#icantbreathe. Ideology and Consensus: Printed News vs. Twitter

The aim of this paper is to analyse the extent to which, if any, Twitter has a role in transmitting information and giving way to collaborative journalism – that form of journalism in which people actively take part in news construction – and in what ways ideology and consensus are constructed. The killing of two black people in 2015 by the police, in Ferguson and Baltimore, US, resulted in an explosion of riots and social disorder in which the media showed a great interest, simultaneously mirrored in social media. In particular, Twitter proved to be a successful resource for both popular collaborative journalism and collective social action. Because of this novel role assigned to Twitter, attention has to be paid to the relationship that exists between our society, its stereotypes and prejudices, and social networks (Zappavigna 2012). Starting with a linguistic analysis of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal editorials about Trayvon Martin’s and Eric Garner’s deaths (with a contrastive investigation of ‘on the surface’ and ‘beneath the surface’ discourse at macro- and micro-levels; cf. Hall 1992: 291, and van Dijk 2000), I will move on to an analysis of tweets related to those same episodes, thematically linked by the #blacklivesmatter and #icantbreathe hashtags in Twitter, in order to see how perceptions and opinions are constructed in texts where space is a severe constraint. This corpus linguistic analysis, based on more than 2,000 tweets collected with Tweetarchivist (www.tweetarchivist.com), is grounded in CDA (Fairclough 1995, 2015; Wodak 1996; Wodak and Ludwig 1999). The results suggest that while in the newspapers the language used seems to reflect corporate ideologies, tweets mirror the stereotypes existing in the society which is responsible for constructing them.