News Travels Faster
Five minutes is an eternity in the current information environment.
AP national media writer David Bauder reflects on the state of his business, noting that, “Even on quiet summer weekends, huge news stories spread to millions more swiftly than ever before.”
James Peeler’s phone blew up with messages as he drove home from church in Texas. Reading a book on her couch in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Wendy Schweiger spied something on Facebook. After finishing a late-night swim in the Baltic Sea off Finland, Matti Niiranen clicked on a CNN livestream.
Each learned that President Joe Biden had abandoned his re-election bid minutes after he dropped a statement online without warning on a summer Sunday.
Eight days after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, it marked the second straight July weekend that a seismic American story broke at a time most people weren’t paying attention to the news. Biden’s announcement was a startling example of how fast and how far word spreads in today’s always-connected world.
“It seemed like a third of the nation knew it instantly,” said longtime news executive Bill Wheatley, “and they told another third.”
[…]
At 1:46 p.m. Eastern Time, the moment Biden posted his announcement on X, an estimated 215,000 people happened to be logged on to one of 124 major U.S. news websites. Fifteen minutes later, those sites had 893,000 readers, according to Chartbeat.
On apnews.com, 3,580 people entered the site during the 1:46 p.m. minute. Nearly an hour later, at 2:43 p.m., The Associated Press’ online news destination site hit the afternoon’s peak of 18,936 new visitors. CNN.com and its news app saw its usage quintuple within 20 minutes of the news breaking, the network said.
Television networks broke into regular programming for the story between 1:50 and 2:04 p.m. During the relatively quiet quarter-hour before 2 p.m., a total of 2.69 million people were watching either CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC, the Nielsen company said. The audience on those three networks swelled to 6.84 million between 2 and 4 p.m. Eastern. Add ABC and CBS, which also had special coverage in those hours, and there were at least 9.27 million following the story on television.
How did everybody get there so quickly? As Wheatley suggested, word of mouth played a big role. To his credit, Peeler said he didn’t open his text messages until stopping his car.
Many people also have alerts set up on their phone.
“Our phones are constantly chirping at us and we have them with us all the time,” said Brian Ott, a media and communications professor at Missouri State University and author of “The Twitter Presidency: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of White Rage.”
Ott and his wife were traveling in Belgrade, Serbia, and, with the time difference, had gone to bed on Sunday night before Biden made his announcement. Ott found out the next morning when he checked news sites online and told his wife when she woke up.
“Oh, I already know,” she responded. She had logged on to X when she got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Granting that I’m a news junkie, I learned of both events almost instantaneously despite not being glued to the news at that moment. When Trump was shot, my wife and I were on the way to dinner for a slightly-early celebration of our fifth wedding anniversary. I forget which of us got the news alert first and shared it with the other. When Biden tweeted his exit from the race, I was looking at something on my laptop and my wife sent me a text—causing me to immediately scramble to get up a blog post.
That news spread quickly isn’t a new thing of course. Way back in 2011, I coined the phrase “Twitter Standard Time” and observed,
When I was in grad school in the early 1990s and we were all trying to figure out the lay of the land in the “post-Cold War era,” international relations types were all buzzing about the so-called “CNN effect.” The notion was that the advent of 24/7 television news coverage of events such as the civil wars going on in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia brought enormous pressure on world leaders, especially the American president, to act.
My mentor, Don Snow, came up with a corollary that he dubbed the “Do-Something Syndrome.” In most of the unfolding crises, there were no good options and no good guys. But, damn it, the president had to do something.
Those were, alas, the halcyon days of yore. In hindsight, they were a period when presidents had the luxury of quiet contemplation. Why, they tended to get weeks to make decisions.
Now, we’re living on Twitter Standard Time. Whereas information junkies of the CNN era might have checked in three or four times a day to see what was going on, we’re now glued to our computer and smart phone screens getting up-to-the-nanosecond updates from hundreds of sources. Events that have been unfolding for two or three days seem like they’ve been going on for months.
Whereas the CNN Effect meant that Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were expected to make a statement within a few days of a remote crisis unfolding, there’s pressure on President Obama to say something within hours. And, while Bush had weeks on end to build a coalition against Saddam Hussein in 1990-91, the clock is running out for Obama to do something about the unfolding mess in the Middle East.
But, as Bauder notes, things have sped up even more because people in his line of work are under enormous pressure to report and analyze in real time.
It’s a mantra drummed into young journalists: Get the news fast but, more importantly, get it right. A mistake on a major, breaking story can derail a career. This month’s big stories illustrated the pressure that comes with the need for speed.
Almost immediately after Biden’s announcement, it became a major part of the story journalists were filing that he hadn’t endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to succeed him. He did within a half hour, but that’s an eternity for those who want to raise questions or float conspiracy theories.
Similarly, video of the Trump rally where shots were fired appeared instantly on television screens. But most initial news reports were extremely cautious, sticking to what was known: Trump was hurried off the stage by Secret Service agents. Blood was visible. There was a noise that sounded like gunshots.
That, in turn, led some to criticize journalists for being too wary, too reluctant to call it an assassination attempt. Yet not all facts are quickly known; nearly two weeks later, at a congressional hearing, FBI Director Christopher Wray said it still wasn’t fully clear whether Trump had been hit by a bullet or shrapnel. The next day, the FBI announced it had concluded it was a bullet.
In other words, it’s common that there’s more to a story than meets the eye, and the frenzy of initial breaking news requires strong adherence to the facts available at the moment, no matter what becomes clear later.
Biden’s tweet announcing his exit hit at 1:46 on a Sunday afternoon. I got my blog post out by 2:08. He tweeted his endorsement of Harris at 2:13 and asked for money for Harris’ campaign at 2:19 (although, oddly, those tweets appear in reverse order in his feed. That’s all pretty fast. But, yes, there was half an hour of hand-wringing over whether he was snubbing her with the non-endorsement.
The conspiracy theories surrounding whether Trump was hit with a bullet, a bullet fragment, or schrapnel from the teleprompter were so silly that I couldn’t work up the energy to blog about it. I started a post with the thesis What difference does it make but it didn’t seem worth the effort to finish. Regardless, the notion that a forensic analysis should take place instantaneously is simultaneously unreasonable and par for the course.
And yet a week later, FBI director Wray was trying to spread the shrapnel dissembling. Thing is, no teleprompter was harmed in the attack, nor was their glass on the stage.
Or at least the GPT search AI couldn’t find any
So the real question is why Top Men (and Women) are showing up to testify before Congress clueless about what their agencies have determined about a crime/incident?
@JKB:
Remind me: who chose Wray to lead the FBI?
@Michael Reynolds:
I recall Trump couldn’t sing Wray’s praises loudly enough.
@JKB: The damaged teleprompter is probably in the same room where they abort the babies after birth.
@JKB: I don’t understand the issue here. A scumbag fired a shot at Trump. Fortunately, no serious harm was done. Whether the injury he did suffer was due to impact from a bullet, a fragment of the bullet, or a secondary impact particle does not seem very consequential to me. Analyzing the trajectory of bullets is not always simple; arguments about the JFK bullets raged for years. Bad guy took a shot, and it did result in some injuries. That’s my takeaway.
After the debate disaster I completely shut myself out of all political news, knowing that Biden was either going to stay in or get out and all the chattering didn’t matter until that played out, and I just didn’t need the blood pressure hit staying engaged would have entailed. Then in my extended family text group my nephew posted that Biden had dropped out. It was an ann hour or so after it had happened. So even someone like me who was actively avoiding the news got it very quickly.
@Slugger: That was the substance of the post I started but didn’t finish. It really doesn’t matter.
@Slugger: In a rational world it would make no difference at all. In a world of optics, if Trump was hit by shrapnel, he can’t say he was shot without people saying he’s exaggerating a minor injury. He lives in a world of optics.
We know what you meant by “no serious harm was done” but we should note one dead and two seriously injured, not counting the shooter.
@Slugger:
The goal here was for the media to assassinate Trump as he was unseen in Secret Service protection or in the ER. They were prepared with the “Trump fell….”, “Trump runs from loud noise…” headlines, but Trump literally fisted them. Then they tried the “glass”, “shrapnel” lies.
What is telling, that more than a week after the shooting, the director of the FBI was still trying to sell the lies even though his own agency was doing the investigation and there were medical reports by doctors familiar with gunshot wounds. And a lie his own agency was out within hours refuting. But Wray achieved his goal of getting the lie out in the news cycle again.
Or it could be that somebody wanted to make sure all the facts were in and verified before claiming something that might have to be walked back later. We see way, way too many mea culpas these days because everybody’s demanding instant knowledge, an impossible goal. As far as I can tell, Wray was simply being careful.
And as others have said, it’s basically immaterial unless it’s evidence of a second gunman.
@JKB:
Look, you must recall when Trump was praising Wray to the skies. What does that say about Trump’s ability to choose the best people for the job?
Constantly jumping to explanations that reinforce one’s sense of victimhood while never extending that perspective to those you disagree with is a terrible way to go through life.
It speaks to an incredible sense of internalized lacking and a feeling that everyone is trying to take something away from you.
Complete aside: I don’t understand how anyone looking at Trump’s ongoing record for choosing the worst possible people for high-level positions would ever want him in power again or argue that he’s an effective manager/leader.
Of course, I think part of that internalized lacking it to be always stuck defending the position that Trump himself can never fail and only be failed by others.
@JKB:
Look, its obvious that Trump is struggling to get media attention. Good luck with Teleprompetergate…
@CSK:
This, of course, is the most consistent recurring feature of Trump-as-leader. He has an unbroken perfect record of appointing incompetent bunglers everywhere he controls. Cabinet positions, Supreme Court, his personal legal team, press secretaries, vice presidents… the list goes on and on. As the despair.com poster puts it: the only consistent feature of all your dissatisfying relationships is you.
@gVOR10: Upvoted for
Values, people.
@Matt Bernius: Still, your observation is consistent with the tendency for conservatives to view life from a zero-sum economic perspective. That perspective also extends into social relationships now as the belief that “I” am diminished when “somebody else” gets recognition as though there is only a specific finite quantity of recognition to go around.
@DrDaveT: At the moment, SCOTUS is actually meeting all the performance goals of Trump’s constituency. Even in cases where they may not have done what conservatives expected, they’ve been pretty explicit about defining how to make the next volley pass muster to become another reversal of “settled law.”
@JKB:
I’m confused. Are you saying that the media knew about the assassination attempt ahead of time? Or someone else did, other than the shooter? Because that’s the only way that someone could have had a goal that was supposed to follow the assassination attempt. Whose goal was this, exactly? Are saying that someone intentionally missed several shots they fired at Trump so that some other group/person could make Trump look bad, but that plan failed?
Instead of making vague accusations, could you please explain exactly what you’re saying happened, and who set it in motion?
The controversy over what exactly nicked Trump’s ear is important to Trump. He’s crafted a narrative in which he was the hero who got “shot in the head”, who “took a bullet for democracy”, who “wasn’t meant to be here”; the president who “felt the bullet rip through his skin”; who survived even though his trauma doctor said it was a miracle; that he’d never seen anyone survive being hit by an AR-15 before.
A finding that he’d been scratched by a bit of flying plastic would have been more than a little deflating.