Cover not available

Article In: Journal of Argumentation in Context: Online-First Articles

Political accountability in press conferences and social media

A comparative analysis of argumentative moves

ORCiD logo with link | Université Paris Cité
 | Università della Svizzera italiana
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Research has acknowledged that social media users sometimes adopt roles that align with traditional journalism, for example, when holding politicians accountable for their decisions. This kind of engagement has led to recognizing the potential of social media as an accountability forum. However, it remains unknown to what extent such attitude prevails in online discussions, and how it differs from traditional settings, like press conferences. This paper explores how discussions unfold on Twitter and a press conference to understand how accountability dialogues take place in each forum. A corpus of journalists’ questions and users’ posts are analyzed in terms of argumentative moves to see how they contribute to accountability. Results showed that both fora served accountability purposes. In the press conference, the discussion was more balanced, with journalists refraining from proposing solutions. On Twitter, plenty of arguments and opinions were advanced but many of them were unrelated to accountability purposes.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Press conferences and Twitter as accountability fora
    • 2.1Accountability in press conferences
    • 2.2Accountability on social media
    • 2.3The role of argumentation in accountability practices
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
References (53)
References
Anderson, Christopher, and Michael Schudson. 2019. “Objectivity, professionalism, and truth seeking.” In The Routledge handbook of journalism studies, eds. Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin, and Thomas Hanitzsch, 136–151. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. “Pragmatic Argumentation in European Practices of Political Accountability.” Argumentation 291: 1–18. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anthony, Laurence. 2005. “AntConc: design and development of a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for the technical writing classroom.” In IPCC Proceedings. International Professional Communication Conference, 729–737. IEEE. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ardern, Jacinda. 2020, April 7. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern holds a press conference to give an update on the Covid-19 pandemic in New Zealand. Retrieved on December 1, 2022, from [URL]
Arora, Swapan Deep, Guninder Pal Singh, Anirban Chakraborty, and Moutusy Maity. 2022. “Polarization and social media: A systematic review and research agenda.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 1831: 121942. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bovens, Mark. 2007a. “Analysing and assessing accountability: A conceptual framework.” European law journal, 13(4): 447–468. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007b. “New forms of accountability and EU-governance.” Comparative European Politics, 51: 104–120. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. “Two Concepts of Accountability: Accountability as a Virtue and as a Mechanism.” West European Politics, 33(5): 946–967. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carr, Caleb T., David B. Schrock, and Patricia Dauterman. 2012. “Speech acts within Facebook status messages.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 31(2): 176–196. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven E., and Matthew P. Fox. 2017. “Hardballs and softballs: Modulating adversarialness in journalistic questioning.” Journal of Language and Politics, 16(1): 20–40. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven E., and John Heritage. 2002. “Questioning presidents: Journalistic deference and adversarialness in the press conferences of US Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan.” Journal of communication, 52(4): 749–775. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2023. “Pressuring the President: Changing language practices and the growth of political accountability.” Journal of Pragmatics, 2071: 62–74. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eriksson, Göran, and Mats Eriksson. 2012. “Managing political crisis: an interactional approach to image repair”. Journal of Communication Management, 16(3): 264–279. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ettema, James S. 2009. “New media and new mechanisms of public accountability.” Journalism, 10(3): 319–321. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fox, Christopher. 1989. “A stop list for general text.” SIGIR Forum 241: 19–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Germano, Fabrizio, Vicenç Gómez, and Francesco Sobbrio. 2026. “Ranking for engagement: How social media algorithms fuel misinformation and polarization.” Journal of Public Economics 2551: 105589. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Greco, Sara, Chiara Mercuri, Barbara De Cock, and Rebecca Schär. 2023. “Arguing through best practice: The role of argumentation from example in activists’ social media posts on sustainable fashion.” Discourse Studies, 25(4), 530–548. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hermida, Alfred, and Neil Thurman. 2008. “A clash of cultures: The integration of user-generated content within professional journalistic frameworks at British newspaper websites.” Journalism practice, 2(3): 343–356. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2024. “Journalists’ questions during crisis: Watchdogs or disseminators of information?”. Journal of Argumentation in Context, 13(1): 74–105. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hong, Sounman, and Sun Hyoung Kim. 2016. “Political polarization on twitter: Implications for the use of social media in digital governments.” Government Information Quarterly, 33(4): 777–782. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hutto, Clayton, and Eric Gilbert. 2014. “Vader: A parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text.” In Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media, 8(1): 216–225. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Korson, Cadey. 2015. “Political agency and citizen journalism: Twitter as a tool of evaluation.” The Professional Geographer, 67(3): 364–373. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lewiński, Marcin, and Mark Aakhus. 2014. “Argumentative polylogues in a dialectical framework: A methodological inquiry.” Argumentation, 281: 161–185. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McGuire, David, James E. A. Cunningham, Kae Reynolds, and Gerri Matthews-Smith. 2020. “Beating the virus: an examination of the crisis communication approach taken by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern during the Covid-19 pandemic.” Human Resource Development International, 23(4): 361–379. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Miller, Serena. 2019. “Citizen journalism.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, ed. Powers, Matthew. New York: Oxford Academic. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mohammed, Dima. 2016. “What’s in a good argument about evaluative claims? Argumentation in accountability practices.” Proceedings of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation Conference, Vol. 111. [URL]
. 2018b. “Exercising accountability in European Parliamentary debates on statements: An argumentative perspective.” In Argumentation and Language — Linguistic, Cognitive and Discursive Explorations, eds. Oswald, Steve, Thierry Herman, and Jérôme Jacquin: 243–262. Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mulgan, Richard. 2003. Holding power to account: accountability in modern democracies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Murthy, Dhiraj. 2011. “Twitter: Microphone for the masses?” Media, culture & society, 33(5): 779–789. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Musi, Elena, Andrea Rocci. 2022. “Staying up to date with fact and reason checking: an argumentative analysis of outdated news.” In The Pandemic of Argumentation, eds. Oswald, Steve, Marcin Lewiński, Sara Greco, and Serena Villata: 311–330. Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Neu, Dean, and Gregory D. Saxton. 2023. “Twitter-Based Social Accountability Callouts.” Journal of Business Ethics: 1–19.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Paasch-Colberg, Sünje, Joachim Trebbe, Christian Strippel, and Martin Emmer. 2022. “Insults, Criminalisation, and Calls for Violence: Forms of Hate Speech and Offensive Language in German User Comments on Immigration.” In Cyberhate in the Context of Migrations, eds. Monnier, Angeliki, Axel Boursier, and Annabelle Seoane: 137–163. Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pang, Bo, and Lillian Lee. 2008. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Delft: Now Publishers. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pizarro Pedraza, Andrea. 2016. “Pragmemes in the Sociolinguistic Interview: A Case Study on Expanded Polar Answers.” In Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use, eds. Capone, Alessandro, Keith Allan, Louise Cummings, Wayne A. Davis, Igor Douven, Yan Huang, Istvan Kecskes et al.: 351–374. Springer, Cham. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rigotti, Edo and Andrea Rocci. 2006. “Towards a definition of communication context.” Studies in communication sciences, 6(2): 155–180.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roginsky, Sandrine, and Barbara De Cock. 2015. Faire campagne sur twitter. Les Cahiers du numérique, 11(4): 119–144. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sambrook, Richard. 2005. “Citizen Journalism and the BBC.” Nieman Reports, 59(4): 13.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Taboada, Maite. 2016. “Sentiment analysis: An overview from linguistics.” Annual Review of Linguistics, 21: 325–347. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tseronis, Assimakis. 2025. Analysing multimodal argumentation: Theoretical and methodological considerations. In Qualitative Research Methods in Argumentation Studies, eds. Andone, Corina, Marianne Doury, Sara Greco, Kati Hannken-Illjes, and Menno Reijven: 147–164. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Eemeren, Frans H. 2018. Argumentation theory: A pragma-dialectical perspective. Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Eemeren, Frans H. and Rob Grootendorst. 1987. “Fallacies in pragma-dialectical perspective.” Argumentation, 11: 283–301. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. A systematic theory of argumentation: The pragma-dialectical approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Eemeren, Frans, Peter Houtlosser, and Francisca Snoeck Henkemans 2007. Argumentative indicators in discourse: A pragma-dialectical study. Dordrecht: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Eemeren, Frans H. and Ton van Haaften. 2023. “The Making of Argumentation Theory: A Pragma-dialectical View.” Argumentation 371: 341–376. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wall, Melissa. 2015. “Citizen Journalism: A retrospective on what we know, an agenda for what we don’t.” Digital journalism, 3(6): 797–813. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ward, Stephen. J. 2019. “Journalism ethics.” In The handbook of journalism studies, eds. Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin, and Thomas Hanitzsch: 307–323. New York Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weaver, David and Lars Wilhoit. 1996. The American journalist in the 1990s: US news people at the end of an era. New Jersey: Erlbaum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wolfsfeld, Gadi, Elad Segev, and Tamir Sheafer. 2013. “Social media and the Arab Spring: Politics comes first.” The International Journal of Press/Politics, 18(2): 115–137. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zampa, Marta. 2016. “Objectivity in newsmaking: an argumentative perspective”. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA), 18–21 May 2016. Eds. Bondy, Patrick and Laura Benacquista: 18–21. Windsor: OSSA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue