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.”
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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.
