders in the pre-digital age, even if such influence also continues in the digital age.12 Now, new e-opinion leaders (as much as well-known old media opinion leaders in the American context such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Jon Stewart), are key nodes in a network and may lead to tipping points for belief or confusion, especially since they are sought by old news media as sources/commentators.13 Research on media and politics in CC must reckon empirically and theoretically with what Klaus Jensen calls three-step (and more) flows,14 something that appears to be happening with cases such as viral emails and FB posts, which move from one trusted source to another in their most successful dynamics, as opposed to anonymous chain emails which may arrive as “spam.”

In addition to RBOIAM, recent RBs about alleged “death panels” enabled by the new American Healthcare Bill and the RB “Shirley Sherrod is a racist” (resulting in her firing/resignation)15 suggest that this phenomenon applies to understanding not just the political vertigo of campaigns in CC, but also the dynamics of governing in it–to say nothing of watching, processing, even influencing it. Let us engage the geometries of circulation, attention, belief, and confusion.

Image Credits:
1. The New Yorker
2. YouTube
3. The Glenn Beck Program

Please feel free to comment.

1. “Growing Number of Americans Say Obama is a Muslim,” The Pew Research Center for People and the Press, August 19, 2010, Retrieved August 20, 2010 at http://people-press.org/report/645/
2. John Hartley, The Uses of Television (New York: Routledge, 1999); Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2006).
3. Stuart Hall. et al, Policing the Crisis : Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978); Philip Schlesinger, “Rethinking the Sociology of Journalism: Source Strategies and the Limits of Media Centrism,” Public Communication, ed. Marjorie Ferguson (London: Sage, 1999)
4. For a lengthier outline of the characteristics of the RB concept see my 2008 article in this journal: http://flowtv.org/2008/12/the-rumor-bomb-on-convergence-culture-and-politics-jayson-harsin-american-university-of-paris/, and Jayson Harsin “The Rumor Bomb ‘John Kerry is French, i.e. Haughty, Foppish, Socialist, and Gay,” The Diffusion of Social Movements, eds. Rebecca Givan and Susan Soule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On trust, identification and politics, see Manuel Castells, “Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society”. International Journal of Communication, 1 (1), 238-266.
5. Tom Bettag, “Evolving Definitions of News,” Nieman Reports, Winter, 2006, Retrieved 10 April 2010 at http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100291; and the “State of the Media” report for 2010 at http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/overview_key_findings.php
6. Brian McNair defines infotainment as “journalism in which entertainment values take precedence over information content,” (which may or may not refer to political agendas). Christina Riegert has refined the concept with regard to politics, introducing the term “politicotainment,” defined as “the way the political is represented or negotiated by entertainment formats.” Like my concept of RB, Riegert’s politicotainment stresses a political economy of TV and news, as well as new “promotional machinery” applied equally to policies, celebrities and politicians. See Kristina Riegert, Politicotainment: Television’s Take on the Real (New York: Peter Lang, 2007, 3); Brian McNair, Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere (London: Routledge, 2000).
7. Garrett and Danziger found that while about half of Americans say they used the Internet to keep up with the campaign, “a comparable proportion of individuals (53%) reported that email from friends and family was a source of information.” See Kelly Garrett and James Danziger, Rumors and the Internet in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, January 22, 2009. Retrieved May 1, 2010 from http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/rumors09.pdf
8. Other RBs also point to the non-novice character of the distribution and agenda-setting. For example, in the “swiftboat” RB about John Kerry in the 2004, Jerome Corsi’s co-authored best-selling book Unfit for Command was part of a well-funded Republican network, where a major Republican donor was funding the group, a major Republican lawyer was defending them, and a major Republican communications consultant designed their ads. See “As Evidence Mounts of GOP Connection to Anti-Kerry Swift Boat Vets, Hume and Dole deny the Obvious,” Media Matters for America, August 26, 2004 Retrieved January 15, 2007 at http://mediamatters.org/research/200408260008
9. Nick Couldry, “Media Meta-Capital: Extending the Range of Bourdieu’s Field Theory,” Theory and Society 32 (5-6), 653-677
10. The point is not that pre-digital news and politics was patently better, but that authority and sourcing has changed.
11. See http://www.danielpipes.org/spoken/ for a list of Pipes’ appearances as a source on an issue, a list that includes several appearances on Fox, CNN, MSNBC and NPR, among others. Google and Lexis-Nexis show similar old-new news media agenda sharing for Schlussel, Corsi, and Martin. Their power on the Internet appears to be enough symbolic capital to make them sources on traditional news media.
12. See Jennifer Brundidge, “The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and the Meta-Silly Season in Politics: Agenda Setting in the Contemporary Media Environment,” at http://flowtv.org/2008/10/the-daily-show-the-colbert-report-and-the-meta-silly-season-in-politics-agenda-setting-in-the-contemporary-media-environment-jennifer-brundidge-university-of-texas-austin/#footnote_1_2066
13. See Malcolm Gladwell, The Tippling Point (Boston: Little & Brown, 2002).
14. Klaus Jensen, Klaus Bruhn Jensen, “Three-step flow,” Journalism, June 2009, 335-337.
15. The Shirley Sherrod RB is exemplary for its accelerated power for agenda-setting, where an “anonymous source” sent edited video clips to a conservative digital opinion leader/news broker Andrew Breibart, who posted the video on his news-aggregator Biggovernment.com on Monday July 19. By evening Sherrod had resigned her post in the U.S. Dept of Agriculture.

“[T]he information bomb’ [is] associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies. Thus, in the very near future… it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed ‘the integral accident’ that is the continuation of politics by other means.” —Paul Virilio

While rumors are a timeless phenomenon, popular and academic voices note something changing. Like the Matrix, Baudrillard’s hyperreality, and David Lynch’s owls in Twin Peaks, things are at best not what they seem; at worst, perpetually disorienting. Henry Jenkins’s “convergence culture” has become a keyword for our present conjuncture where new and old media content, production and consumption, collide in fascinating new ways. Though gatekeeping practices in news and cultural production have weakened, creating new production opportunities, rumor rises to new levels of importance in a postmodern political context.

Despite the digital divide, the cases of rumor exploding into public scandal are fairly global. They have prompted suicides, imprisonments, stock plunges, resignations and government investigations . For example, on Friday October 3, on CNN’s “Citizen journalism” site a post appeared stating that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had had a heart attack. Apple stock plunged immediately, though the rumor was debunked an hour later, leaving suspicions it was planted by a short-seller after quick gains. But rumors have assumed a very special role in professionalized politics, where communication experts shrewdly read the new convergence culture and use rumor to try to steer political discourse via inter-media agendas.

In February 2006, the Democratic Party of Japan admitted that one of its politicians used a hoax email producing a scandal that implicated a senior official of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, who allegedly received large sums of money from a publicly disgraced Internet startup. In 2005, a political consultant in South Africa was paid to fabricate emails to sow divisions and contribute to the succession battle in the ANC. In Nigeria in September 2008, an entire TV station was closed after it repeated an internet claim that Nigeria’s president would resign due to illness.

New photo-editing technologies led to visual rumors. Recall the doctored photo of John Kerry with “Hanoi” Jane Fonda which made its way into the New York Times, and countless war journalism examples.

Perhaps the most common American political rumor recently concerned Barack Obama. When it was clear Obama would be a contender, the Muslim rumor was launched, landing on mainstream news when a Clinton campaign volunteer was caught re-emailing it. Videoed McCain supporters also announced dread of an “Arab” President Obama, again frequenting news agendas, pressuring McCain to respond that Obama was a “decent family man” (not an Arab). Meanwhile, these rumors have complements that imply Obama was/is a terrorist because he allegedly “pals around with terrorists,” referring to acquaintance Bill Ayers.

Rumor then is a keyword of contemporary politics and culture. But is it useful as a scholarly concept?

I proposed the concept of “rumor bomb” (RB) to distinguish a particular use of rumor from other related notions.1 I begin with the widespread definition of rumor as a claim whose truthfulness is in doubt and which often has no clear source even if its ideological or partisan origins and intents are clear. I then treat it as a particular rhetorical strategy in current contexts of media and politics in many societies. The “RB” extends the definition of rumor into a media/politics concept with the following features:

1. A crisis of verification: perhaps the most salient and politically dangerous aspect of rumor. Rumor is classically defined as a kind of persuasive message involving a proposition that lacks secure standards of evidence.2 Obama is a Muslim, an Arab, a terrorist. In each of these cases, the verification is dependent on the definition of the term the subject is accused of embodying, its persuasive impact depending on its strategic ambiguity, and on the desire of the receiver to interpret it in a particular way. If Obama spent important formative years in a country where Islam was a dominant religion, does that make him in some way “Muslim” even if he identifies with Christianity? The very fact that some will debate it suggests the political power of the rumor/statement.

2. A context of public uncertainty or anxiety about a political group, figure, or cause, which the RB overcomes or transfers onto an opponent. The U.S. is in the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s, is fighting two wars that have been marketed as a war on “terror” or terrorism, and Bush hasn’t had a plus 50% approval rating in years. That’s public uncertainty and anxiety about a country’s leadership and future. Enter the tri-partite rumor. Similar to John Kerry is “French” in the context of freedom fries and images of supposedly mass protests against French “treason” by Americans pouring out their $14 Beaujolais.

3. A clearly partisan even if anonymous source (eg. “an unnamed advisor to the president”), which seeks political profit from the RB’s diffusion. Mr. Corsi who was proud to make a book out of the Swift boat and now the Obama is Muslim rumor. Or the Clinton campaign volunteer who happily circulated the viral e-rumor. Also like the “unnamed White House official” who during the 2003 declarations of Democratic presidential candidacy told the New York Times John Kerry was “French-looking.”

4. A rapid electronic diffusion: i.e. a “convergence culture” where news travels fast.

In addition, RBs are similar to but different from such concepts as disinformation (intentional false information) and propaganda. Disinformation? Often too associated with government. Propaganda? A widely varying concept used to describe attempts to control opinion without regard for ethics and accuracy. Similarly, “spin” is a generic term for attempts to frame or re-frame an event or a statement in a way politically profitable for one side and detrimental for another,3 while a “smear campaign” is a popular term that loosely means a coordinated effort to attack a person’s character. An RB, while similar to these terms, has very particular cultural and historical conditions: a new media “convergence culture” where information produced on the internet can influence the production of media content in other forms; new media technologies and business values that emphasize speed and circulation, fewer resources and less time for verification, and that combine with entertainment values in news, political marketing, and public craving of tabloid news that mirrors other entertainment genres. RBs are not just about classic mouth-to-ear diffusion. They begin in a rapport between deliberate “disinformers” and media, whether TV news, talk shows, newspapers, radio, or internet. They then circulate across these media. Unlike a “smear campaign,” they need not be about discrediting a person (as is the case for example in claims about Iraq and 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction moved to Syria). Similarly, spin refers too specifically to an event and its re-framing. RBs may seek to produce events themselves (like “pseudo-events”).

One doesn’t need audience studies to know that RBs have effects (though that would enlarge the picture). When websites devoted to a rumor appear and generate lots of visits and commentary; when “old media” news give it attention; when a policymaker, a company, a candidate is forced to take time and energy to respond to his/her damaged brand image or character instead of talking about or doing something else; when scandals force people to resign from powerful positions (only to have it known months, even years later that the claim/rumor was a hoax) rumors are having powerful effects, and considerable numbers of people attach to them, at least for a while. The question of why and how they are launched and why and how people attach to them is room for new research that moves beyond the outdated strictly interpersonal or even old media treatment of rumor. The present conjuncture is much more complicated, exciting, and dangerous.

If there have always been unverified claims printed in “professionalized” journalism (before that turn, of course, rumor was a news staple), the degree to which they are sliding in and also swirling about the new media forms we consume suggests we are in a very new kind of convergence culture, one whose dangers may recall the theories of Paul Virilio more than Henry Jenkins.

Image Credits:
1. Obama and rumor, converging
2. Apple stock plunged on Steve Jobs heart-attack rumors
3. A doctored photo of John Kerry and Jane Fonda

Please feel free to comment.

1. Harsin, Jayson. The Rumour Bomb: Theorising the Convergence of New and Old Trends in Mediated US Politics . Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture; Volume 39, Issue 1; 2006; 84-110. Reprinted in Michael Ryan ed. Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2008).
2. Pendleton, S.C. (1998), ‘Rumour research revisited and expanded’, Language&Communication, vol. 1. no. 18, pp. 69–86.
3. Bennett, Lance. News: The Politics of Illusion. Longman, 2003, p. 130.