https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6818-0533
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ABSTRACT
Political journalism continues to be the main source of political information in deliberative democracies. However, the advent of hybrid media systems during the last decade(s) has altered how journalists cover politics and how audiences consume relevant content. In this context, live blogging has emerged as a web-based alternative to traditional TV broadcasting. To explore whether and in which forms the trend toward hybrid media systems is empirically traceable in current journalism practice, the present study focuses on political live blogging from four popular media outlets covering the two 2020 US presidential TV debates. It applies a discourse-oriented, mixed-methods, corpus-based approach and specifically considers sourcing practices as well as the normalization of professional role conceptions and practices of objectivity. Results suggest that political live blogging establishes multi-layered and multi-authored discourse that places strong emphasis on accountability and disclosure transparency by updating and linking information, while maintaining the journalistic gatekeeping/gatewatching function. It further emerges that political live blogs are characterized by an informal tone but also by a continuation of traditional news media practices as regards objectivity, as instantiated by the salience of debate topics and political terms and by a clear delineation of information from opinion and contextualization.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 It should be noted that objectivity naturally is to be conceptualized as an ideal(ized) norm rather than an empirically measurable category (see, e.g., Deuze Citation2005).
2 Note also Porto López (Citation2021, Citation2022), who offers a semiotic perspective.
3 For the sake of completeness, note that live blogs have also been used in computational linguistics as input for automatic text summarization (e.g. Avinesh et al., Citation2021).
4 From a sociological perspective, it has also been discussed how the existence of live blogging in a legal context may influence the practices of legal professionals (Flower and Ahlefeldt Citation2021). Further, the field of cultural studies has engaged with live blogging as a (pop-)cultural manifestation (Sandvoss Citation2004).
5 The screened debates are available at https://youtu.be/wW1lY5jFNcQ and https://youtu.be/bPiofmZGb8o.
6 According to Majid (Citation2023), all four outlets are included among the world’s top 50 news sites, with substantial monthly visitor numbers (GUAR: 363 million, MIR: 129 million, NYT: 644 million, WSJ: 82 million).
7 The annotated MAXQDA files are available at https://osf.io/8hd3k/.
8 Note that this list is lemma-based; that is, Trump and Trump’s or say and said are treated together, for instance. For documentation on the corpus software, please refer to https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/.