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Part of
Participation, Engagement and Collaboration in Newsmaking: A postfoundational perspective
Edited by Jana Declercq, Geert Jacobs, Felicitas Macgilchrist and Astrid Vandendaele
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 94] 2021
► pp. 43–66

Chapter 3
“It is, perhaps more than ever before, a matter of participation”

Ontological tension and boundary work in a free trade blog

| Ghent University
| Ghent University

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.

Keywords: free trade, political economy, Discourse Theory, postfoundationalism, ontology, discourse, media, pragmatics, newsmaking, participation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Research design
  • The politics of free trade, the European centre for international political economy and their blog
  • Evidence of conflicting ontologies in a free trade blog
    • Communication, campaigning, and language
    • Post-truth
    • Post-truth strategies
    • Legacy to new media
  • Implications for the public debate on free trade
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.94.c3
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