Thursday, May 28, 2015
Leadership as defined by your measure of Centrality
Leadership is the order of centrality you are willing to bear to reach your level of success.
There are a lot of platitudes about leadership. Courage,
force of will, popularity, charisma and intelligence may strike a few familiar
notes. The truth is all of these are factors to great sounding leadership memes,
yet the reality is its not really a factor. Does courage count if you are
disengaged? Does intelligence matter if you are out of the loop? Does your
sheer force of will matter if you are so disconnected that you are unaware of
the context of any important decision facing your organization?
Probably not…
So, as we have clearly left the 20th century, at
least most of us. I believe its important to point out we are living in a
post-modern hyper-connected information economy. So the virtues of the last
century while are still noble but really hint at being a quaint curiosity in
the face of first world problems of which smart-watch platforms to buy into and
the resale of personal big / small data exchanges. Not that courage or
intelligence are not in demand or are not noble characteristics. They just are,
just not as critical as centrality, when it comes to leadership centrality
rules.
Let’s be clear, we don’t follow stupid, cowardly, weak willed, unpopular leaders blindly or wantonly. Yet, I dare you to not mention a
leader who did not have at least one of those qualities?
The factor that enables even stupid, cowardly, weak willed
and unpopular leaders in power? Is the order of centrality, and not just any
sort as I shall explore, but a very specific type.
Some Background, Centrality is a way social science measures
your connections in network, most specifically in a social network. You are a
node and every connection to a node is a degree. Centrality is measured several
ways, Degree, Closeness, Betweenness and Eigenvectors. Each mathematical
measure answers a question to way we might measure how connected you are in any
social network.
Degree: How many
connections to me? Closeness: Am I closer to other groups or more isolated?
Betweenness: How well do you connect groups to other groups? Eigenvector: How
many connections do your connections have closest to you?
So, being connected? That’s the key to leadership? No. The 3rd
measure is. Though I would argue that Closeness and Eigenvector are critically
important as well, just not to the extent of Betweenness. And I would add that
Closeness and Eigenvector are still more important than Courage, Intelligence,
and force of will.
Now Betweenness is how information flows. If you are the key
or gate keeper to the flow of information, be this financial data, social-dynamics
data, or technological expertise data, if you are the shortest path between any
two random nodes/persons, you have a high centrality of Betweenness.
Think for a second, if you have the fastest answers, if all
information goes through you, and you can alter or shape the flow of or type of
information passed, you are the leader in any information based organization.
You may not have the title, but you rule that kingdom.
But before you run your email list through LinkedIn, there
are trade-offs and efforts that are required to accomplish this. In an
enterprise there are only 3 ways to increase your “Betweenness”.
1) Snoop
2) Expand your base
3) Own the record maker
Snooping is really just being able to pick up information
anywhere, and then building a reputation of always knowing the inside scoop,
this is a precursor to value resonance that I will elaborate later. Such that,
this can be a catalyst to the second which is building your base. But it can
also backfire, as people may interpret you are the sieve and not a lock box.
Expanding your base, is really building your social network.
Its not just Linkedin or Facebook. But having a lot of connection does help in
terms of surface credibility. This is a long and laborious process. It takes time to create situations where you
are indispensable to others.
The key here are the qualities identified in studies on
leadership emergence. Value resonance and gregariousness. So the example I use
is Flickr. If you go onto Flicker and use it post pictures of well crafted
articles, not going resonate. If you create or curate great photos of love,
war, peace, that will. But only if you are gregarious in so much that you reach
out to others as one that holds great resonating values to that network aka
great photographs will.
This can is time consuming as well. Especially in business,
where there are so many factors to focus on core resonate values. But if you
produce great product, that gets observed across various value based networks
Finance/Marketing/Sales, then leadership opportunities will follow.
Finally we get to the easiest and most ignored yet probably
the most powerful. Own the record maker. And by this I mean; If you own the technology that
controls decision making, you are catapulted into a leadership position. You
may be stupid, weak willed, isolated or insipid, you own the record maker.
A record maker is the device that sucks up information and
pushes out some report that the business must have to make decisions. If the
record maker works in real time? Even better, as various other business leaders
will depend on you to make their decisions.
Then why aren’t the quants in research the CEO? Because they
don’t do the other 2. They lack the
ability to be gregarious, they lack an understanding of value resonance, and
other than their own data, they have no idea what’s going on beyond their
cubicles.
How many times have we seen somebody who knows what’s going
on in every department, delivers key reports, and is connected to various team
leaders who depend on them and is the company’s loser?
I have not seen it. I have seen that person not be the
smartest, not the most genteel, nor the most popular in a particular division.
But everyone felt they were leaders. So while knowing what courage is, knowing
how to be charismatic is great, being the goto person for answers and having
the wit to capitalize on that is crucial.
So knowing how information flows, knowing how to seize the
opportunity to control that flow, and knowing how to distribute it through a
business network, that is 21st century leadership.
The question is now, what information center do you own?
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Using Social Memory to Cure Lurkers
How to engage a community? As you grow your community you may find that it has lots of members but not a lot of activity. The term being bounced around in social science is called “Social Loafing” and it means that people online are using their anonymity to shy away from doing any activity at all.
In doing research for our communities, we took a look at the latest academic papers about “Social Loafing” and by doing what academics call a Literary Review, we found that what we know as consultants is true.
One of the most interesting findings of one of the studies about forum communities was that while infrequent posters were similar to posters with regard to trust in benevolence/integrity, lurkers were very different from both groups.
Thus there may be a trust barrier to overcome with regard to this specific dimension of trust that is essential before a user will begin to post in the community.
Here we introduce what Kenwyn K. Smith and David N. Berg call the Paradox of Disclosure, from their book Paradoxes of Group Life. The idea being that if you the community face / leader(s) are not willing to disclose who and why they lead a community, they probably shouldn’t expect others to on their own.
So if no one knows who you are, that makes trusting an online stranger almost insurmountable. Activity on the site may continue, but the lurkers are only there because they “Trust” that there is activity, just not sure of who, what, and where these activities are.
An image of a boy watching a public park basketball game comes to mind. The boy watches, but does not engage. Whereas if the boy comes every week and watches, a familiarity may either encourage the players to ask if he wants to play, or he may ask himself. But in a virtual community were presence is anonymous this is impossible.
The Social Loafer has a higher perceived risk of interaction, which is formulated by the spatial and temporal separation among the members of online communities. This separation forms an information asymmetry, which gives rise to the members’ perceived risk.
Information Asymmetry is the inability of one individual to see that any other individuals have the same amount of information about each other. In the offline world, if two strangers walk into a room, if both are new to the room and each other, their information is symmetrical. A new member to a group may perceive risk as they do not know who anyone is, what social ties these individual have, their norms, values, and expectations.
Therefore, a different tack must be taken. Each social community software platform has different options. In this article we will use Meetup dot com.
Here are some of the tools we use to create more participants in our communities on Meetup:
First decrease Information Asymmetry.
- Post pictures of past events and future locations of events
- Speak into a camera and explain who you are and why a member should participate
- Post Maps and Directions to next event
- Post a list of things needed for event / meeting
- Post expectations of Meeting activity
Tip the Balance of Paradox of Disclosure.
- Post pictures of who the Leader(s) are are in multiple settings appropriate to the community
- Describe your Leader(s) expertise in leading the community
- Provide links to information and other groups you participate outside the particular community that support your passion for the community
- Be available online via email or forum
Decrease Spatial and Temporal separation.
- Create online Chat event for new Members to ask questions and chat with members
- Create smaller meetings of just “New Members” or create safe space for them prior to an event
- Create Teleconference via Skype or Phone
Target & Moderate Activity:
- Send emails to non-active members
- Create Narrative for non-active members
Finally, there will be new options in the future. Recent developments with Facebook and its Social Graph API, show that there will be opportunities to create a longer tail to our social memories.
The consultants will discuss the implications more in a future post. But we include it here because Facebook is another tool to convert lurkers.
Prior to Facebook, our social memory consisted of our cognitive abilities, our little black book, and maybe a photo album or shoebox..
But as Facebook increases its reach. Using it to share your Values and Norms as supported by your Facebook “Likes” becomes increasingly easier to do. By sharing this information via a link to your leader(s) social community profile, you provide a “longer tail” to the social memory of your community.
This provides an opportunity for members with higher perceived levels of risk of engagement another way to learn what your values and activities are. So if I have a Coffee Party Meetup, having my profile linked to Huffington Post, is an opportunity to extend the long tail of my social memory to other platforms..
The implications of using various platforms to extend the long tail of social memories is enormous, suffice to say here, use other platforms, like Twitter or Facebook to create one.
References:
Mitigation of Social Loafing
Computers in Human Behavior
Volume 26, Issue 4, July 2010, Pages 768-777
Emerging and Scripted Roles in Computer-supported Collaborative Learning
Psychological Barriers: Lurker and Poster Motivation and Behavior in Online Communities," Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 18, Article 16.
Paradoxes of Group Life; Understanding Conflict, Paralysis, and Movement in Group Dynamics Wiley Press Smith / Berg
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Horizontal Brand Salience
Recently I had a discussion with a CTO of some very popular video portals. The question he raised for my feedback was whether to develop a “Horizontal Approach” or a “Vertical Approach” to a Social Media Product Development.
He had been having some meetings with Facebook management. He posed this question:
What do you think Facebook wants? Do they want you to build brand pages on Facebook and bring traffic to Facebook? Or, build your own site and bring Facebook users to your own branded site?
To his and my unconsidered surprise was that FB management wants you to bring Facebook users to your branded site... Thus Facebook is not trying to build vertically, its trying to build horizontally. Makes sense once you use Facebook Connect as a social login, right?
Okay, so that is Horizontal Branding. Providing a layer across products or services that work without sacrificing the brand equity of the horizontal or the platform. In fact the horizontal should enhance it in a kind of symbiotic brand equity exchange. This works in various schematics and environments, take Sirius, or Tivo, or Dropbox... Sirius is offered in several different rental car services. Facebook Connect is another example of this, but its insidious nature was not something I was able to comment on in this brief encounter with this CTO. The antithesis of this is of course “White Labeling.”
Before we investigate Reed’s laws here (which I will return to), let’s take the third word “Salience”. Here is where things get really interesting. Salience is the implicit impact of bounded rationality on behavioral actions, in that as we raise the salience or awareness of a brand, research shows we crowd other brands out. And conversely we enhance brand loyalty with the salient brand. This can be somatic markers or embedded consensus maps depending on the marketing guru you follow.
We also know that many things can and do raise Brand Salience. Last week, I was having a conversation with the VP of Customer Experience of a company that unbeknownst to itself sells “Brand Salience”... Their core offering is a web page application that asks two simple questions and based on the answers given the selected users get one basic request.
What do you think of this Brand? (On Scale of 1-10)
What do you think of their specific product? (On Scale of 1-5)
If they score above 9-10 and 4-5 - They request you to share your thoughts.
That’s it. And it works brilliantly. By identifying the individuals who like the brand and the brand’s products, they take that group and request that they share those positive thoughts... A Simple Brand Salience Function.
But how do you provide Horizontal Brand Salience? The fact is most major brand companies don’t or don’t do it well. Ford does not, Dell does not, neither does Apple. Well, that’s not really true. Apple does provide Windows users with iTunes on Windows. “That glass of ice water”... But that’s it and its very rare for a major platform brand to not build and protect vertically. Of course, Microsoft does provide Office for Mac and some iPhone apps.
And that brings us to the real title... Ubiquitous is the New Black. From web sites to mobile phone platforms, we are confronted by “uneven” networks. Yet we know from Reed’s law that the exponential power to reach new pockets of users is in these subgroups or subnets. And its not always the technology that creates the barrier... Sometimes its content...
SideBar: I was asked who we should target in a past marketing meeting.. I said “The Etsy Girl” and you can find her on Etsy or Pinterest ... Well, Mashable saw what I saw...
Meaning there are pockets of users or technology bounded communities or networks like Blackberry users or iOS users or Chrome users or Symbian users or Apple PC users or Android users or Windows Phone 7 users or Windows 8 Beta Tablet users... Or even combinations such as PC Gamers of WOW. And the list goes on..
And so services that can maintain their “Brand Equity” Horizontally have additional “Brand Cache”.. As their ubiquitousness is part of their attraction. Its everywhere...
Take Dropbox, recently valued at over a billion dollars. Its a frickin slick “FTP client”.. But it works on every conceivable platform from mobile phones to PC operating systems.
So do you put Office on the iOS? Do you put iTunes on Android, seeing the effect from iTunes on Windows? These are and were heated discussions within their respective platforms. But, as all things indicate creating a Horizontal Brand Salience is the gold ring. Which is to say, if you have an iPad tablet and Microsoft Office comes to it, and you are aware of the MS Office Experience working seamlessly between iPad, Mac and say the work Windows PC you have enshrined your product or service within the users set of cognitive brand constructs.. This is a major shift from the days of only building in features for your platform and walling off the platform like an AOL online experience.
But does the platform lose? If I can run MS Office on iPad, why would I buy a Windows 8 Tablet? But if I have a PC does Apple lose if iTunes works on Windows? Observationally no of course...
So what was my answer to the question: Do we build a vertical or horizontal Social Media Product? I suggested a hybrid approach. But as I was limited in time, I had to skip the importance of granularity and abstraction. And more importantly do you lose if you tie yourself to Facebook’s Social Connect... Is this any difference than the trade-off MS will make by placing MS Office on the iPad/iPhone?
And here is where it gets really messy and I will dig deeper in a new post in the future.
But briefly: You use FB Connect you get the aggregate data and maybe more if you are creative. But they have privacy concerns breathing down their neck. Ultimately you don’t want aggregate data of users, you want granular or atomic. That brings you back to thinking you need email as a unique id. Or Twitter id, or extracting an FB id. But ultimately, you need a unique identifier separate from FB/Twitter/Email.
So getting started using FB sounds good at first because of its low friction social spread, but you need abstraction. That means you need to understand that once you begin building granular data around your user ID, you can then abstract the social identity and re-architect the branding from the game logic of the Social Media Product you are delivering.
Thus, visually each product appears separate on each domain, but that is because you are applying game logic that takes both the granular and the organic emergence of subnet/subgroup/product verticals in mind. While still using the horizontal social dynamics across multiple verticals... Example might be a “Point and Shoot Game”. On the kids site you shoot butterflies and on the adult site you shoot ho’s and pimps. The login, the number of inputs and outputs are the same, but the kids game may have some control over not allowing vulgarity in chat and allow only small subgroups to form, while the adult would not. You’re still shooting by tapping a flash button at moving objects in a 3X3 Window, just the visual layer is different... And yet I understand that this example does not dig deep enough into our discussion on Horizontal Brand Salience (I said it would get messy)... Unless, we return to opening the game API to other game developers or user generated content? Again this is for another post...
Yet in the end, the result is Horizontal Brand Salience that adapts to each community, by individually delivering experiences you want to provide. Where as Dropbox wants to be similar on each platform thus providing a Horizontal Brand Salience, a Social Media Product does in a different way. See how giving Meetup Groups the ability to customize their community works? Their UI is not dramatically different, but UGC will be. And most importantly, the Social Media Product will scale horizontally across the long tail of new bounded communities you have yet uncovered. The horizontal is that your brand will remain. The code base will remain horizontal. The user database will remain horizontal yet delineated. But the product will be socially, visually and interactively vertical... If you have architected the brand strong enough you will have Angry Birds like ubiquitousness and be seriously in the black...
He had been having some meetings with Facebook management. He posed this question:
What do you think Facebook wants? Do they want you to build brand pages on Facebook and bring traffic to Facebook? Or, build your own site and bring Facebook users to your own branded site?
To his and my unconsidered surprise was that FB management wants you to bring Facebook users to your branded site... Thus Facebook is not trying to build vertically, its trying to build horizontally. Makes sense once you use Facebook Connect as a social login, right?
Okay, so that is Horizontal Branding. Providing a layer across products or services that work without sacrificing the brand equity of the horizontal or the platform. In fact the horizontal should enhance it in a kind of symbiotic brand equity exchange. This works in various schematics and environments, take Sirius, or Tivo, or Dropbox... Sirius is offered in several different rental car services. Facebook Connect is another example of this, but its insidious nature was not something I was able to comment on in this brief encounter with this CTO. The antithesis of this is of course “White Labeling.”
Before we investigate Reed’s laws here (which I will return to), let’s take the third word “Salience”. Here is where things get really interesting. Salience is the implicit impact of bounded rationality on behavioral actions, in that as we raise the salience or awareness of a brand, research shows we crowd other brands out. And conversely we enhance brand loyalty with the salient brand. This can be somatic markers or embedded consensus maps depending on the marketing guru you follow.
We also know that many things can and do raise Brand Salience. Last week, I was having a conversation with the VP of Customer Experience of a company that unbeknownst to itself sells “Brand Salience”... Their core offering is a web page application that asks two simple questions and based on the answers given the selected users get one basic request.
What do you think of this Brand? (On Scale of 1-10)
What do you think of their specific product? (On Scale of 1-5)
If they score above 9-10 and 4-5 - They request you to share your thoughts.
That’s it. And it works brilliantly. By identifying the individuals who like the brand and the brand’s products, they take that group and request that they share those positive thoughts... A Simple Brand Salience Function.
But how do you provide Horizontal Brand Salience? The fact is most major brand companies don’t or don’t do it well. Ford does not, Dell does not, neither does Apple. Well, that’s not really true. Apple does provide Windows users with iTunes on Windows. “That glass of ice water”... But that’s it and its very rare for a major platform brand to not build and protect vertically. Of course, Microsoft does provide Office for Mac and some iPhone apps.
And that brings us to the real title... Ubiquitous is the New Black. From web sites to mobile phone platforms, we are confronted by “uneven” networks. Yet we know from Reed’s law that the exponential power to reach new pockets of users is in these subgroups or subnets. And its not always the technology that creates the barrier... Sometimes its content...
SideBar: I was asked who we should target in a past marketing meeting.. I said “The Etsy Girl” and you can find her on Etsy or Pinterest ... Well, Mashable saw what I saw...
Meaning there are pockets of users or technology bounded communities or networks like Blackberry users or iOS users or Chrome users or Symbian users or Apple PC users or Android users or Windows Phone 7 users or Windows 8 Beta Tablet users... Or even combinations such as PC Gamers of WOW. And the list goes on..
And so services that can maintain their “Brand Equity” Horizontally have additional “Brand Cache”.. As their ubiquitousness is part of their attraction. Its everywhere...
Take Dropbox, recently valued at over a billion dollars. Its a frickin slick “FTP client”.. But it works on every conceivable platform from mobile phones to PC operating systems.
So do you put Office on the iOS? Do you put iTunes on Android, seeing the effect from iTunes on Windows? These are and were heated discussions within their respective platforms. But, as all things indicate creating a Horizontal Brand Salience is the gold ring. Which is to say, if you have an iPad tablet and Microsoft Office comes to it, and you are aware of the MS Office Experience working seamlessly between iPad, Mac and say the work Windows PC you have enshrined your product or service within the users set of cognitive brand constructs.. This is a major shift from the days of only building in features for your platform and walling off the platform like an AOL online experience.
But does the platform lose? If I can run MS Office on iPad, why would I buy a Windows 8 Tablet? But if I have a PC does Apple lose if iTunes works on Windows? Observationally no of course...
So what was my answer to the question: Do we build a vertical or horizontal Social Media Product? I suggested a hybrid approach. But as I was limited in time, I had to skip the importance of granularity and abstraction. And more importantly do you lose if you tie yourself to Facebook’s Social Connect... Is this any difference than the trade-off MS will make by placing MS Office on the iPad/iPhone?
And here is where it gets really messy and I will dig deeper in a new post in the future.
But briefly: You use FB Connect you get the aggregate data and maybe more if you are creative. But they have privacy concerns breathing down their neck. Ultimately you don’t want aggregate data of users, you want granular or atomic. That brings you back to thinking you need email as a unique id. Or Twitter id, or extracting an FB id. But ultimately, you need a unique identifier separate from FB/Twitter/Email.
So getting started using FB sounds good at first because of its low friction social spread, but you need abstraction. That means you need to understand that once you begin building granular data around your user ID, you can then abstract the social identity and re-architect the branding from the game logic of the Social Media Product you are delivering.
Thus, visually each product appears separate on each domain, but that is because you are applying game logic that takes both the granular and the organic emergence of subnet/subgroup/product verticals in mind. While still using the horizontal social dynamics across multiple verticals... Example might be a “Point and Shoot Game”. On the kids site you shoot butterflies and on the adult site you shoot ho’s and pimps. The login, the number of inputs and outputs are the same, but the kids game may have some control over not allowing vulgarity in chat and allow only small subgroups to form, while the adult would not. You’re still shooting by tapping a flash button at moving objects in a 3X3 Window, just the visual layer is different... And yet I understand that this example does not dig deep enough into our discussion on Horizontal Brand Salience (I said it would get messy)... Unless, we return to opening the game API to other game developers or user generated content? Again this is for another post...
Yet in the end, the result is Horizontal Brand Salience that adapts to each community, by individually delivering experiences you want to provide. Where as Dropbox wants to be similar on each platform thus providing a Horizontal Brand Salience, a Social Media Product does in a different way. See how giving Meetup Groups the ability to customize their community works? Their UI is not dramatically different, but UGC will be. And most importantly, the Social Media Product will scale horizontally across the long tail of new bounded communities you have yet uncovered. The horizontal is that your brand will remain. The code base will remain horizontal. The user database will remain horizontal yet delineated. But the product will be socially, visually and interactively vertical... If you have architected the brand strong enough you will have Angry Birds like ubiquitousness and be seriously in the black...
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Freedom from The Clutches of PR Pro's...
In Response to: http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/13488.aspx
The 7 Reasons why Social Media should be pulled out of the clutches of PR:
1) Building your Book is not equal building a Community.
-Understanding game mechanics, feedback loops, rewards, integrating community features and understanding group dynamics is just not a PR function.
2) Despite every Social Media Fluff piece, Social Media is not 1 to 1, relationship building, its building communities or Brand armies.
-To manage the onslaught of messages coming in you must build armies or communities to segment, score and analyze that kind of mass communication. A well crafted message does not work, it requires implementing messaging systems, triggers, and rewards that only someone who understands community technologies and applications should handle.
3) PR is about building a 1 to 1 single contact that can broadcast to many, Social is about building 1 to 1000's.
-I apologize for all the fluff you have read in the last five years on social. But enterprise social media is not about 1v1, if you are receiving 10-20K messages a day or even 2-3K a day, you are not responding to every post or tweet. But I doubt any PR rep would not return the email of an established Blogger or Newcaster, or Reporter...
4) Social is about Big Data, PR is not, placement and reach is just a sliver of similar data points shared with PR, the majority of Social now is Social CRM, PR has no place there.
-Social data is being stored, it is being pulled into e-commerce and consumer acquisition models, campaigns are being designed to capture social data, wrangle that data, and push that data into columns and charts where decisions can be made in real-time. This is not what any PR expert should be expected to do.
5) Social Campaigns, are about building Brand Advocates, not identifying Brand Experts or significant New Media Outlets.
-Simply put If an individual node aka person or enterprise has 100K followers in which you want to reach that is PR. If you want to marshal 1,000's of nodes that have less than 500 connections that is Social Media... Period Stop...
6) Social Media provides the heartbeat, blood pressure, and temperature of your brand in real-time, PR media reports while important are about how established thought leaders respond as opposed to complex social networks.
-The analytic tools used by Social Media today, are not needed by PR. From segmentation based on product Affinity to Demographics about gender, age, location, content contexts, and etc are designed about developing resonance within a community and segmenting that community. The social media message changes per segment, so its about the voice of the community, not PR which is about the Voice of the Brand...
7) Conclusion: Whereas Social Media has been the ugly step-child of PR, Marketing, and Support, its role in providing real-time analysis, instant response, campaign conceptualization and management is too critical to be left to a seasoned PR rep with a great set of contacts.. PR is critical for the enterprise, but it is not a Social Media function...
Thursday, December 20, 2012
These Are The Companies Behind Apple's Attempt To Kill Google
The truth about Siri is that it's not very good. But, Apple's not giving up on it. As such, it's still worth examining. Which is what Gene Munster did in a report today.
via Pocket http://www.businessinsider.com/who-powers-siri-2012-12
Monday, July 9, 2012
Small things:
Little bits of technology, and all the connections - Carlson's and Kim's death are linked by an invisible thread…
Headlines: "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff" author dies of heart attack"
Headline: "Machines can't save our world / Kim family's story shows limitations of new technology" (Originally Published Online)
What is interesting about re-examining the untimely deaths of these two individuals is that small stuff matters in very similar ways. Because it is all the small stuff that is connected to other small stuff, that when you look at all the small stuff interconnected it becomes really big important stuff. This is the basis of systems theory, it is a basic component of social dynamics, it is the basis of biological systems, it is the basis of neuro-cognitive psychology, it is the basis of social networks, and even technological networks. The invisible thread is that element or interface that we as humans provide a consciousness to connect them all with. We can operate in a world full of small stuff, manage all the small stuff, and be connected to all the small stuff. It's not that hard, it does not require sweat, and it might just save your life
Ironically, the first article is about a guy promoting a book about holiday stress that dies of cardiac arrest on flight from one book appearance to another during the holidays. Sadly, the other article is about a guy who reviews tech gadgets that didn't have a satellite phone or portable GPS to find a way out of the wilderness and died try to find a way out.
The second article states technology can't save our world. Well, no one machine, no one device, not one helicopter with an infrared camera can do it. But that's not what this article is about. It's about all the devices connected.
One cell phone is useless without the infrastructure to allow it to connect to emergency service networks. One anecdote about how to pat yourself on the back will not lower your Cortisol while you spend the holidays making public appearances on different coasts.
What is lacking is the connection these two men made. One analyzes new gadgets that make our life better, and the other analyzes new behaviors to make our life better. Yet neither made the connection in their own life to have the gadget that would have saved one and the behaviors that might
have prolonged the other.
One can not say for certain if Mr. Kim had spent $39 rental fee for a satellite phone or purchased one for $700 dollars he would be alive. Or if he had purchased any number of GPS devices ranging from $500 & up what might have still been the outcome?
Nor can one say for certainty if Mr. Carlson had in the last 6 months had his homosystiene levels checked, or gotten a C-reactive protein test or any number of indicators for heart disease. Or for that matter, whether a defibrillator was on board and if somebody even used it.
What we can sketch out is this, these were 20th century men living in a 21st century world. In the 20th century we lived in a cause and effect world. Big forces caused big effects, the two world wars can be seen like chess pieces, with clear black and white sides. But we are all connected. We have multiple redundant systems and multiple virtual profiles that keep us connected. Cell phones, laptops, email, and on and on... In the 20th century newsreels fed us information, major network anchors fed us headlines, but not now...Not in the 21st century. We are the person of the year according to Newsweek...
We are connected, we are networked, but are we aware of all the connections? This is the real issue. Can we be aware of all the small stuff we are connected to? If we can't who can help us? Who will emerge as the that begins to see all the connections to all the small stuff.
It is not just technology and communications, but we are now looking at our biological selves as connected networks of small stuff. Digestive systems connected to endocrine systems, connected to nervous systems. Then we have the brain itself, a barely mined golden vane of separate neuron based 'small stuff' of visual, emotional, and motor networks.
The days of matching a cough to a pill, and the removal of a dictator to democracy are over. Now we have to begin the long hard haul to put all the small stuff into the big things that happen. Welcome my 20th century friends, this is the 21st century.
In socio-economic and political realms, the 20th Century gurus have emerged; certainly Al Gore comes to mind to complex ecological issues. And some might even point to persons like Dr Weil and Deepak Chopra as gurus in the world of health and wellness.
Those are just the first generation of forward thinkers of the last century, yet who are going to take the place of Mr. Carlson in terms of behaviors and Mr. Kim in the world of gadgets? Hopefully, a person who sees that all the small stuff matters because all the small stuff is connected to you.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Calling the President
“Dude”
A Conversational
Analysis of the changing Norms of Broadcast Journalism
Since the 1980s journalists have lost autonomy within news
organizations increasingly dominated by the logic of the market, and have lost
prestige within society -
Daniel C. Halin UCSD from International Communication Association &
Political Science Association Vol 16
Many social critics, scholars, and
popular cultural figures have bemoaned the blending of entertainment and the
news (Anderson 2004, Postman 2005, Kimball 1994). Specifically, this has become
most visible in TV news organizations and TV news productions. The once sacred domain of the TV news
interview with its ideals of Social Responsibility (Siebert, Peterson and
Schramm 1956) have come under scrutiny as major media conglomerates have
demanded that the once sacrosanct newsroom become a profit center in its own
right (Kimball 1994) .
As Halin points out in his paper, this
has not always been the case, but today we see that with cable news and even
with broadcast news the social institution known as the news interview with its
norms of objectivity and adversarialness (Heritage, Clayman 2010) has become
less clearly defined if not completely ambiguous in many cases.
News provides a way to inform the
public, and is considered by many as a social good (Hamilton, Rimsky 1996) and
necessary ingredient to a successful democracy. But this paper is not a
political science survey of news media events, communication theory or media company
histories.
But rather a look at how the slow
but clear deconstruction of the news interview norms has created an opportunity
for individuals to explore and exploit this once clearly defined domain.
To provide this window into the disintegrating
journalistic TV norms of today’s broadcast news, the author proposes to use
someone at the nexus between entertainment and broadcast news, Jon Stewart of
the Daily Show on Comedy Central. This paper will use the work of
Conversational Analysis to show how the participants in specific interviews are
bewildered, caught off guard, and professionally damaged by Mr. Stewarts
willingness to both criticize the lack of journalistic “Social Responsibility”
and then use the very rhetorical techniques of news journalists in the art of
news gathering he himself critiques.
Host Jon Stewart in the studio of The Daily Show in 2004 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
As the media landscape has changed,
with the internet and 100’s of TV channels, Jon Stewart, a comedian who anchors
“Self-Proclaimed” fake TV news show is one who travels in and in between the world
of entertainment programming and broadcast news. Research shows that specific
younger demographics primarily get their news from him (Pew Research 2004), he
is ranked as a trusted journalist along side TV News Journalists like Tom
Brokaw and Brian Williams. And, he regularly gets higher ratings than most TV
Cable news programs (NY Times 2005).
Thus he provides a unique and
powerful example of relative ease that a personality like Mr. Stewart can move
to take control and deconstruct in real time various news interview situations.
This paper will specifically look at three news interviews situations of Mr.
Stewart. The first is where Mr. Stewart was the guest of the CNN cable news
show Crossfire. The second will be his interview of Chris Matthews as a guest on
Mr. Stewart’s own The Daily Show. And finally we shall look at the most recent
interview of President Barack Obama on the Daily Show taken just before the
November midterm elections of 2010. In each Mr. Stewart uses his unique “un-journalistic”
credentials to attack, propose his populist views, and potentially destroy the
careers of other unwitting TV participants. We will use the works of John
Heritage and Steve Clayman to examine how Mr. Stewart works in these
interviews.
It is important to note that the
author of this paper did review many other interviews of Mr. Stewart. These
include interviews with Ken Auletta at C-Span, Larry King, and Oprah. Mr.
Stewart is a seasoned professional who has hosted the live telecast of the
Academy Awards twice. He has authored several books, and is a writer, producer and
host of the Daily show which is the winner of two Peabody Awards, several
Emmy’s for outstanding Comedy / Variety Show and a Thurber Award. Thus, the
following examples are of a seasoned media professional who’s nightly broadcast
specifically skewers broadcast media. Thus, it would be difficult to assume his
naïveté in the world of broadcast journalism as a cause for his actions.
It is also important to note that
two of the transcripts used are culled from the third party transcript
services, and one is done by the author of this paper. Yet due to limitations
of creating transcripts, while they are all accurate, they do not contain the
standard notations of inflection, breath, silence, and other points of higher
precision typical of Conversation Analysis papers.
Thus our first example shows that
Mister Stewart is well aware of what Heritage and Clayman refer to as the
“overhearing” audience. In fact he plays to the audience in all his interviews.
The twist, is that he plays to it as a comedian and not in deference as a
journalist, despite his use of journalistic rhetorical techniques. Heritage and
Clayman point out that the journalistic question / answer interaction is
constrained in part for journalists to get answers for the “overhearing”
audience and not themselves, thus journalists refrain from making “oh” or
“right” remarks, so as to maintain a “neutralistic” stance. Further, to
maintain a completely neutral stance is quite difficult as they state that
trying to be both objective and adversarial creates a tension that is difficult
to maintain and that being completely neutral is nearly impossible.
But again, Mr. Stewart is not
willing to be constrained by the journalist’s neutralistic circle of
objectivity which reporters use as Heritage and Clayman suggest as a shield
against attacks of bias and unfairness. In fact, he acknowledges that this
journalistic objectivity is being destroyed in fact by the hosts of Crossfire.
So what Mr. Stewart does as he literally sits in the middle between the liberal
Mr. Begala on the left and the conservative Mr. Carlson on the right is
unashamedly attack not using simple declaratives as one might use in ordinary
conversation, but using the question and answer turn taking of journalists to
support his opinions about the current state of broadcast journalism.
The attacks are so devastating and were
so widely reported that despite the fact that Crossfire first aired on CNN in
1982 and was a very successful show, in less than a year after Mr. Stewart’s 2004
appearance, the show was taken off the air. Though long running shows
frequently get cancelled, in a New York Times interview of the President of CNN,
the CNN executive was quoted as saying that its cancellation was due in great
part to Mr. Stewart’s appearance (NY Times 2005).
1 STEWART: Thank you very much. That was very kind of you to
say.
2 Can I say something very quickly? Why do we have to fight?
2 Can I say something very quickly? Why do we have to fight?
Here
Mister Stewart uses what Heritage and Clayman refer to as deference to the interviewer,
which is a request to shift the agenda. We see this in debates and news
interviews. Yet, as Mr. Stewart proceeds he has something else in mind.
He continues to guide the two
interviewers on saying something nice about the other candidate at the time
being Bush and Kerry. Tucker
Carlson the “right wing” conservative obliges and Paul Begala “left wing”
progressive makes a feeble attempt at Bush stating he ‘s be unemployed
soon.
This only frustrates Mr. Stewart
more, until he pleads with both hosts to just “stop, stop hurting America.” In fact he requests for them to go “work
with us, the people.” As if he is a representative or union leader of that group. This entire dialogue is critical to understanding Mr. Stewarts
populist stance. Mr. Carlson’s assumes that Mr. Stewart is just a “funny”
journalist and makes the insistence that he is a lax journalist because of the easy
questions Mr. Stewart lobed on the Democrat’s nominee John Kerry.
(This is not
lost on the audience, who are listening intently)
1 STEWART: See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now,
you're helping the
2 politicians and the corporations. And we're left out there
to mow our lawns.
3 BEGALA: By beating up on them? You just said we're too rough on them when they
3 BEGALA: By beating up on them? You just said we're too rough on them when they
4 make mistakes.
5 STEWART: No, no, no, you're not too rough on them. You're part of their strategies.
5 STEWART: No, no, no, you're not too rough on them. You're part of their strategies.
6
You are partisan, what do you call it, hacks.
7 (LAUGHTER)
The audience has now turned and is clearly laughing at the “hack”
hosts of the cable show they waited in line to attend. The error that begins to grow is where
Mr. Carlson continues to compare Mr. Stewart to himself in terms of
journalistic objectivity. Mr. Carlson is mistaken in thinking that Mr. Stewart is
a Progressive political interviewer, and continues to suggest that Mr. Stewart
was too easy on John Kerry. But Mr. Stewart is undeterred by the assumption he
must play by the rules of objectivity that are the hallmark of good journalism.
1 STEWART: But the thing is that this -- you're doing theater,
when you should be doing debate, which would be great.
2 BEGALA: We do, do...
3 (CROSSTALK)
4 STEWART: It's not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan
2 BEGALA: We do, do...
3 (CROSSTALK)
4 STEWART: It's not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan
5 hackery. And I will tell you why I know it.
6 CARLSON: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you're
6 CARLSON: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you're
7 accusing us of partisan hackery?
8 STEWART: Absolutely.
9 CARLSON: You've got to be kidding me. He comes on and you...
10 (CROSSTALK)
11 STEWART: You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank
8 STEWART: Absolutely.
9 CARLSON: You've got to be kidding me. He comes on and you...
10 (CROSSTALK)
11 STEWART: You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank
12 phone calls.
13 (LAUGHTER)
13 (LAUGHTER)
Clearly we see that Mr. Stewart
believes his status as entertainer alleviates his requirements to follow neutralistic
assertions, while his self-proclaimed populist position requires him to demand
that others in broadcast journalism maintain the very standards he does not
require of himself.
In addition, Mr. Carlson has begun
to leave the realm of Question and Answer turn taking and just begins in line #
3 to simply argue that Mr. Stewart is not an objective journalist. And so to
drive the point home that that Mr. Carlson’s assertion is false, Mr. Stewart
buries the knife with the line # 5 “You're on CNN.
The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls”. Here Mr.
Stewart gets his biggest laugh and applause. The program proceeds but the damage is done. Neither Mr.
Carlson nor Mr. Begala are able to return to the Question and Answer format
their news show format was entirely based on.
Thus we see that Stewart both
understands the role of news journalism, the techniques of journalism, but he himself
is not required to be objective as he is an entertainer.
As an
entertainer, his role as interviewer can change depending on how he wishes to
proceed. In the next interview we look at how a very seasoned broadcast journalist Chris Matthews fails to realize the use
of adversarial techniques in the guise of a talk-show conversational format.
Mr.
Matthews is a 20 year veteran of news, a syndicated columnist in over 200
papers, hosts TV news programs, winning numerous awards, as well as being a
visiting fellow at Harvard’s JFK school of government. So again he should be
prepared to handle whatever a comedian might throw his way.
Yet we
see again, Mr. Matthews is thrown off guard, where it might have been expected
by a younger less experienced Tucker Carlson, one might assume Mr. Matthews can
handle a comedian.
Video Link: Of the exchange
1 JS: Welcome to the
uh Welcome to the show2 CM: That’s
right
2 JS: How’s it going?
3 CM: It’s great.
4 JS: (Closeup of
Book on Table) Life’s a Campaign,
now if I read this correctly and I
5 believe I have read this book correctly what you are saying is people can
use
6 what politicians do and uh in political campaigns
7 CM: Yea
8 JS: uh to help
their lives
9 CM: YEA
10 JS: Now the-at
11 CM: That’s irony
isn’t it?
12 JS: It strikes me as fundamentally
wrong. It strikes me as a self-hurt book if you will
13
CM: Laughing
Mr. Stewart is beginning this
interview in a typical Question and Answer format. But we can see in this first
question line #4. But he states it as a declarative, and not an interrogative.
Thus he sets the tone for the way he will manage the interchange. In fact,
there are no questions of who, what, where questions in the most of the
interview. Even in line #12 “It strikes me as a self hurt book if you will” is
a combination of declarative statement and agenda shift.
Clearly Matthews interprets Mr. Stewart’s
comments as comedic sarcasm and gentle ribbing at his book’s premise. What
unfolds though is a process again where the guest incorrectly presumes the
stance of Mr. Stewart. In this interview Mr. Stewart carries on no Q&A
interview. It is simply a conversation, or rather an argument about the value
of Mr. Matthews book. We know this by the lack of turn taking constraints, lack
of any lexical choices, or sequence design (Heritage, Clayman 2010) typical of
a TV interview.
John poses one of just two
questions of the entire interview, “How is this not a book about Sadness, just halfway through
the interview? Matthews counters stating “May I give you an example” what
Heritage and Clayman state as a token request for permission. as if he is in a journalistic setting
of turn taking question and answer format. But Mr. Stewart will not have any of
the Q&A format, and continues with his conversational style denigrating the
books’s premise. Matthews ignores Stewart’s proposition stating “But watch how
far politicians have gotten, watch what Clinton got watch what Hillary …”.
Matthew steps into a deep hole by using an example of women and Bill Clinton. Matthews
illustrates that Clinton shared the tip to friends that you have to listen to women to get them in bed.
1 CM: But Noo
2 JS: But politicians
often listen but they don’t their their
3 CM: Listen (softly)
4 JS: It’s a
contrivance
5 CM: It’s not a
contrivance if you I’m listening to you
6 JS: No your not
7 CM I’m listening to
you
8 JS: You don’t
listen to anybody
9 CM: How could I not
listen while your trashing my book . How could I not hear ya?
10 JS: I’m not
trashing your book, I am trashing your philosophy of life
11 (Audience laughter
and applause)
Matthews tries but can’t “Operate
on the Question”, despite following up on the presumptive term “Contrivance.”
Heritage and Clayman suggest this is one way to shift the agenda in news
interviews, but it fails and Matthews gets clearly disgusted at this point. He grabs
his book out of the hands of Jon Stewart at line #9. What follows is an interesting ploy by Matthews to turn
return to the accepted rules of interviews back in his favor. He realizes he
must take over and return to a Question and Answer format and leave this
conversational parlay where he is at a disadvantage with a skilled comedian.
1
CM: Can you come on Hardball?
2
JS: What?
3
CM: Yes come on Hardball
4
JS: No
5
CM: You know what we can play this both ways
6
JS: No: You know (pause) what I can say is this (pause) I don’t troll
7
CM: (slapping his open hand down on desk) Hard laugh
8
(Audience laughs and moans)
9
CM: You are unbelievable, you are, this is a book interview from
hell.
10
JS: (laughing coyly pulls his arms and body away from being hit
mockingly)
11
JS: No this is
12
CM: this is the worst interview I have ever had in my life
13
JS: No
14
(Audience begins to cheer and laugh)
In this sequence we see that Matthews
can not figure out how things went so wrong, but realizes that he needs to get
to the safer realm where he does understand the journalistic rules of
engagement that Mr.Stewart has no interest in maintaining. But interestingly
even Mr. Stewart has over stepped what might be called the realm of common
courtesy. As in line # 6 “I don’t troll” gets laughs but also gets an equal set
of moans at the bitterness of how the interview has become.
Mr. Matthews is known as a more
liberal tilting journalist from his political work with Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil and
Senator Ed Muskie. As Jon is also typically known to side with more progressive
points of view on his show, It could be assumed that attacking a fellow
progressive in each conversational turn has become too much for many in the
audience to bear.
And so this is evident as Stewart recognizes
after the moans to re-dress his adversarial attacks on Mr. Matthews, offering
to appear on his show after saying no to the suggestion and asking for his
handshake for the sake of friendship.
But Mr. Stewart does not just
interview celebrities and media personalities. He also interviews powerful
political figures including former and current presidents. This final analysis
is an interview with Barack Obama. Here, Mr. Stewart does away with his
conversational style he used with Matthews and instead uses the journalistic
techniques of Question and Answer turn taking typical of a presidential press
conference or interview.
Where as the Matthews interview had
few if any clear question and answer turns, this interview does. In fact we are
able to use Clayman and Heritage’s work of five dimensions of adversarialness;
initiative, directness, assertiveness, accountability, and hostility. We will briefly look at this segment to
analyze how this interview stands up to other presidential interviews.
Video Link: POTUS vs. Stewart
1 Stewart: Does that happen to you wherever
you go? Is that just a wild — 'cause
2 when you
guys [gestures to audience] go to work, do people typically
applaud? It's
3 a nice feeling.
4 Obama: It was a wonderful welcome. It does not happen, for example, when I go
4 Obama: It was a wonderful welcome. It does not happen, for example, when I go
5 to the Republican caucus meetings.
6 Stewart: I see; slightly different. So here you are —
7 Obama: Here I am.
8 Stewart: — you're two years into your administration, and the question that
6 Stewart: I see; slightly different. So here you are —
7 Obama: Here I am.
8 Stewart: — you're two years into your administration, and the question that
9
arises in my mind: Are we the
people we were waiting for? [laughter] Or, does
it
10 turn out those people are still out
there and we don't have their number? How
11 are you feeling about that?
Lets’
look at this through each dimension. According to
Heritage and Clayman Initiative
contains three aspects reporters
use;(1) preface their question with statements that construct a context
for the question to follow, or (2) ask more than one question within a single
turn at talk, or (3) ask a follow-up question.
Clearly
we see initiative used as Stewart in line #1 he asks a direct question, but
does not pause and clarifies the question with reference to the audience. And
then ends with a declarative line #3“It’s a nice feeling” .
In
terms of Directness, line one is
clearly direct. There are no self-referencing or asking or permission, but
Stewart does open the question to the audience, before making the statement its nice...
Assertiveness,
which captures the extent to which the question invites a particular answer and
is thus opinionated rather than neutral, according to Heritage and Clayman.
Here both questions are mildly assertive. The first ends with an open
declarative of being nice to be liked, and the other ends line #11 with an open
question that does not require a yes or no response.
Adversarialness,
which captures the extent to which the question pursues an agenda in opposition
to the president or his administration, is concerned mainly with the question content (Clayman). Clearly
neither is truly adversarially posed questions as the first question is poised
with positive statements of being liked and the second is neutral offering the
president either option of finding people who believe in his administration’s
claim to change or not.
Accountability
as defined in their work is in new reporting is as questions that explicitly
ask the president to defend and justify his policies. Because such questions
decline to accept policy at face value, they are to some extent aggressive,
although the degree of aggressiveness depends on the linguistic form of the
question according (Heritage Clayman 2010). Again these two questions are
devoid of any accountability.
So we can see in these first two questions that Mr. Stewart is playing “softball”
with the president. This is what Tucker Carlson argued was his tendency to not
hold left leaning or progressive politicians feet to the fire. And not what Mr.
Matthews received in his conversational interview.
In
each section we see clear delineation of question and answer turn taking. But
Mr. Stewarts adversarial “quotient” does ramp up.
1 Stewart: Is the difficulty that you have
here the distance between what you ran on
2 and what you delivered? Is that — you
ran with such (if I may) "audacity" — so much
3 of what you said was, "great
leaders lead in a time of opportunity," "we're the ones
4 we're looking
for" — yet legislatively it has felt timid at times. I'm not even sure at
5 times what you want out of a healthcare bill.
6 Obama: And this is — Jon, I love your show, but —
7 Stewart: Very kind of you!
8 Obama: — but this is something where, you know, I have a profound disagreement
6 Obama: And this is — Jon, I love your show, but —
7 Stewart: Very kind of you!
8 Obama: — but this is something where, you know, I have a profound disagreement
9 with you and — I don't want to lump you in with a lot of
other pundits — but —
10 Stewart: You may.
11 Obama: — but this notion that healthcare was "timid": you've got 30 million people
10 Stewart: You may.
11 Obama: — but this notion that healthcare was "timid": you've got 30 million people
12 who are gonna get health
insurance as a consequence of this —
13 Stewart: Right.
14 Obama: — you've got a Patient's Bill of Rights that makes sure that insurance
13 Stewart: Right.
14 Obama: — you've got a Patient's Bill of Rights that makes sure that insurance
15 companies
can't drop you when you get sick, if you've been paying premiums, that…
In
line one we see that Stewart is
asking direct question line #2 what you delivered? Though it is tempered by
using an indirect self reference of (if I may) line #2. In terms of Initiative though the
question is complex and prefaced content that the president is not meeting the
mark of his campaign rhetoric.
This speaks to it being much more adversarial and assertive. And by
using his keyword “Audacity” from the president’s own book title, we see that
Stewart is demanding accountability for the president’s record so far.
So we
see at line #8 that the president has become aware that this is no longer a
comedy interview show. The questions have moved from “how do you feel?” to
complex prefaced presuppositions of the president’s willingness to be a “great
leader” and embrace the “audacity” rather than the assertion of timidity.
Stewart is using what Clayman and Heritage state as a “Contrast” in question
design creating very stark Black and White hypothesis.
In
fact we see the president not wanting to “Lump you with a lot of other pundits”
which appears to be placing a kind of deference to Mr. Stewart. Remarkably,
Stewart responds with “You May” line #10. This appears ironic, since just a few
years back as in the CrossFire interview Stewart very clearly states he is not
a political pundit or partisan. This may be sarcasm on Stewarts part, but it
still suggests that even Mr. Stewart is not concretely aware of his sliding
position from political interviewer to stand-up comedian. And is supported by the president’s
deferential comment to not want to compare him to other pundits. It is
important to note that in line 11, Stewart responds to the president with
“Right”. Again Mr. Stewart despite developing complex adversarial questions has
no qualms of stepping beyond the neutralistic circle of objectivity and
agreeing or confirming answers, rather than to remain silent and objective.
But
there is a turning point in the interview where Mr. Stewart uses a rhetorical
technique that traps the president between two questions one in which Mr.
Stewart answers for him and another just as difficult to respond to.
1 Stewart: — you worked within the system.
You know, during the campaign there was
2
talk that we were gonna be able to negotiate prices with Canadian
pharmaceutical
3
companies —
4 Obama: Right.
5 Stewart: — a deal was made with them — $80 billion over 10 years — okay, that
4 Obama: Right.
5 Stewart: — a deal was made with them — $80 billion over 10 years — okay, that
6 seems like a quid pro quo that seemed reasonable, but there's other things with
the
7 insurance companies. You know, I was
talking with a woman in the audience before
8 the show [audience cheers] but she
brought up an interesting point: you know, 2014
9 is when these exchanges kick in and there will be
some kind of price controls, but up
10
until that point there's really nothing in this bill that doesn't allow
these insurance
11 companies to
raise rates.
12 Obama: Not true! In fact, what we have done is we have empowered state insurance
12 Obama: Not true! In fact, what we have done is we have empowered state insurance
13 commissioners to
review the rate hikes that are taking place in states — in some
14 states, like North Carolina, they've already used it and
rolled back premium
15 increases by 25%.
From
line 1 to line 5 Stewart sets up the president for a tough question on his
campaign promise of negotiating with big pharma on drug prices. This was a
major democratic talking point during the 2008 campaign (NY Times 2009). But in
line# 5 Stewart answers his own allegation and assertion that it was “quid pro
quo”. Then continues to assert that the president policies again are not
helpful as an audience member points out that the insurance industry is hiking
up rates currently.
Stewart
is formulating what Heritage and Clayman call fork or presenting two
unpalatable alternatives. Does the president agree that it was a backroom quid
pro quo done in contrast to his campaign talking points or that his policies
are hurting audience members with higher insurance rates?
Clearly
this represents what Heritage and Clayman suggest as maximizing
adversarialness. The president is trapped between two tough alternative takes.
The president chooses the later, ignoring the deal with big pharma.
But
the damage is being done and the president will seal the deal himself. The over
arching principle that the president is not the populist hero or idealist but
rather a pragmatist that sides with big pharma, big insurance, and is adverse
to risky idealistic populist positions his 2008 campaign espoused has been set in the minds of the audience through the
skillful techniques of Mr. Stewarts adversarial pursuit of this theme.
1 Stewart: Welcome back to the show
President Barack Obama. [audience cheers and
2 applause] You expressed some frustration
with those on the Left who are still feeling
3 dissatisfied. Do you think in any way the expectation was
something that maybe even
4 you
and your campaign created? Were people being naïve, in the sense of — I
5 remember very clearly you said, "We can't expect
different results with the same
6 people."
7 Obama: Right.
8 Stewart: And I remember when you hired Larry Summers [laughter] — I remember
7 Obama: Right.
8 Stewart: And I remember when you hired Larry Summers [laughter] — I remember
9 thinking, "Well, that seems like the exact same
person," and why would you — so, in
10 some respects, I get your frustration with this idea that,
"Well, geez, are you never
11
satisfied?" but again, the expectation, I think, was Audacity,
going in there and really
12 rooting
out a corrupt system. And so the sense is, has reality of what hit you in the
13 face when you first stepped in, caused
you to back down from some of the more
14
visionary — like bringing in a guy like Larry Summers, like —
15 Obama: First of all, if you look at how we have handled this financial crisis —
16 Stewart: Right.
17 Obama: — if you had told me two years ago that we're gonna be able to stabilize the
15 Obama: First of all, if you look at how we have handled this financial crisis —
16 Stewart: Right.
17 Obama: — if you had told me two years ago that we're gonna be able to stabilize the
18 system, stabilize the stock market, stabilize
the economy, and by the way at the end
19
of this thing it'll cost less than 1% of GDP where the S&L
crisis cost us 2½% of our
20 entire
economy for a much smaller crisis, I'd say, "We'll take that,"
because we
21 saved taxpayers a whole lot of money. And, in fairness,
Larry Summers did a heckuva
22 job
trying to figure out how to —(audience laughs)
23 Stewart: You don't want to use that
phrase, dude. [laughs]
Mr.
Stewart skillfully takes his time and uses the casualness of the tone to set up
the president in two questions. On line #5 he quotes the president’s campaign rhetoric, “We can’t
expect different results with the same people”. On line# 7 the president
ignores the question as a statement in line #3-4. And Obama confirms the
premise on line #7 with “Right”
But
Stewart is working toward a premise and hits him in line # 14 bringing up Larry
Summers. It is important to note that Larry Summers was Secretary of Treasury
under Clinton and helped pass the deregulation bill that ended the separation
of investment firms with banks by ending the Glass-Stegal Act that prevented
this since the great depression. Thus Stewart is twisting in the knife again, using
a highly political figure that Obama is well aware of. And although the
president was fully prepared to defend this choice and stand behind his record
of ending the economic free-fall he faced when entering the white house, it is
on line #22 where Obama’s tone briefly changes.
The
line is “And, in fairness, Larry
Summers did a heckuva job trying to figure out how to”. The president is
stopped cold in mid sentence as the audience laughter begins. But rather than
laughing with him and cheering, they are laughing at him.
The
audience is quicker to respond to the statement than Mr. Stewart is able to.
The line is recognized as nearly identical from the one used by former
President George W. Bush, in his defense of his FEMA Secretary Mike Brown in the Katrina Hurricane
crisis. An instance where Brown’s incompetence was pointed out by the press and
yet defended by president Bush. And Mr. Stewart pleased and shocked by the irony, calls the
president “Dude” casualness not typical of a presidential interaction further
demeaning the stature and dramatic nature of the slip.
Thus
slip on its own, might be meaningless, especially with the typically
progressive leaning audience of the Daily Show. But here, after question after
question of Mr. Stewart setting up the context that the president is not a
visionary leader but rather just another politician using the same team and
defending the status quo, Obama’s slip makes the assertion complete.
If not
for the president’s strong rebuttals and preparedness, this interview might
have been more devastating as in the previous two examples. As a result, the
president escapes lightly bruised. But we can see that the affable attitude and
tendency to lean in towards Mr. Stewart smiling has left Mr. Obama. His
expression from here on out is more stone faced and remote.
In
fact, the president realizing his defeat asks to return to the subject of his
campaign ideals and campaign spirit to defend it moments later. But again
Stewart succeeds by setting up a contrast already throughout the interview.
1 Stewart: You wouldn't say you'd run this
time as a pragmatist — it wouldn't be, "Yes,
2 we can — given certain conditions..."?
3 Obama: No, I think what I would say is, "Yes, we can, but — [audience laughs] — it is
3 Obama: No, I think what I would say is, "Yes, we can, but — [audience laughs] — it is
4 not gonna happen overnight."
In
line# 3 the audience again cuts the president off and begins to laugh at the
president. Here Obama makes the mistake to use his campaign slogan but
interjects a “but” which simple signals to the audience he is conceding to Mr.
Stewarts premise that he is in reality a pragmatic politician not a visionary
leader.
In
conclusion, what we see is a talented individual who uses rhetorical techniques
and accepted journalistic conventions and maneuvers in and out of those
accepted norms with a nimbleness and skill that most journalists and comedians
do not have in there respective domains or verbal skill arsenals. The world of broadcast journalism may be
the one grist for the mill of Mr.
Stewart, but it is also where he takes when he wishes to attack and disarms
those who oppose his genuine populist views.
Further
it is clear as to whether he sees himself as being part of the solution or part
of the problem of a media landscape lacking Social Responsibility. He clearly
sees himself as part of the solution. But as he jumps into the fake suit of
news journalism using adversarial techniques, the question begs does his
audience realize the difference?
And if
they don’t as some research shows, the question begs for more research to find
out if he is doing more harm by not clearly defining what he does as pure
entertainment and not news. As we saw in the Obama interview, Mr. Stewart is a
skillful political interviewer, worthy of putting an experienced politician
such as President Obama on the ropes. But did the audience experience a news
interview or entertainment?
And
did his use of news gathering techniques blur the lines further that he himself
has decried and satirized on his own show? More research must be made, what is
clear is by using the tools of Conversation Analysis we can see that what Mr.
Stewart does is not as ambiguous as it may seem.
We see
also that others do not understand his particular delineation of entertainer vs.
objective journalist, as the lines have become blurred even for those who
participate in it. So blurred in fact are the waters, that professionals in
broadcast media as well as seasoned politicians are having a hard time
navigating these uncharted seas. All the while, Mr. Stewart captains the ship
into murkier and murkier waters of journalistic objectivity and entertaining
combativeness.
References
John Heritage and Steven Clayman
Talk in Action Wiley- Blackwell
2010
Steven Clayman, Marc Elliot, John Heritage, Laurie McDonald Historical Trends in
Questioning Presidents, 1953-2000 Presidential Studies Quarterly 36, no. 4
(December)
Steven Clayman, Marc Elliot, John Heritage,and Megan Beckett A Watershed in White House
Journalism: Explaining the Post-1968 Rise of Aggressive Presidential News
Political Communication, 27:229–247, 2010
Also videos and papers cited and used:
CNN / Crossfire:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE
Daily Show Chris Matthews:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-2-2007/chris-matthews
Daily Show Barak Obama:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-27-2010/barack-obama-pt--1
Bonnie M. Anderson News
Flash: journalism, infotainment, and the bottom line of Broadcast news 2004
Wiley Imprint SF
Neil Postman Amusing
Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Penguin 1985 /
Foreward 2005
Obama’s Health Care
Mistake? THE EDITORS NY Times
August 19, 2009 http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/obamas-health-care-mistake/
John Maxwell Hamilton George
A. Krimsky Hold the Press Lousinana
State University Press 1996
Penn Kimball Downsizing The News: Network Cutbacks in the
Nations Capital Woodrow Wilson
Press 1994
The Passing of the 'High
Modernism' of American Journalism Revisited Professor Daniel C. Halin UCSD
International
Communication Association & Political Sence Association, Vol 16. No. 1
Winter 2006
Fred S. Siebert Theodore
Peterson WIlbur Schram Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian,
Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the
Press Should Be and Do University of Illinois press Illini Books 1963
David Carr The Media Equation
Olbermann, Impartiality and MSNBC
Published: November 7,
2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/business/media/08carr.html?scp=6&sq=news+as+entertainment&st=nyt
BILL CARTER CrossFire
Ends Published: January 6, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/business/media/06crossfire.html
Pew Research: Project for
Excellence in Journalism The Daily Show: Journalism, Satire or Just Laughs May
8, 2008
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