Anstead-Chadwick_-_Primary_Definer_Online_Media_Culture_and_Society_2017.pdf (1.53 MB)
A primary definer online: the construction and propagation of a think tank’s authority on social media
journal contribution
posted on 2017-11-15, 13:57 authored by Nick Anstead, Andrew ChadwickAndrew ChadwickWho has power in the construction of economic news in the United Kingdom? Are social media reshaping how this power is enabled? We examine the public Twitter interactions between journalists, political elites and, what is arguably the United Kingdom’s most important think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), during the 2015 UK general election campaign. Combining human-coded content analysis and network analysis of Twitter discourse about the IFS during a 38-day period, we explain how and why the authority of this think tank is being translated to social media. We develop a new, social media theory of ‘primary definers’ and show how the political authority on which such roles rest is co-constructed and propagated by professional journalists and political elites. Central to this process is a behaviour we conceptualize and measure: authority signalling. Our findings call into question some of the more sanguine generalizations about social media’s contribution to pluralist democracy. Given the dominance of public service broadcasters in the processes we identify, we argue that, despite the growth of social media, there can be surprising limits on the extent to which contemporary media systems help citizens gain information about the assumptions underlying economic policy.
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Communication and Media
Published in
Media, Culture & SocietyVolume
40Issue
2Pages
246 - 266Citation
ANSTEAD, N. and CHADWICK, A., 2018. A primary definer online: the construction and propagation of a think tank’s authority on social media. Media, Culture & Society, 40(2), pp. 246-266.Publisher
Sage © The Author(s)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-02-25Publication date
2017-05-16Notes
This article was published in the journal Media, Culture & Society [SAGE © the Authors] and the definitive version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717707341ISSN
0163-4437eISSN
1460-3675Publisher version
Language
- en