The Role of Gatekeepers and Emotionality of Arguments: Analyzing the Brexit Discourse in Social and Print Media

During the last years, the development and spread of social media such as Facebook and Twitter gained enormous impact on the public discourse, which eventually influences political decisions. Public discourses occur in different arenas of the hybrid media system and there are various discourse channels in print as well as in social media. However, research in this emerging field is still underdeveloped. In this paper, we investigate the hybrid nature of print and social media, using the technic of social network analysis. Such insights about argumentation and images in print media discourses, in contrast to uncontrolled dynamics in social media discourse could help to explore this hybrid media system. As a case study, we selected the EU Brexit in Great Britain, where the public discourse in the media played an important role. Particularly, this paper focuses on the role of gatekeepers in the Brexit discourse before and after the EU referendum relating to the emotionality of arguments (Edwards 1999, Elster 1999 Shi-Xu 2000, Höijer 2010, Recuber 2015). At first glance, this emotional discourse reflected a polarized view on the advantages and disadvantages of being an EU member state. Under scrutiny, other emotional issues were entangled, e.g. fear of migration, solicitudes about unemployment or the health system, or in general a feeling of anger and dissatisfaction about the establishment and the elite of the EU. We analyzed the coverage of the EU Brexit discourse in the print media (boulevard and quality print media cross-national in GB and Germany) and, on the other hand, we had a comparative look on social media data. Therefore, we analyzed Facebook discourses in the same time period. Using discourse network analysis, different newspapers were coded in both countries to dynamically trace the media coverage of emotions related to the Brexit referendum prior and two weeks after the EU Brexit issue. Analyzing social media data involves methodological questions about how to handle social media data and how to combine it with social network analysis. With tools of social sciences, in particular discourse analysis, we analyzed comments and statements of the newspaper Facebook pages during the same time. Our findings show that the discourse in the print media differs from the social media discourse, due to the role of journalists as gatekeepers, especially when looking at emotions and perceived images in the argumentation.