Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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    #IamMetiria: A qualitative case study of agonistic welfare policy debates on Twitter
    (2022-08-01) Salter LA
    #IAmMetiria began on Twitter in July 2017, after a speech by New Zealand Green Party co-leader, Metiria Turei, challenging political consensus on welfare policy. Turei confessed she lied to authorities in the 1990s, prompting a flood of supportive posts. Soon after, right-wing oppositional tweets were posted (n = 288) contesting the arguments of Turei and her supporters, and left-wing responses to those arguments (n = 214). Drawing on Mouffe’s dissensual model, this article undertakes a close, qualitative analysis of those 502 tweets, in order to move towards a method for empirically distinguishing between antagonistic and agonistic tweets, identifying the latter as putting forward arguments which can be identified by the researcher and potentially engaged with by ideologically opposed adversaries. The results show a majority of the tweets were agonistic, with implications for the future study of social media policy debates and for the online practices of scholars.
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    'Just doing their job?' Journalism, online critique and the political resignation of Metiria Turei
    (SAGE Publications, 18/03/2019) Phelan S; Salter LA
    Abstract When Metiria Turei resigned as co-leader of the Green party of Aotearoa New Zealand in August 2017, there was clear disagreement about the role played by journalism in her resignation. The controversy began after Turei confessed to not disclosing full information to the authorities about her personal situation as a welfare recipient in the 1990s. Journalists insisted they were simply ‘doing their job’ by interrogating Turei’s story, while online supporters accused the media of hounding her. This article examines the media politics of the controversy by putting Carlson’s concept of metajournalistic discourse into theoretical conversation with Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, especially their concept of antagonism. We explore what the case says about traditional journalistic authority in a media system where journalism is increasingly vulnerable to online critique from non-journalists.