This Master’s thesis focuses on the discursive power struggle between politicians and journalists on Finnish digital news articles where the politician’s tweets are embedded or quoted in using multimodal discourse analysis. Embedded and quoted tweets are one of the premier links between Twitter and digital news platforms but have for the most part been left out of the field of discourse analysis. This research will try to fill that gap, focusing on a time period of one month before the 2019 parliamentary election in Finland. The research material consists of 18 articles from two of the biggest digital news platforms in Finland, Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat. They are analyzed using Machin and Mayr’s seven-part scheme for critical discourse analysis, focusing on the embedded and quoted tweets in relation to the text’s discourse, and also the intertwined textual and the visual sides of the articles. The analysis shows that in most articles, the discourse portrayed in the tweets is not challenged by the journalist, meaning that the politicians most often come on top in the discursive power struggle. The analysis also displays that there are multiple ways of challenging the discourse, but they are seldom used in the power struggle. In conclusion, as the tweets’ discourses often go unchallenged, both the politicians and Twitter as a platform have arguably disproportionate power to influence both the discourse on digital news platforms, as well as the readers of those.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-194180 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Lehtinen, Don |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, JMK |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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