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.”
Wheatley, now retired and summering in Maine, had sat down to check his email and absent-mindedly refreshed the CNN.com home site on his computer. If he didn’t learn the news that way, text messages from friends would have alerted him soon after.
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.
Since then, as he has moved on to Italy, visiting Rome and Florence, Ott said everyone he’s run into who hears he speaks English has wanted to talk to him about Biden.
“My sense is that the compulsion is the same for everyone,” he said. “In our digital world, information is capital, and everyone wants to demonstrate their capital.”
At his summer house in Pyharanta, Finland, Niiranen has taken a keen interest in U.S. politics, which the semiretired writer said dates to his time as an exchange student in Michigan. He had gone for a swim after 10 p.m. on Sunday, since daylight lingers longer there.
Niiranen had read speculation that Biden might drop out, so when he sat down on his deck after getting out of the water, he checked the CNN stream and found that was the case.
“Interesting election you have there!” he said. “I’ll be watching it.”
Visiting family in Canaan, New Hampshire, Tracy Jasnowski was having a mostly unplugged week because of spotty internet service. Once a day, adults and children alike retreated with their devices to a spot on the lawn where the service is more consistent. That’s when she found out.
“Honestly, I thought I might vomit,” she said. “I was shocked. I was cast adrift. I had no idea that would happen.”
Even if she hadn’t learned it then, Jasnowski said she quickly got text messages from friends. And when her father woke up from his nap, he turned on Fox News.
A generation or two earlier, people would have to be watching TV or listening to the radio to hear a special report about momentous news, said Wheatley, a former executive at NBC News. Then people would spread it by telling friends or family. Now with social media, text alerts and websites available at a click, news moves “much, much faster.”
“The next logical question,” he said, “is how accurate is it?”
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.
When Peeler arrived at his destination in Texas last week and checked on what his friends had texted him about Biden, he called up the websites of local TV network affiliates. In Pennsylvania, Schweiger turned immediately to the AP and The New York Times online.
Both were grateful they had someplace they considered reliable to learn the facts.
“I operate under the assumption that news is 24 hours, and that you always have people that can be pressed into service for anything at any time,” Schweiger said.
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder.
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