Framing TTIP: The Resonance of Social Media Frames in Mainstream Mass Media Discourse

Much has been written about the transformative impact of digital and/or social media on conceptualizations of the public sphere. In particular, social media are widely thought to provide spaces through which activists can reach out to audiences beyond their already committed supporters. Far less attention has however been paid to the impact of social media framing on mainstream mass media discourse, specifically in relation to the extent to which social movement frames resonate in traditional mass media such as daily newspapers or news magazines. Frame resonance can however be viewed as a core ingredient in what deliberative democrats would refer to as the generation of communicative power. Communicative power is seen as a power resource that is specific to the public sphere and plays a key role as a counterweight to the administrative power held by the institutions of the political system. In this context, social media present an opportunity for social movements to advance specific understandings of their concerns and ultimately to channel those understandings into mass media discourse. This paper develops the theoretical connection between the literature on framing (and frame resonance) and the Habermasian concept of communicative power and illustrates this connection by reference to the (informal) European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) "Stop TTIP". Although "Stop TTIP" was rejected by the European Commission as a formal ECI, the initiative nonetheless continued its campaign against TTIP, both in the form of a highly successful signature collection and an active social media campaign. Concretely, the paper analyzes the frames used in Stop TTIP’s social media campaign and then contrasts these findings with a media content analysis of the debate on TTIP in 12 newspapers and news magazines from four European countries, namely in France, Germany, Spain and the UK.