Chapter 3. “It is, perhaps more than ever before, a matter of participation” : Ontological tension and boundary work in a free trade blog

Jacobs, Thomas;Jacobs, Geert
(2021) Participation, Engagement and Collaboration in Newsmaking : Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture — ISBN: [9789027209474], p. 43-66, accepted/in-press

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(en) This chapter presents a discourse-analytical approach to a series of blogposts uploaded to the website of Brussels-based libertarian think tank between 2015 and 2018 in reaction to the controversy over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). In these blogposts, economic experts and professionals reflect about how to successfully persuade the public of the case for free trade. We argue that these blogposts rest on two ultimately incompatible ontologies – one founded in economic science, the other based on a rudimentarily constructionist understanding of media and the public debate. The tension generated by the clash of these ontologies turns the blogposts into an interesting example of the negotiation of professional identities at a time when participation, collaboration and engagement are increasingly getting sedimented as the baseline for newsmaking practices.
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Jacobs, T., & Jacobs, G. (2021). Chapter 3. “It is, perhaps more than ever before, a matter of participation” : Ontological tension and boundary work in a free trade blog. In Jana Declercq, Geert Jacobs, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Astrid Vandendaele (ed.), Participation, Engagement and Collaboration in Newsmaking : Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (p. p. 43-66). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.94.c3