If you happened to check www.google.com/trends/hottrends,
a section of Google's website that lists the day's most popular search
terms, around six in the evening, Pacific Time, this Friday, you'll
know that the most Googled woman in America--in fact, the most Googled
thing in the world--on that day was not Sarah Palin, as was recently the
case, but Anne Kilkenny (her name spelt Ann Kilkenny, while her own
spelling didn't make the top 100 searches). Kilkenny, a resident of
Wasilla, Alaska, Palin's hometown, has risen to digital fame (I should
like to invite some discussion on synonyms for this term--I've seen
references to "web celebrity," "e-famous," and "digital acclaim," but
internet culture is still waiting for a definitive neologism) as the
result of the widespread publication of an e-mail (here
is a copy of a copy) she wrote to friends explaining who Palin is and
criticising her terms as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska.
I'd like to talk about the way the e-mail was absorbed into discussion of Palin's candidacy, but first I think it worth talking a little about Kilkenny herself. I should note in doing so that almost all of my information about Kilkenny come from the NPR story from which I first heard of her. Kilkenny is a transparent writer herself, providing, since no one knew anything about Palin, both a factual summary of her career, as Kilkenny understood it, and analysis. She describes her own role in and attitude to, usually as an opponent of Palin, the events she reports, and at the bottom of the piece describes how she produced the statistics on which she bases her argument about Palin's record with government money, noting that she does not have any training as an accountant. Her purpose in writing is obviously to dissuade her audience from believing the good things that had been said about Palin by her supporters. It appears from the NPR story that she genuinely intended to reach only a few friends, and did not anticipate reaching national circulation--at any rate, in the interview she doesn't appear to know the difference between instant messaging and blogging, which suggests a considerable remove from online discussion.
Kilkenny's e-mail, written at a time when reporters from major outlets were still on their way to Wasilla and very little information was available about her, was obviously an important primary source about her career. It was, of course, recognized as such, as testified to by its place in Google's rankings. But it clearly posed a difficult problem for media outlets invested in neutral coverage. While the letter contained a significant amount of information about Palin not yet widely circulated, it was barely mentioned in legacy media outlets at first. The reasons for this are obvious--its assertions were not backed up to traditional standards, and Kilkenny, an unknown person, was essentially an anonymous source. Such was the uncertainty that conservative blogs at first suggested that Kilkenny was a fiction created to source an attack on Palin.
Legacy media did pick up the story gradually, in two different ways. Like NPR, the McClatchy newspaper syndicate ran a story profiling Kilkenny and writing about the deluge of calls and responses she has received since her writing became famous. Both profiles confirmed that she existed and was who she claimed to be, and also allowed media outlets unwilling to print her assertions directly to repeat many of them. The other tack, taken by the Kansas City Star, was to take on specific charges from the e-mail--in this case, the assertion that Palin had attempted to force the city librarian to remove several books from the library--and to check them out. The New York Times also mentioned this incident in a story with interviews from Wasilla, curiously interviewing Kilkenny without mentioning her e-mail. The Star, likewise, mentioned Kilkenny's e-mail only at the bottom of the article. Online sources, on the other hand, generally reprinted Kilkenny's e-mail without commentary, or little more than the equivalent of "You go, girl!" if they were sympathetic, providing only the text, which was not available through major news sources, despite, as we have seen above from Google, evident widespread demand for it.
The whole affair, then, seems to have followed a pattern similar to that of the Mayhill Fowler case, in which a blogger present at a closed Obama fundraiser posted online a video containing his now-notorious 'clinging to religion' remarks, leading to widespread online commentary before the traditional media took up the story. Like Kilkenny, Fowler was barely mentioned in the print and broadcast stories that derived from her work. Both stories, to my mind, suggest that the traditional media are already settling into a new role within the American public sphere, one in truth not that much different from their historic role. People are, as this year's State of the News Media report shows, still turning to established news outlets. It seems likely that they are doing so in order to find authoritative, or better-reported, accounts of stories they have first heard about online. Many people, too, like me, first hear about these stories through major news media, although they were broken online. To my mind, at least, this doesn't seem to suggest a fundamental challenge to the methods or goals of traditional journalism--while it obviously has now to defer to online discussion's choice of an agenda at times, and has to rely less on the being the first than on being reliable, that is, if anything, surely likely if anything to encourage what I have been told is the purpose of journalism, the truthful reporting of things that people actually want to know.
Kilkenny's e-mail, written at a time when reporters from major outlets were still on their way to Wasilla and very little information was available about her, was obviously an important primary source about her career. It was, of course, recognized as such, as testified to by its place in Google's rankings. But it clearly posed a difficult problem for media outlets invested in neutral coverage. While the letter contained a significant amount of information about Palin not yet widely circulated, it was barely mentioned in legacy media outlets at first. The reasons for this are obvious--its assertions were not backed up to traditional standards, and Kilkenny, an unknown person, was essentially an anonymous source. Such was the uncertainty that conservative blogs at first suggested that Kilkenny was a fiction created to source an attack on Palin.
Legacy media did pick up the story gradually, in two different ways. Like NPR, the McClatchy newspaper syndicate ran a story profiling Kilkenny and writing about the deluge of calls and responses she has received since her writing became famous. Both profiles confirmed that she existed and was who she claimed to be, and also allowed media outlets unwilling to print her assertions directly to repeat many of them. The other tack, taken by the Kansas City Star, was to take on specific charges from the e-mail--in this case, the assertion that Palin had attempted to force the city librarian to remove several books from the library--and to check them out. The New York Times also mentioned this incident in a story with interviews from Wasilla, curiously interviewing Kilkenny without mentioning her e-mail. The Star, likewise, mentioned Kilkenny's e-mail only at the bottom of the article. Online sources, on the other hand, generally reprinted Kilkenny's e-mail without commentary, or little more than the equivalent of "You go, girl!" if they were sympathetic, providing only the text, which was not available through major news sources, despite, as we have seen above from Google, evident widespread demand for it.
The whole affair, then, seems to have followed a pattern similar to that of the Mayhill Fowler case, in which a blogger present at a closed Obama fundraiser posted online a video containing his now-notorious 'clinging to religion' remarks, leading to widespread online commentary before the traditional media took up the story. Like Kilkenny, Fowler was barely mentioned in the print and broadcast stories that derived from her work. Both stories, to my mind, suggest that the traditional media are already settling into a new role within the American public sphere, one in truth not that much different from their historic role. People are, as this year's State of the News Media report shows, still turning to established news outlets. It seems likely that they are doing so in order to find authoritative, or better-reported, accounts of stories they have first heard about online. Many people, too, like me, first hear about these stories through major news media, although they were broken online. To my mind, at least, this doesn't seem to suggest a fundamental challenge to the methods or goals of traditional journalism--while it obviously has now to defer to online discussion's choice of an agenda at times, and has to rely less on the being the first than on being reliable, that is, if anything, surely likely if anything to encourage what I have been told is the purpose of journalism, the truthful reporting of things that people actually want to know.
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