When Tweets Are Embedded, Who Gains the Upper Hand?

The Discursive Power Struggle on Finnish Digital News Articles before the 2019

Parliamentary Election

Don Lehtinen

Department of Media Studies Master’s Thesis 30 HE credits Media Studies Global Media Studies (120 credits) Autumn term 2020 Supervisor: Sven Ross

When Tweets Are Embedded, Who Gains the Upper Hand?

The Discursive Power Struggle on Finnish Digital News Articles before the 2019 Parliamentary Election

Don Lehtinen

Abstract

This Master’s thesis focuses on the discursive power struggle between politicians and journalists on Finnish digital news articles where the politician’s tweets are embedded or quoted in using multimodal discourse analysis. Embedded and quoted tweets are one of the premier links between Twitter and digital news platforms but have for the most part been left out of the field of discourse analysis. This research will try to fill that gap, focusing on a time period of one month before the 2019 parliamentary election in Finland. The research material consists of 18 articles from two of the biggest digital news platforms in Finland, Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat. They are analyzed using Machin and Mayr’s seven-part scheme for critical discourse analysis, focusing on the embedded and quoted tweets in relation to the text’s discourse, and also the intertwined textual and the visual sides of the articles. The analysis shows that in most articles, the discourse portrayed in the tweets is not challenged by the journalist, meaning that the politicians most often come on top in the discursive power struggle. The analysis also displays that there are multiple ways of challenging the discourse, but they are seldom used in the power struggle. In conclusion, as the tweets’ discourses often go unchallenged, both the politicians and Twitter as a platform have arguably disproportionate power to influence both the discourse on digital news platforms, as well as the readers of those.

Keywords Embedded tweets, discourse, power, Twitter, politics, journalism

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Contents

Contents ...... 2 Introduction ...... 4 The research questions ...... 5 RQ1: Do Finnish digital news articles challenge the discourse of the tweets embedded in them and how do they do it? ...... 5 RQ2: What roles do the embedded tweets have in the discourse of the news article? ...6 Theoretical frame and literature review ...... 6 Discourse ...... 6 How journalists use social media for sourcing ...... 8 Tweets as news sources...... 9 Embedded tweets are not quotations ...... 10 Embedding ...... 10 Recontextualization...... 11 Quotes ...... 11 Hypertextuality ...... 13 Functions of embedded social media posts ...... 14 Multimodality of embedded social media posts ...... 15 How politicians use social media for publicity ...... 15 Role and business models of Twitter and Facebook ...... 21 Social media posts in relation to traditional media ...... 21 The Finnish Media Environment ...... 25 Strong Rational-legal Authority ...... 25 Neutrality in Reporting ...... 26 The Previous Elections ...... 27 Methodology and materials ...... 28 Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis ...... 28 The news articles ...... 31 Validity ...... 32 The analysis ...... 33 The analysis and results ...... 33 RQ1: Do Finnish digital news articles challenge the discourse of the tweets embedded in them and how do they do it? ...... 34 The role of the journalist ...... 34 Rationality versus emotion: The journalist in an active role ...... 36 Hybridity ...... 37 How messages are told ...... 39 Modality ...... 40 Tweets as visual discourse-makers ...... 42

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How politicians’ messages are challenged ...... 44 Who gets to tell the message? ...... 47 How people are presented ...... 49 RQ2: What roles do the embedded tweets have in the discourse of the news article? . 50 Tweets in a central role ...... 51 Supporting tweets ...... 52 Counter-discourse ...... 53 Background information ...... 54 Conclusions ...... 54 Reflections and Further research ...... 58 References ...... 60 Appendices ...... 64 Overview of the articles ...... 64 The full analysis of the articles ...... 74

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Introduction

In this Master’s thesis, 18 digital news articles related to the Finnish parliamentary elections in 2019 will be analyzed using critical multimodal discourse analysis (CDA). This project will focus on the embedding and recontextualization of tweets published by politicians and picked up by two of the biggest digital news platforms in Finland, Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat. In essence, this research will focus on the struggle for power between journalists, newspapers and politicians on the news articles where tweets are embedded.

Many studies have been conducted about how politicians, journalists and news organizations use social media and how Twitter is being used in news journalism. Very rarely, however, this kind of research takes hypertextuality, one of the defining features of the internet and thus digital news outlets, as the focal point of analysis, meaning that the most direct and visible connection in the hybrid relationship between social media and traditional media, embedded social media posts, has gone mostly unresearched (Enli and Moe 2013: 642; Broersma and Graham 2013: 449; Van Leuven et. al. 2018: 800; Heiss et. al. 2019: 743; Herring 2019: 46). Embedding is not a new feature, either: the first mentions on embedded tweets on Google are from 2010, and some social media websites, such as YouTube, started to offer embedding to other websites even before that.

This research will try to fill a part of the gap, focusing on how politicians, journalists and news organizations struggle for power on digital multimodal news articles where tweets are embedded. In this thesis, the “struggle for power” means any kind of power-related interaction between (mostly) politicians and digital news platforms or journalists. For example: who interprets and explains who? Does the message get transformed? Who gets their own message across? Who dominates the space on an article? Who is represented as a power figure? Who is downplayed? And, most importantly, how do all these functions happen in the space of digital news media articles containing tweets? Ruth Wodak (2001a: 11) argues that “texts are often sites of struggle in that they show traces of differing discourses and ideologies contending and struggling for dominance”. Similarly, Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm have argued that social media is an ongoing discursive struggle, but they do not take into account what happens after embedding/recontextualization onto news articles (2015: 82).

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The research questions

While doing preliminary research for this thesis, I noticed that many tweets are simply embedded onto news articles without explanation or interpretation, disregarding the role of the journalist as an interpreter, at worst transforming them into a mere curator of content. Even when the role of a journalist in Finland has traditionally been “as neutral as possible”, trying to be neutral in the manner of becoming invisible is problematic (e.g. Skogerbø et. al. 2016: 104-105; Bouvier 2019: 227). According to Marjut Johansson, quotes, which are selected similarly to tweets, are often labeled as neutral discourse, which they are not (2019: 138). John Parmelee has argued that even though journalists claim that the tone of their coverage is not affected by tweets, evidence proves otherwise (2014: 442). Gwen Bouvier has even argued that unchallenged tweets might have the power to completely shape the discourse, which is then only strengthened by the media as they embed and quote the original tweets (2019: 227). This problem is at the heart of this thesis, and thus, research question 1 is

RQ1: Do Finnish digital news articles challenge the discourse of the tweets embedded in them and how do they do it?

Even when we have acknowledged the power of tweets and tweeters in news discourse, not much research exists on how they influence the discourse (Ekman and Widholm 2015: 88). There have been many analyses on how the politicians intend to tweet, but research of their outcome and influence on news articles is lacking (e.g. Broersma and Graham 2016: 100; Di Fraia and Missaglia 2014: 68; Falasca et. al. 2017: 90). For this, it is useful to analyze what kind of roles the tweets and tweeters have after they are recontextualized from their original platform to a news media. For example, tweets could be described to be “authoritative” when they communicate a message from a leader, or “immediate” when a tweet is quoted as news right after an event, or “informative” when the tweet contains only information about what happens in the future, without an opinion. Tweets can also, for example, drive the story forward, be an additional snippet of information or emotion or act as a counter argument to another quote. It also matters where the tweet is positioned in the story (Johansson 2019: 154): the most important parts of a journalistically well-made story are at the beginning of the

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story, and online, in the headline, and often most of the following information is told to support the same view and discourse. The aim is to understand how tweets affect the discourse on a general level (“What is the core function of tweets in news discourse”) and how they affect them on a case-by-case level (“What is the message of a singular tweet and how does it affect the discourse of this news article”). So, research question 2 will be

RQ2: What roles do the embedded tweets have in the discourse of the news article?

Answering these two research questions should help us understand more about the nature of tweets that are embedded in digital news articles. Concerning the power struggle, RQ1 deals mainly with the outcomes of the struggle, and RQ2 mainly with what elements the struggle consists of. In a similar research, Johansson (2019) mostly describes how the tweets on a single news articles are and what are their main functions, but fails to take into account the power aspect critically. This thesis is an attempt to delve further. With the abundance of tweets available for journalists to put into a story, the selected tweets are valuable insight on what the newspaper wants to show to the audience and what kind of information it wants to convey to the readers. However, this research does not focus on why something gets selected and something does not, but on what happens after something gets selected.

Theoretical frame and literature review

Discourse According to Michel Foucault (in Hall 2001: 72), discourse is a “group of statements which provide a language of talking about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular historical moment”. Discourse constructs a way of talking about a topic, at the same time leaving other ways of talking about it out. The same discourse will appear across a range of texts and actions within society at one historical moment, and these together form a “discursive formation”, in which the elements share the same style, support

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the same strategy and form similar patterns. Foucault argues (in Hall 2001: 73-74) that studying a discourse should take into account the following elements:

1. statements about the topic, which give us a certain type of knowledge about it 2. the rules of which prescribe the ways the topic should be and is talked about, while leaving other ways out – what is “sayable” and “thinkable” 3. subjects who in some ways personify the discourse, including the attributes we would expect these subjects to have regarding the discourse 4. how this knowledge about the topic acquires authority, how is “the truth” about it constructed in that particular historical moment 5. the practices within institutions for dealing with the subjects 6. acknowledging that a different discourse will arrive at a later time, supplanting the existing one

Following Foucault, Jan Blommaert (2005: 3) has defined discourse to comprise “all forms of meaningful semiotic human activity seen in connection with social, cultural, and historical patterns and developments of use”. Doing so, Blommaert puts more emphasis on action and results than in meaning of the texts. For a research of this kind, however, such an all- encompassing perspective is problematic in practice. In a slightly more practical view on discourse, Teun Van Dijk (2009: 192) has summarized the study of discourse as such:

1. It focuses on natural language and real users in real social situations 2. The unit of analysis consists of structures and strategies of “whole” written or spoken discourses or communicative events 3. Discourses are analyzed as complex phenomena, at many levels of structure and made explicit in terms of a large variety of theories and (sub) disciplines 4. Discourses are multimodal 5. Discourses as language use presuppose cognitive aspects of production and comprehension 6. Discourses are studied in relation to, for example, social, communicative, political, historical and cultural frameworks, which form contexts for the involved 7. Discourses are also social practices that have a crucial role in the reproduction of society in general, their knowledges and ideologies

Foucault was also concerned in how discursive practices make it possible for institutions to regulate the behavior of people, focusing on the relationship between knowledge and power. Van Dijk has also noted that power is at the center of most critical discourse analysis: groups have more or less power when they have the power to influence and control the acts and thinking of other groups (2018: 469). Foucault had an all-encompassing view on power, claiming that there is no knowledge that exists without constituting power relations at the same time (in Hall 2001: 76). According to Wodak, power is “about relations of difference, and particularly about the effects of differences in social structures” (2001a: 11). David 7

Machin and Andrea Mayr argue that “power is transmitted and practiced through discourse” (2012: 4). According to Martin Reisigl and Wodak, power is legitimized and de-legitimized in discourses, and texts are sites of ideological power struggles for dominance and hegemony (2017: 80). Silvio Waisbord has argued that news and journalism do not have the same impact on the minds of the public as before, but they still have “unmatched ability to determine what is real and visible for large publics”, making critical discourse analysis vital for understanding power in the media (2018: 1873). Following in these footsteps, focus on power relations, as a social practice, especially as a way for the politicians and journalists to influence the minds of the public, is at the center of this research.

Following Reisigl and Wodak (2017: 81) and their overpoweringly extensive discourse- historical approach, I will try to also put focus into the broader sociopolitical and historical context relating to the news articles. In the Foucaldian sense, discourse is never entirely present in a singular act of communication or text (Machin 2016: 330). The discourse and context where the discourses of the articles are embedded in, such as global warming, globalization, the political climate in Finland, the discourse of Twitter, among others, have to be also taken into account. These I will call grand discourses, as they are a sort of umbrella hovering over and influencing the articles analyzed in this research.

How journalists use social media for sourcing Social media, defined here as media that in theory “facilitate participation and interaction in public communication”, has rapidly become an indispensable part of news production (Neuberger et. al. 2018: 1260). Most journalists in Western countries use social media in their work every day; in Finland, 86 per cent of journalists used Facebook and 61 per cent used Twitter in their work (Cision 2015). It has been argued that social media has not only been added to the news making process, but it is now a part of the “technological infrastructure” of news production (Bouvier and Machin 2018: 180) and it has been “woven into the newsroom” (Broersma and Graham 2016: 93). The integration works both ways, as news has become a key part of how social media works (Bouvier 2019: 213; Johansson 2019: 136).

Marcel Broersma and Todd Graham have distinguished seven dominant reporting practices and routines of political journalists on Twitter: monitoring, networking, engaging, sourcing, publishing, promoting and branding (2016: 194). This research paper focuses on the functions that have to do with the relationship between politicians and journalists: monitoring, networking and, most importantly, sourcing. 8

Tweets as news sources Although journalists claim they are reluctant to use social media posts in a news story, almost all journalists and media use them as a part of the sourcing process. According to Broersma and Graham, political journalists most often use tweets as a trigger for a story, and sometimes as the focal point of a story when a politician cannot be reached and the story has to be written anyway (2016: 97-98). How much and in what ways social media is used varies: in their study of the Norwegian local elections in 2011, Eli Skogerbø and Arne Krumsvik discovered that only rarely the social media posts of politicians are used as source material. They attribute this to the proximity of citizens, politicians and journalists in Norway’s local politics and the prevalence of traditional news logics (2015: 363). Countering this, the bigger the politician, the harder reaching them for an interview will be.

Tweets as a source can be problematic in a multitude of ways regarding the pursuit of objectivity in journalism. When a journalist tries to follow up on a newsworthy tweet and the politician who tweeted it refuses to answer further critical questions, the tweet is often picked up as it is, setting the agenda (Broersma and Graham 2016: 98). It has been argued that sources in general have “strengthened their grip in the source–journalist relationship” because of the digital revolution of journalism, downsizing of newsrooms and the subsequent lack of resources for critical scrutiny and a growing dependence of source material produced outside of newsrooms (Ekman and Widholm 2015: 80). According to Andrew Chadwick et. al. (2015: 32), the integration of digital media logics into the practices of professional journalists has resulted in journalists moving from being gatekeepers of information to curators of content. This also points towards the stronger position of sources in today’s journalistic practices (e.g. Broersma and Graham 2013: 461-462; Klinger and Svensson 2015: 1246; Skogerbø et. al. 2016: 117).

Tweets are a way for the journalist to convey a perspective that would be difficult to put on the news text or even a quote, as it’s seemingly detached from the news article itself, but at the same time it’s deeply embedded onto it. At the same time, using a tweet is taking responsibility, but also leaving the responsibility of the tweet to the tweeter. Therefore, an embedded tweet seems to be a grey area concerning power and responsibility: who is actually responsible for conveying the tweet to the audience?

Tweets add a sense of immediacy to the article: this is happening right now. Rarely tweets that are more than a few hours old are embedded onto the articles. According to Evelien D’heer and Pieter Verdegem, Twitter “reflects a networked, time-compressed interface 9

consisting of continuous streams of content between users, creating an ambient, always-on news environment” (2014: 84). Broersma and Graham describe Twitter as a “one-off news beat”, which allows reporters to gain information on a story much before a reporter has managed to get to the place where for example disasters or incidents have happened (2016, 92). Parmelee has also noted that timeliness is one of Twitter’s most intriguing features, making it one of the best tools for breaking news stories (2014: 444-445). This has been Twitter’s complimentary strategy, too, as it has developed itself towards promoting timely, informational messages (Hermida 2016: 84).

Even though tweets are prominent in the daily news flow, a very small percentage of tweets make it to mainstream news. In the 2015 Finnish parliamentary elections, the candidates tweeted around 78000 times during the month leading up to election day, with the average being 22 tweets per week per candidate. It has to be noted that a small group of candidates posted most of the tweets, as the median candidate only posted 8 tweets per week (Marttila et. al. 2015: 123-124).

Embedded tweets are not quotations

Embedding Besides being used as sources, social media posts are often quoted or embedded in digital news stories. The embedding of social media posts is referred to in this research often; in the most basic definition, it means copying a string of code from Twitter and pasting it onto the news article, making it seem that the original tweet is embedded onto the news article, appearing on the news article as it is on Twitter. In practice, the website’s code has been modified on both IL and IS so that the embedded tweet does not look exactly like the original. In her analysis of how tweets are used in French newspapers, Johansson (2019: 154-155) compares tweets to quotes in a useful way:

A digital quotation is a tweet, video, or other digital element that is recontextualized from a digital context by being copy-pasted into digital news texts. Digital quotations are literal quotations, and they disseminate information in the traditional sense of news information. However, they can have several functions and can consequently contribute to several discursive processes when they are embedded in the news text.

Johansson claims that digital quotes are literal, which according to the Cambridge English dictionary means “having exactly the same meaning as the basic or original meaning of a word or expression” (2019). While literal usually refers to written text, in the case of digital quotations it should be broadened to include pictures and form, which contribute to the

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discourse of the quotation. I will argue that as the context of the embedded tweet changes, so does the discourse of it, and following that, the meaning of the tweet. Thus, even though it would be embedded in the exact same form visually and textually as the original (which is not the case in the tweets in this research, for example), the meaning changes.

Recontextualization Following this, a key concept in understanding embedding is recontextualization, which is often referred to in CDA. Per Linell (1998: 144) has characterized the relationship between discourse and context in the following way:

Any discourse or text is embedded in a matrix of contexts made up from an array of different contextual resources: prior discourse, concrete physical environments, people (and assumptions about people) with their interpersonal relations, various kinds of background knowledge, situation definitions (frames), models of topics talked about etc.

Linell has defined recontextualization as “moving something from one context to another” (1998: 141). The complexity of recontextualization comes from the interplay between the original context, the new context, the act of recontextualization itself and the recontextualized text object, as they are in “constant interplay”, meaning that each part influences one another (Linell 1998: 144). This also means that the discourses are affected. Michał Krzyżanowski has called for a reconsideration of the meaning of recontextualization, arguing that it’s not merely an act of moving text objects, but also a way of spreading ideologies through media (2016: 315). In a multimodal environment, recontextualization has also been presented as an action of “copy-and-paste”, which results in a remix of the original materials (Adami 2011: 5); this results in a brand-new media object with intertextual references.

Similarly to this study, Matt Carlson has examined the sharing and commenting of news articles on social media from a recontextualization point of view. According to him, this kind of user interaction transforms not only the form of the news piece, but also the context (2016a: 918). I will argue that the same happens with the discourse of a news article when a social media post is embedded onto it: an embedded post is not only transferred to an already existing discourse, but it also transforms the discourse of the article.

Quotes According to Lauri Haapanen, quotes in journalistic articles have six distinct purposes: to build the rhythm, to advance the plot, to tell the reader about the surroundings, to increase credibility, to convey uniqueness and subjectivity and to characterize the speaker (2011: 70).

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In comparison, in their oft-cited study on the use of tweets in the UK and The Netherlands, Broersma and Graham (2013; 450-451, 456-457) categorized four different functions of tweets in news stories:

1. They can be “used to illustrate news events or larger trends in the article” 2. They can trigger “a news story because the tweets themselves were newsworthy” 3. They can be “simply published on their own (e.g. the tweet of the day)” 4. They can be “used as part of a question and answer exchange”

Broersma and Graham (2013, 456) came to the conclusion that two thirds of the tweets used in British and Dutch newspapers were used as “illustration” in a similar fashion to regular quotes: “to flavour news stories with quotes that express the opinions or experiences of a range of sources”. Their analysis is very rough-cut, however, and would benefit from a finer- tuned categorization of tweets. Tom Bakker, Damian Trilling and Luzia Helfer found out in their research that in the eyes of the readers, quoting from Twitter is not any less credible than quoting from a face-to-face interview (2013: 161).

While recontextualized tweets are easily comparable to quotes (which are also recontextualized, traditionally from the interview onto a newspaper), their function as a mere quotation should be contested and analyzed further. Ekman and Widholm have also pointed out that few studies have critically examined tweets as news sources and what kind of functions they have in news discourse (2015: 88).

When embedding, tweets can be made to look exactly the same as on their original platforms. Modifying the code of the social media post before embedding makes the post look different: for example, attached images and the amount of received “likes” or replies can easily be hidden and the background color of tweets can be changed.

For example, Iltalehti uses a modified format for embedded tweets, which hides the amount of replies written to the original tweet and makes them visually more coherent with the rest of the articles. The visual transformation merges the tweets into the article more seamlessly, making look more similar to a written quote and stand out less. Hiding the amount of replies suggests that the newspaper considers this information irrelevant to the articles, even when the amount of discussion could be an important criterion when assessing which tweets to choose for the article (and from the perspective of the reader, which tweets to read more thoroughly). Interestingly, social media posts that gather attention are often deleted by the original poster only after they are embedded, leaving an unreadable shadow of an embedded post onto the article (Wardle 2016: 29). A digital news article containing embedded material 12

can so be modified from outside the newsroom, and is never as stable as a printed article (Samdesk 2016). Thus, the digital quotes are not literal, and have similar problems of imperfection in recontextualization as other kinds of quotes. The concept of “digital quotation” is therefore too problematic to use as it is, so in this research the more plain and descriptive term “embedded social media post” will be used. From a visual perspective, Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen have argued that the interplay of text, pictures and composition form “powerful, multidimensional structures”, where the elements are always interrelated to each other when they are on the same platform, meaning that the elements always modify the context and thus the discourse (2006: 108-109).

When writing quotes based on interviews or press conferences, more often than not journalists modify them from the original utterance to make the quotes more readable and more in line with the rest of the text. For example, utterances that are not actual words rarely make it to news pieces (Haapanen 2016: 218-220). Quotes derived from speech have a specific relationship to the original utterance, and embedded quotes have a different, more direct relationship with the original text.

What clearly distinguishes “digital quotations” from other quotations is hypertextuality: the reader can click on the embedded post and move to the original post in an instant. Helle Sjøvaag et. al. have stated that in digital news ecologies, “the hyperlink is the premier tie and backbone of relationships” between digital news outlets and social media, and they also have the function of keeping established digital media outlets in the centre of the news ecology (2018: 509-510). According to Gemma Fitzsimmons et. al., visual saliency, as is the case with hyperlinks and some advertisements, “is a stimulus-driven signal that announces to us that a certain item or location is different to the rest of the visual field and is worthy of attention” (2019: 1-2).

Hypertextuality Although studies of embedded posts in relation to hyperlinks are missing from the field of media studies, it seems that most of the functions of quotes described by Haapanen are also functions of embedded social media posts. Hypertextuality makes telling the reader about the surroundings different from plain text, as the journalist not only has the possibility to tell the reader about the original utterance (written quote derived from a social media post), but also take the reader onto the original utterance (embedded social media post), which changes the user experience (Johansson 2019: 136; Fitzsimmons et. al. 2019: 1). As is the case with this

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research, the hyperlink or embedded tweet is not always used when quoting tweets. Studying hyperlinks is also an opportunity to study “direct and visible connections” between actors and different media (Moe and Larsson 2013: 778). Hyperlinks thus have a direct and visible effect to the ways power is used: when a digital newspaper links to another source, it gives the user an opportunity to switch to another platform, but it also connects the newspaper to the world in a more holistic manner (Fitzsimmons et. al., 2019: 17). From a classic journalistic standpoint, showing one’s sources should give the news item more credibility (Sjøvaag et. al. 2018: 510). Some studies have pointed out, though, that in the eyes of the public, the effect is the opposite, especially when it comes to political news (Kruikemeier and Lecheler 2018: 643).

Functions of embedded social media posts From these studies, it is possible to put together three main functions of embedded social media posts from a journalistic point of view:

1. Similarly to quotes in written text which are often used as visual elements, embedded social media posts add visual and textual “flavor” to the story. 2. Embedded social media posts connect the news article to both the original post and the rest of the discussion-discourse via hyperlinks. 3. They add journalistic credibility, as directing the viewer to the original source makes it possible for them to better check that the facts are correct in the article.

From the perspective of power, all of these have important implications. Embedding a tweet might give the article more credibility, but it also shows the viewer exactly what the politician said, with the possibility of framing the tweet, but not editing it. Framing tweets is potentially harmful for the journalist, too, as an “unfair” way of framing a tweet might affect the source- journalist relationship in the future (Berkowitz 2009: 106). Journalists in Britain, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands quoted tweets verbatim instead of paraphrasing almost all of the time (Broersma and Graham 2013: 455; Hladík and Štětka 2017: 169). An embedded tweet- hyperlink connects the article and the user from a curated and edited section of the internet to Twitter, a place where almost any kind of comment goes, and it’s up to the user to decide whether he wants to go back to the article after clicking. While a social media post is visually appealing and gives the article variety, the downside is that the attention of the viewer could more easily shift from the written news text to the embedded tweet, giving less chance for the journalist to convince the viewer. Kress and Van Leeuwen argue that squared frames are a way to capture attention, along with contrasting colors; embedded tweets have been separated 14

from the news text in this visual manner, too (2006: 53-54, 230-231). Raffaell Heiss, Christian von Sikorski and Jörg Matthes have found out that highlighting quotes and using embedded tweets increase the reader’s cognitive capacity to remember them (2019). Another issue to consider is whether hyperlinking to massive social media companies’ websites could be considered advertisement for the companies, meaning that news platforms are always forced to promote certain services when embedding. Combined with the knowledge that these companies can and have at times changed how the embedded social media posts are shown on the article, the platforms start to have much more power over the content of the articles than it would seem at first glance (see Hughes 2017).

Multimodality of embedded social media posts In the recent years, the attention of discourse analysts has largely shifted from analyzing written text and images to analyzing both of them multimodally and simultaneously (for example Bouvier and Machin 2018: 184; Hart 2016: 335; Machin and Mayr 2012, Veum and Undrum 2018: 87; Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006: 34). Some have gone as far as to argue that we are inevitably on our way to the post text era, with internet images, video and audio taking the place of written text (New York Times 2019).

Although the frequency of social media posts embedded in news stories varies, it is prevalent enough to have alerted scholars to re-examine the ways to analyze digital news stories, as it “adds to the complexity of the semiotic meaning of digital texts” (Johansson 2019: 134). The increasing multimodality, along with aestheticization and nonlinearity of digital news stories are challenges for critical discourse analysis (Bouvier and Machin 2018: 186). Another challenge for discourse analysis is the ambivalence of graphical phenomena, especially in social media posts: the use of emojis, memes and other images “raises issues of ambiguity, ambiguity resolution, miscommunication, and repair” (Herring 2019: 26).

How politicians use social media for publicity Ekman and Widholm argue that the relationship between political actors and journalists is best analyzed from the perspective of mediatized interdependency, meaning that both need each other to be able to do their work properly (2015: 81). Daniel Berkowitz describes the relationship as a “battle for power over public opinion and public consent”; when the source and the journalist have a balance of power, the interaction is symbiotic, but it becomes more

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adversarial when one has the upper hand over the other (2009: 102, 105). It has been argued that social media has changed the dynamics between journalists and politicians, as instant publication (and disintermediation, as in removing steps and actors between sources and audiences) has made communication with audiences more direct; this has also resulted in more responsibility towards the audiences (Broersma and Graham 2016: 90; Carlson 2016b: 2, 6; Skogerbø et. al. 2016: 104). Jörg Matthes, Peter Maurer & Florian Arendt argue that politicians in general are hostile towards the media and especially journalists with opposing views, which leads to less contact with journalists: politicians would rather speak themselves through social media than use traditional media to convey their messages (2019: 348).

Many studies have noted that despite the possibility of using social media reciprocally with audiences, politicians mostly use it as a tool of unidirectional communication (e.g. Larsson and Moe 2013: 777; Calderaro 2014: 4; Di Fraia and Missaglia: 73). In political communication, the role of citizens has remained small in the era of widespread social media use (Marttila et. al. 2015: 120). Politicians nor journalists are keen to answer the messages they receive from audiences on social media (D’heer and Verghem 2014: 92). In an analysis of the Facebook posts by Swedish political parties during the 2014 election, Falasca et. al. noticed that only 15 percent of the posts called for a reply (2017: 95). A clear pattern in the Nordic countries is missing: in a survey of the 2011 Danish parliamentary elections, 51 percent of candidates claimed to use social media for communicating directly with voters, although whether direct communication actually took place during the campaigns and to what extent is not known (Skovsgaard and Van Dalen 2013: 751). While this research is not completely forgetting the role of the audiences (at the very least they should be taken into account when studying how the visibility of like-counters and other elements derived from audience activity affect the articles), due to the mixed results of the aforementioned studies it is focusing mostly on the struggle for power between politicians and journalists and news outlets along with social media platforms. On the tweets it’s possible to put other people down or on a pedestal by tagging their handle onto the tweet. This is used quite rarely, which also supports the view that Finnish politicians use Twitter for one-way conversation.

These results have implications for analysis of the relationship of social media and traditional media in political communication: as the politicians do not prefer reciprocal communication as much as previously touted, the main reason for them to publish on social media might be to try and circumvent the gatekeeping of traditional media while still reaching a considerable audience. With the tools that for example Facebook provides, it is also possible to reach a 16

very specifically targeted audience for pennies on the dollar; one has to remember that for example in Finland, it is possible to get elected to the parliament with only about 2500 votes. The candidates were not asked directly about circumventing traditional media in Morten Skovsgaard’s and Arjen Van Dalen’s research, but only 19 percent of candidates (and 28 percent of candidates who preferred using traditional media in their campaign) claimed they used social media to gain visibility on traditional media and thus, they concluded that circumventing traditional media was not a priority for the candidates (2013: 737, 751). Social media does, though, give politicians the opportunity to avoid traditional gatekeeping and set the agenda themselves (D’Hee and Verghem 2014: 82; Hladík and Štetka 2017: 155; Enli and Skogerbo 2013: 762-763; Skovsgaard and Van Dalen 2013: 740; Skogerbo and Krumsvik 2015: 362).

Guido Di Fraia and Maria Carlotta Missaglia acknowledge six functions for the use of Twitter by politicians: direct communication (tweets containing tags, directed to specific users), personal and emotional tweets, spreading information, encouraging action, tweets containing information about politicians’ and institutional activities; and fundraising. They also argue that Twitter can be used in three specific ways (2014: 68):

1. as a means of direct communication to citizens (following the traditional model one-to-many) 2. as a medium of relation and bidirectional communication 3. as a useful tool to activate listening processes and to collect issues and themes from people

These functions and uses seem to be a good overview of how politicians use social media in relation to their audiences and voters. However, the aspect of traditional media is missing. Di Fraia and Missaglia also argue that politicians use methods such as strong language, targeting of content and timing of tweets to specifically attract the attention of the media system, broaden their audience and gain authenticity and validation. For example, Donald Trump kept himself in the headlines of the traditional media using his high visibility on social media and posting controversial and soundbite-worthy tweets (Tucker et. al. 2017: 46-47). Di Fraia and Missaglia call the recontextualization of social media posts on traditional digital media and the audiences’ attention following this the “re-launching effect” (2014: 76, 115). It would be suitable to add a fourth use for social media: as a means to influence traditional media.

To better understand the struggle for power between politicians and political journalists on social media, Di Fraia’s and Missaglia’s uses and functions can also be related to Broersma’s and Graham’s seven dominant social media uses of political journalists:

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Use of social media Politicians Political journalists (Broersma (Di Fraia and Missaglia) and Graham) Understanding what’s going Listening, collecting issues & Monitoring, sourcing on themes Group-forming Direct communication, Networking fundraising Engaging the audience Encouraging action Engaging Publishing new information Spreading information Publishing Promoting events, ideas, Spreading information about Promoting people politicians’ and institutional activities Image building Personal & emotional tweets Branding

Most of these can overlap with each other, for example, fundraising can be at the same time viewed as engaging the audience and trying to form a group with them. They also vary in significance: considering that politicians mostly use social media unidirectionally, direct communication and encouraging action are reserved for only certain situations. It seems clear that politicians and political journalists use social media in similar ways. Broersma and Graham argue that it’s the politicians who usually try to mimic journalists on Twitter (2016: 100). This emphasizes the struggle for power on social media platforms between them: all of the described uses and their outcomes are contested.

Ekman and Widholm describe social media as an “on-going discursive struggle that takes place in the digital public space” where both use material from each other to promote their own agenda (2015: 82). In relation to traditional media and digital news outlets, they also argue that the relationship between politicians and political journalists is a struggle, where sources decide what could be published while journalists eventually decide what will be published (2015: 81). This is most evident in political PR, where public relations officers try to publish the most newsworthy press releases, tweets and other content to compete for access to the news, although they also are trying to find ways to circumvent the gatekeeping (Carlson 2016b: 6-7). As Twitter is a mostly public elite medium with elite social networks, the politicians and political journalists also collaborate in creating an atmosphere where these uses are possible. All of the functions happen in contest and collaboration. According to

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Chadwick, the struggle between “new” and “old” media actors is characterized by competition, conflict, negotiation and interdependence (2013: 75). This has interesting implications for the analysis of recontextualization of social media posts: the struggle for power that takes place on the article itself has already started on social media, and, the social media posts on the article are a result of contest and collaboration of both politicians and journalists. The discourse of Twitter is formed by journalists as well as politicians, meaning that the embedded tweets, including the discourse of them, have already been influenced by journalists and digital news platforms before they are embedded onto the news articles; a clear example of how interrelated and hybrid the social media-digital news media dichotomy is. In a similar notion, Kajsa Falasca et. al. argue that people commenting on the social media posts of politicians are “co-creators of meaning” (2017: 90). In one example from the news articles, a “conversation” on Twitter started from an opinion piece about the coming-together of the social democrats and the coalition written by a journalist on IL, then the Twitter “conversation” was partially embedded onto a news article on IS.

Although social media has been an opportunity to gain power for the ones who previously had less, the elites adapt quickly on social media, especially Twitter (Chadwick et. al. 2015: 18). Broersma and Graham have noted that in a hybrid media system, online power most often comes from a previous offline presence (2016: 100). Bigger parties have greater resources, more talent and better possibilities to combine offline and online campaigns in a hybrid media environment. In a sharp-eyed critique, Andrea Calderaro (2014: 5-6) wonders if social media will ultimately become just another tool for the powerful to spread their political messages.

Many other scholars have come to the conclusion that although non-politicians have improved their potential to get their messages noted and quoted by the mass media through social media, the elites still have much more power to grab attention, through both social media and more traditional information channels (Thorsen and Jackson 2018: 848; Hladík and Štetka 2017: 168; Bouvier and Machin 2018: 180-181; Van Leuven et. al. 2018: 800). Carlson has argued that elite sources are also becoming elite communicators (2016b: 7-8). In their study of the United States, Dominic Lasorsa et. al. noticed that elite journalists are more likely to keep the status quo (2012: 31). D’heer and Verdegem have pointed out that people who take central positions on Twitter are also privileged in their occupations as politicians and journalists (2014: 92). Keeping the status quo works at a systemic level, as well, as networks favor actors who are already well-connected (Carlson 2016b: 10). Adding to this, Blommaert points out that “language users have repertoires containing different sets of varieties”, meaning that 19

people are not entirely free or objective when they are using language, but they are restricted by their own skills and previously gained positions of power or powerlessness, and the distribution of both repertoires and power is unequal (2005: 15).

The dilemma of power distributed on social media continues on social media embeddings visually, too. The profile pictures of the politicians are present on the embedded tweets. Most politicians have a photo of their own head as their profile picture. This resembles a poll-style news piece, where everyone, regardless of their background, gets an equal opportunity to say what they want. This is, of course, not true, as the tweets (as well as the poll answers) are selected to fit in the story. The embedded tweets are in a standard form, which adds to the effect. A difference between poll-stories and embedded tweet-stories is that the from the near- infinite pool of tweets regarding an event like this, only the ones posted by politicians tend to be accepted, with the occasional comedian or celebrity tossed into the mix. This verifies the position of Twitter as an elite medium and helps to tune the audience’s expectations to match. Considering democracy, the public understanding that only the elite can hold a conversation with each other and even though it’s possible to try and take part, success is rare, is very problematic. To take part in the social aspect of Twitter, you arguably need a certain level of influence and power. When someone’s tweet ends up on a newspaper, the person must be important, and so does the tweet. What tweets are important are up to the judgment of the newspaper, and thus, newspapers also have power to select tweets that are not from the Twitter elites, which would certainly democratize the discourse.

As both politicians and journalists contribute in similar ways to how social media, especially Twitter, is and what kind of discourses it holds within, I will argue that politicians alone are not blame for the normalization of party politics on social media, but it is heavily supported by journalists. So far, this has seemed to ring true in Finland, as well, as in the 2015 election the major parties dominated internet campaigning (Strandberg 2015: 111). No representatives from parties previously outside the parliament were close to being elected. In the era of widespread social media use in Finland, no new parties have made it into the parliament. The biggest shift in recent parliamentary politics came in the 2011 election, when the True Finns party managed to secure a massive victory with 39 seats, gaining 34 seats from the previous election. According to Kim Strandberg, the 2011 election was the first one where social media had a somewhat significant impact, but there is not much evidence to argue that the True Finns won because of social media campaigning (2015: 103).

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Role and business models of Twitter and Facebook Finally, when considering how power is used on social media platforms and posts recontextualized from the platform, it is necessary to mention a few words about Twitter and Facebook use power on their own. Unfortunately, the scale of this research does not allow for the inclusion of the media-business perspective but focuses on the journalists and politicians as actors and Twitter as a platform. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey has agreed that the platform should have been more active in curating the content posted by users, signaling that the company does not consider itself as a neutral platform, but an active participant in the discourse-forming process (CNBC.com 2019).

In essence, the action of embedding under scrutiny is a relocation of a social media post from one commercial platform to another. When taking into account that the social media post is also a part of a media strategy by an organization which includes the politician and his or her campaign people, the struggle for power takes place between three distinct organizations. Because the embedded social media post is also a hyperlink and hyperlinks are a premier connection between digital news outlets and social media (Sjøvaag et. al. 2018: 508), the hyperlink also connects two large businesses. Both Facebook and Twitter are fundamentally capitalist, and as such their main function is to make profits for the shareholders (Bouvier and Machin 2018: 187). As social media platforms take users to news platforms and vice-versa via hyperlinks, it could be argued that the hyperlink is one of the basic tools for conducting business in the online media system.

Social media posts in relation to traditional media One of the cornerstones for this research is the concept of hybridity in the media system. Hybridity is characterized by the interaction and integration of “new” and “old” media and their logics, focusing on the interpenetrated fields of media and politics. Instead of focusing on “old” and “new” media as separate entities, hybridity acknowledges that in some cases there are meaningful differences between them, and in others those same distinctions are dissolving or have been dissolved. According to Chadwick (2013: 5), the hybrid media system is built upon interactions among older and newer media logics—where logics are defined as technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms—in the reflexively connected fields of media and politics. Actors in this system are articulated by complex and ever-evolving relationships based upon adaptation and interdependence and simultaneous 21

concentrations and diffusions of power. Actors create, tap, or steer information flows in ways that suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable, or disable the agency of others, across and between a range of older and newer media settings.

While Chadwick’s hybridity focuses on “new” media as digital media and “old” media as in TV, print and radio among others, the concept (especially the concept of information flows) is useful in analyzing the integration and interaction between social media and traditional online news platforms. Many online news platforms, including IL and IS still utilize media logics that are mostly the same as the logics of their preceding print editions. The same journalists now write stories for print and web, using to a large extent the same tools and skills as their predecessors: a pen and a piece of paper are still the most important objects for the daily routine of most journalists.

Traditional media and social media are also highly interconnected via hyperlinks on social media. In an analysis of a local election in Belgium in 2012, approximately a third of all the hyperlinks featured on election-related tweets linked to traditional media: social media is not a system in itself, but part of a hybrid media system, in which traditional media and social media blend with each other via hyperlinks, hashtags and other intertextual references (D’heer and Verdegem 2014: 86-87). In another study, Sjøvaag et. al. found via network analysis that over 20 percent of all hyperlinks on Scandinavian digital news outlets lead to social media (2018: 514). Chadwick calls this interdependence in practice “tapping” into social media content and “weaving” it into their own news genres and production techniques (2013: 57).

One of the examples Chadwick uses is the successful 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, which has been touted by many to be the first real social media election (e.g. Di Fraia and Missaglia 2015, Chadwick et. al. 2015, Skovsgaard and Van Dalen 2013). Here, the hybrid media system, fortified by clever campaign management, manifested itself as one where content would quickly spread across all mediums, producing different kinds of messages: Obama’s announcement of joining the presidential race was first published on YouTube, from where it was picked up by online newspapers, television news, blogs, social media and other YouTube channels and online video platforms. Depending on the medium, the original video was cut, quoted, recontextualized and ultimately viewed in different ways, portraying different kinds of perspectives to the campaign. Considering hybridity and recontextualization, some politicians communicate the same or very similar messages on multiple different channels, such as blogs, twitter, press releases, press conferences and parliament sessions, and sometimes almost at the same time. This makes it very difficult to 22

pinpoint what is an original quote and what is a recontextualization of it, highlighting the need for the concept of hybridity.

One of the major social media incidents before the 2019 parliamentary election in Finland was the accidental deletion of the nationalist right-wing party True Finns leader Jussi Halla- aho’s campaign debate from the public broadcast service YLE’s digital streaming platform Areena. The debate received major news attention in a similar fashion to Obama’s campaign announcement. The debate was first aired on TV1, one of the two main channels of the public broadcasting service. Like most programs, it was then made available for streaming in Areena. According to Yle, an error during a system update deleted tens of streamable programs, one of which was Halla-aho’s debate. The debates of other party leaders remained streamable. Halla-aho quickly noted this on Twitter, saying that “it’s getting difficult to believe your own eyes”, pointing his finger towards the alleged biases of YLE. One user had already uploaded a viewer’s cut of the debate on YouTube, with many of the “ramblings of the so-called experts” removed, giving more space and credit to Halla-aho (Videoforum 2019). Halla-aho’s tweet gathered nearly 300 responses on Twitter, many of them with major Twitter followings, and it was picked up and embedded by both IL and IS among other media outlets, who tried their best to get a comment from YLE. The same evening YLE published their own online news story as an explanation. The stir caused by a tweet about a recontextualized TV broadcast and amplified by digital news outlets made returning the content to Areena YLE’s top priority, and the debate was available for streaming again some hours after the start of the ruckus. Other deleted shows were made available the next day. Ultimately, the flow and recontextualization of information from medium to another was the force that kept the stir going, with the only pieces of relevant, non-speculative new information being Halla-aho’s tweet and YLE’s official comment. The defected former True Finns party leader Timo Soini called YLE a “useful idiot” in his blog: their technical blunder ended up boosting the True Finns’ position and waking up old conspiracy theories about the public broadcaster (Soini 2019). With TV, fast-paced digital news platforms (both public broadcast and commercial) and social media playing part in the news event, it is a textbook example of hybridity, interdependence and recontextualization.

This example shows why hybridity is a key concept in this research. A single well-timed tweet can in a matter of minutes be picked up by all of the national media outlets, which not only recontextualized it for their own audiences, but also solidify its importance to both audiences and the politicians (Broersma and Graham 2013: 461; Chadwick 2013: 234). The 23

event has as much to do with hybridity of “old” and “new” media as with the hybrid relationship between digital news outlets (the “old” media of the internet) and social media (the “new” media of the internet), including blogs, discussion boards and comment sections of news articles. It also has to be mentioned that while digital news platforms might be classified as “new” media, they still operate on a firm basis of “old” media logic. Chadwick argues that actors in the hybrid media system try to “create, tap, or steer information flows in ways that suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable, or disable the agency of others, across and between a range of older and newer media settings”, implying that the struggle for power is one the core reasons why hybridity works as it works (2013: 181).

One problem with Chadwick’s model is that it is focused on the UK and the USA. For example, Finland has been much slower in adapting Twitter into the media system, and unlike the USA and the UK, many politicians still consider Facebook to be the best channel to reach their target audience. Where possible, I have tried to avoid using information from USA and UK-based studies and focus on ones from Northern Europe where media systems are more similar to Finland. Another example is the emphasis on television: Finland has one of the highest newspaper coverages in the world, which means that television certainly does not (nor never did) have total dominance of breaking news stories. Focusing on world-changing events such as WikiLeaks and the Trump election make it seem that Chadwick’s version of total hybridity (in the sense of unprecedented audience-media-politics interdependence and interaction) is reserved for massive, deus ex machina style political bombshells.

My main criticism against the Chadwick’s hybridity theory is his excessive focus on audience as a media producer in political communication. Certainly, this is related to the media environments the theory originates from: in Finland, an unknown tweeter very rarely gets significant attention in the online legacy media. Very few social media posts posted by non- politicians, such as news satirists and celebrities, were embedded to the articles in this study. Time and the shift in scholarly consensus also play a factor, as in 2013, when Chadwick’s theory was published, most scholars were still fascinated by the supposedly deciding effect Twitter had on the Arab spring of 2011. The perception that social media has become a revolutionary democratizing factor in news production has in the following years been for the most part debunked, or at least diluted (e.g. Enli and Moe 2013: 637; Van Leuven et. al. 2018: 800; Thorsen and Jackson 2018: 848; Waisbord 2018: 1871). This shift in consensus is also one of the reasons for this study to focus on politicians and the platforms instead of audiences as producers. I suggest that in this kind of research about day-to-day news production, such as 24

the case of social media posts recontextualized, it will be useful to tone down the role of the audiences. Next, I will take a look at the specific characteristics of the media environment in Finland.

The Finnish Media Environment According to Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Finland, along with other countries of northern Europe, has a democratic corporativist media system. Countries with the democratic corporativist system are characterized by high newspaper circulation, strong external pluralism, a historically strong party press but with a recent development of a strong, neutral commercial press, strong professionalization, institutionalized self-regulation, strong state intervention but with a traditionally strong protection for press freedom, press subsidies and strong public-service broadcasting (2004: 67). Most, but not all, can be generalized to Finland. A very notable exception here are press subsidies; the press in Finland gets a total of 0,5 million euros in subsidies per year, while the press in Denmark and Sweden gets 60 million and in Norway 38 million (Erho 2019). Finland also has lower press-party parallelism than other Nordic countries, meaning that the mobilizing role of the party press has diminished, and the press in general tends to be politically neutral (Van Kempen 2007: 309). From 1986 to 2002 all the Finnish daily newspapers one by one began to officially proclaim that they were be unaffiliated with political parties, although their “code of values” mostly stayed the same as before the neutrality announcement (Lehto 2006: 406).

The use of Hallin and Mancini’s media systems theory is somewhat problematic, as so many different countries with differing media systems are grouped into the democratic corporativist model, but the similarity of the basic principles in these countries make the concept usable enough. To counter this, Blommaert argues that all discourses are influenced by “the structure of the world system”, meaning that discourse does no longer happen in a single society (2005: 15). For example, the basic structure of Twitter was formed in the USA and Twitter culture reflects North American ways of discourse, such as wittiness, self-promotion and capitalist consumption (Bouvier and Machin 2018: 181, 187; Ekman and Widholm 2015: 83; Barbera 2017: 28).

Strong Rational-legal Authority Concerning the use of power, it has to be noted that democratic corporativist countries have a strong rational-legal authority. This has led to a strong codification of journalism and the

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press, in Finland manifested by the strength of the Journalist’s Union. Hallin and Mancini argue that this has proven to be relatively fertile ground for the development for the press, and it has also made it easier for media owners to keep their distance from politics (2004: 55-57). It has also contributed to the public availability of much of the material produced by the government, although in recent years there have been multiple cases where public information was withheld from journalists, with some leading to court cases (Honkonen 2018).

The level of instrumentalization of the media by politicians has remained low in democratic corporativist countries. It does not mean that that instrumentalization is nonexistent, however. The relationship between journalists and politicians varies significantly by location, with Nordic countries having a high degree of symbiosis (Berkowitz 2009: 108). All politicians try to control the flow of information, which poses a challenge to journalism from a neutrality standpoint (Robertson 2015: 60-61; Berkowitz 2009: 103-104; Dinan and Miller 2009: 251). Scholars have long ago challenged all notions of objectivity in journalism, even the pursuit of it, with many holding the view that news medias are simply a vehicle for the elite to spread their agendas (e.g. McNair 2009: 241; Berkowitz 2009: 109; Van Dijk 2009: 195). In democratic corporativist countries the struggle for information control is most often about spinning the story. A recent example of an information control struggle is that of the Finnish prime minister Juha Sipilä, who attacked the public broadcasting company YLE because of a story about the prime minister’s relatives’ mining company receiving state contracts, claiming that his respect for YLE was now “exactly zero” (Koivunen, 2017: 44-45).

Neutrality in Reporting Although historically rooted in party press, journalism in the Nordic countries now has a strong emphasis on neutrality in reporting. In the 1960s journalism in the Nordic countries started to develop from noncontroversial information-relaying to a watchdog, which targeted social problems and politics in particular. The Finnish Journalists’ Union’s code of ethics from 1968 state that “a real piece of news is true, appropriate, balanced, reviewed and honest” and that a journalist should “separate their own opinion from reporting the events” (Julkisen sanan neuvosto 1968). The previous edition from 1957 does not state anything related to this (Julkisen sanan neuvosto 1957). According to Hallin and Mancini, the “activist orientation” of the 1970s has faded, but a critical orientation towards institutions remains (2004: 177). From the 1980s on, journalism took a public service orientation, meaning that instead of telling the audience how they should be and act, they wanted to mirror how the public thinks (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 180). 26

Finland has in the recent years been one of the countries where the public trusts the media the most, comparatively speaking. Along with Albania, Denmark and Sweden, only 20 percent or less of people had low or no trust in the media in 2017 (European Broadcasting Union 2018: 8-36). Radio was the most trusted medium with 79 percent of tending to trust it, TV was trusted by 73 percent, written press by 67 percent, internet by 33 percent and social networks by 14 percent. Comparing to the previous year, trust in the internet dropped dramatically by 18 index points. From 2012 to 2017, trust in the written press rose by more than 10 percent. In a study comparing different Finnish institutions, however, the media were trusted by only 33 percent, with the police getting the highest trust rating with 87 percent and the education system with 80 percent. The parliament was trusted by 38 percent and the government by 31 percent (Taloudellinen tiedotustoimisto 2018). Another survey compared trust for different news brands in Finland; IL finished last and IS second-last (Reunanen 2018). Considering that the digital news platforms under scrutiny in this research are on the internet, although derived from the written press, it cannot be determined that IL and IS have a firm basis of public trust. IL and IS are at the same time the least trusted and most read digital news platforms in Finland.

The Previous Elections With the parliamentary election in 2011 being the first election with significant political activity on social media, the parliamentary election in 2015 was beforehand touted to be the first real social media election. In the 2015 election, more than 10 percent of the candidates used several social media channels for campaigning and over 210000 tweets related to the election were posted (Marttila et. al. 2016: 121). More than half of the 2146 candidates had a Twitter handle, but the distribution of those handles was very Helsinki-focused. The most active users were the Green party and the Coalition party candidates, which was also reflected in the prolific use of hashtags related to those parties and their agendas. Young age also correlated with political activity on social media (Strandberg 2016: 111).

The 2015 election seemed to follow previously described patterns of political activity on social media; the majority of tweets were made by traditionally powerful parties, communication was mostly unidirectional and instead of making communication more accessible and effective for a wider variety of parties and influencers, it seemed to normalize the existing power relations and patterns of political communication (Strandberg 2015: 100, 111, Marttila et. al. 2015: 120). On the other hand, the overrepresentation of youth and women on social media seems to counterargue this normalization (Strandberg 2015: 109). 27

Twitter in Finland is an “elite media”, where many but not all of the elite users are in powerful positions elsewhere, and political reporters and politicians are closely connected through Twitter discussions (Vainikka and Huhtamäki 2015: 167). This implies that tweets on their original platform are not that visible to the general public, but when recontextualized to a digital news platform, their importance and visibility changes drastically.

Being active of Twitter did not correlate with being elected in Finland in 2015. Of the top ten most active candidates in Mari Marttila et. al.’s research, only two were elected (2015: 131). Both Marttila et. al. and Strandberg argue that the 2015 election wasn’t the first social media election nor the first internet election. According to Strandberg it is surprising since the first social media election in the USA happened in 2008 and otherwise the development of the internet and social media is very similar between Finland and the USA (2015: 95). On the other hand, being internet-savvy in general seems to go hand in hand with political success: in all Finnish parliamentary elections between 2003 and 2015, a high percentage of candidates and members of parliament from the major parties were a part of the population who used the internet and social media the most; they have also been among the early adopters of both (Strandberg 2015: 96, 106).

Methodology and materials

Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Machin and Mayr describe critical discourse analysis as a “loose combination of approaches found in linguistics”. As noted, politicians, journalists and newspapers are on a mission to influence people, which is a good starting point for choosing a method from the field of CDA.

“…Such detailed analysis can allow us to reveal more precisely how speakers and authors use language and grammatical features to create meaning, to persuade people to think about events in a particular way, sometimes even to seek to manipulate them while at the same time concealing their communicative intentions.” (Machin and Mayr 2012, 1)

Similarly, Wodak (2001a: 3) argues that CDA “makes it possible to analyse pressures from above and possibilities of resistance to unequal power relationships that appear as societal conventions”. This is what critical means in Critical Discourse Analysis. According to Machin and Mayr, the purpose of CDA is to “draw out ideologies, showing where they might be buried in texts" (2012: 25). CDA started to detach from Critical Linguistics in the 1970s 28

and 1980s as a viewpoint which takes into account history, power and ideology in a more wholesome manner. Proponents of CDA such as Kress, Wodak, Norman Fairclough and van Dijk published seminal studies using CDA methods in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and since then the variety of methods and perspectives has morphed and multiplied so that choosing the “best” method for each study is arguably completely dependent on the values, history and available resources of the researcher. For example, Reisigl and Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach takes into account every little detail of the object of study, but also the grand discourses in force during the time and place where the object came into existence (context), and even the contexts that came before that one. Wodak also argues that triangulation using other methods is vital for CDA, doubling the amount of work (2001b: 64- 65). Such an all-encompassing method requires time and resources that few institutions have. The author has acknowledged these problems themselves, too (2001a: 10).

Van Dijk (2018: 467) has described the general properties of critical analysis on discourse to be the following, among others:

• It focuses primarily on social problems and political issues rather than the mere study of discourse structures outside their social and political contexts. • This critical analysis of social problems is usually multidisciplinary. • Rather than merely describe discourse structures, it tries to explain them in terms of properties of social interaction and especially social structure. • More specifically, CDA focuses on the ways discourse structures enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of power abuse (dominance) in society.

Adding to Van Dijk, Blommaert has argued that language works differently in different contexts, and so context must be carefully taken into account while examining media objects (2005: 14-15). Following these, in this research, the social aspect and the context of the news stories under analysis must be taken into careful consideration. The news stories will be analyzed taking into account the grand context and discourse, which is described in the Finnish Media Environment and the Previous Elections sections.

Of Van Dijk’s key points, the reproduction of dominance is the most important and relates specifically to RQ1: if the journalist/news platform does not challenge the tweet of the politician, who is asserting dominance over who? If the journalist/news platform does challenge the politician, how does she do it? What is the role of the “people” in the news story? Are they involved in the discourse as passive recipients of decisions or are they active

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members of democracy? All of these questions relate directly to how social media is used by politicians, journalists and also the audience-producer.

The methodology of this study is largely based on the method described by Machin and Mayr. Their contribution in the field is invaluable in terms of putting the principles of CDA into systematic analysis, while also taking into account the ever-increasing visual requirements of modern media and society. The problem with this method meant for analyzing different subjects from different perspectives is the scope of it; to make a broad and deep analysis, one needs resources too large compared to a simple master’s thesis. Therefore, in this chapter, I will try to focus on the most important parts of their method keeping in mind the scope of this thesis. For example, the analysis of video clips will remain at a very superficial level, as focusing on them would take a massive amount of space.

Machin and Mayr put emphasis on analyzing the media objects multimodally (Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, MCDA), which means analyzing not only the texts and contexts, but also images, photographs, diagrams and graphics (2012: 9). A modern website consists of all of these, so a multimodal approach is vital in understanding it. Other researchers have also pointed out the gap between multimodality and CDA (Hart 2016: 335; Herring 2019: 46; Veum and Undrum 2018: 87). The key points of analysis described by Machin and Mayr are:

1. Analysing semiotic choices: What kind of words and images are used? 2. Presenting speech and speakers: How are the speakers represented to speak? 3. Representing people: Language, identity, attributes and characteristics of people 4. Representing action: What and how are the people depicted as doing? 5. Nominalisation and presupposition: What is concealed and taken for granted? 6. Persuading with Abstraction: What kind of rhetoric and metaphors are used? 7. Truth, modality and hedging: What are the people committing to and what are they evading?

In practice, I will analyze all of the 18 articles using this seven part scheme. The focus is on two different kinds of elements of the news articles. The “static” elements, meaning the elements that stay the same even when switching to the next news story. These include mostly visual elements, for example, the positioning of the headline and the principal image, the default appearance of embedded tweets and the colors used on the websites. For example, as a default, the headline on top of the news article is always one of the most important elements of the article despite its length. The “changing” elements differ from article to article, and include, for example, the news story itself, the pictures, the content of the tweets, how it is represented visually and also the context of the story. As noted in the multimodality section,

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the “static” elements are not stable from computer to computer, so in this research these should not be considered as important as the “changing” elements.

Interactivity of websites makes critical discourse analysis even more difficult, as the layout and content of a website changes with user interaction, actively and passively (Chadwick 2013: 48; Carlson 2016a: 917). The users of a website can modify and influence the discourse by posting comments in the comment section when available, and the algorithms behind the website interface modify it by trying to show users the messages and advertisements they are most likely to be interested in (for example Chadwick 2013: 268; Bucher 2018: 1-2). When studying the multimodal discourse of a website, one has to at least point out that the website changes depending on the time, location, device and previous internet use of the one who accesses it. The modification of already published articles also means that news articles are never fully finished (Neuberger et. al. 2018: 1263). The technological complexities of these new dimensions of multimodality also suggest that research should consider both the changing and static elements of websites. There is certainly need for new ways to conduct critical discourse analysis in an environment where every user sees a unique version of a single website. In a similar notion, Kress and Van Leeuwen point out that websites are designed to accommodate multiple reading paths, and the importance of the different elements can be organized by their visual saliency, or “heaviness”, meaning that the different sizes, shapes, colors and positioning of the elements should be paid close attention to (2006: 49, 204-205). For example, and importantly for this study, hyperlinks are visually very salient, meaning that tweets, which are both hyperlinks and large, attention-grabbing visual elements, are very salient, as well (Fitzsimmons et. al. 2019: 1).

The news articles For this research, all news articles containing embedded or quoted tweets posted by politicians in the politics section of IL and IS between the governmental dissolution on March 8 2019 and the 2019 parliamentary election on April 14 will be analyzed. Set in a period of post-dissolution bickering and pre-election campaigning, the five weeks between was a period of much political activity online and offline. Altogether the analysis contains 18 articles, of which 10 are from IS and 8 from IL. The main reason for using quoted tweets as well is that IL has a mixed way of using tweets in their articles: sometimes they are embedded, sometimes they are plainly quoted in the news text, and there doesn’t seem to be a pattern

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why. This is also a great opportunity to compare the discourse of an article with only quoted tweets and an article with embedded tweets.

The online editions of IL and IS are two of the most frequented news websites in Finland, with both reaching approximately 3,5-3,7 million people, two thirds of the Finnish population, monthly (Fiam 2019). This analysis features articles from the Politics section of both websites. Therefore, in regard to the definition of discourse by Foucault, they are two of the most dominant discourse-makers in the Finnish online media sphere.

Validity The material selected for the analysis portrays a part of the entire media landscape of the month leading to the 2019 parliamentary election, which from the perspective of grand discourse makes the analysis only a small fragment of what actually happened during the campaigning. However, this medium-sized analysis shows a much fuller picture of the discursive power struggle between than a deep, background-information heavy analysis, which would have worked if for example the discourse-historical approach was applied. Analyzing 18 articles gives the results depth that would have been unattainable with a smaller sample size, but also puts the all-important grand discourses to the background.

Triangulation is often underlined in discourse studies, and in this analysis it has mostly been disregarded, which does reduce the validity in this project. This was done purely because of space limits for a thesis: in the preliminary phase of this thesis, I was trying out an audience- research style method for complimenting the discourse analysis, but the time and effort would have ultimately tripled or even quadrupled. The preliminary study on a different set of articles did show that discourse analysis and audience reception complimented each other in a very useful manner, with many similarities between the results. For the scope of this research, however, of these two methods it was much more efficient to use discourse analysis. Thus, I would argue that Machin and Mayr’s method works nicely in this kind of research, with the grand discourse perspective and the lack of triangulation being the downsides.

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The analysis

Of the 18 news articles analyzed, 6 are trying to challenge the discourse of the tweets, 7 are not trying to challenge it and 4 are amplifying the discourse. One article is both challenging and not challenging the article, with the result depending heavily on how the article is read. The most important find in this analysis is that most articles do not try to challenge the discourse portrayed in the tweets: this shows that when journalists do embed or quote tweets in their articles, most often the already powerful figures in Finnish politics get to heavily influence, if not completely shape, the discourse of the articles and thus, the digital news outlets. What is surprising considering the public image of objectivity in the Finnish media is that multiple articles not only left the politicians’ discourses unchallenged, but also amplified them using different methods: for example, making the politicians seem more capable than they themselves present and ignoring the questions made by the public when they had the responsibility to ask them.

Considering the differences between IL and IS, it seems that IL is less likely to embed and more likely to plainly quote than IS. This also makes the discourses of the articles on IL less likely to work as loudspeakers for the politicians, also making IL seem journalistically more credible from a critical perspective. IL also seems to use less tweets and more interviews in their articles where tweets are embedded, and also use them more in a supporting role.

A short summary of each article is presented in the appendices along with the complete analysis of all 18 articles.

In the following section I will present analyses of different articles and how tweets are embedded and used there, exemplifying different aspects of the relationship of the embedded tweets and the articles. These are structured in relation to the two overarching research questions, but presented categorized in subthemes that proved to be most important in the analysis.

The analysis and results To select the themes to be presented here, I have used the coding scheme by Johnny Saldaña (2009), which allows the elements of the analysis to be categorized and grouped systematically. In essence, I have categorized the useful elements of discourse-forming that appear on the articles, such as the role of the journalist, “how” messages are told, how 33

emotion and rationality are used, conflicts between people, etc., and highlighted the ones that recur in the analysis to be further studied in the results section. The sections here overlap to a degree, but I will try to focus on each one as clearly as possible. In general, it seems that in most articles, the discourse of the tweets gets picked up by the digital medium at face value and is reproduced in the article. This observation reflects the nature of Finnish and Nordic journalism, where journalists and newspapers are most often seen as neutral and objective relayers of information. The role of the journalist is arguably most often passive, and politicians are given more space to use their own power in forming the discourse.

In some cases, the discourse gets “amplified”, meaning that the characteristics of the tweets are confirmed and made even more visible and significant. In some articles the discourse provided by the tweets is challenged, explicitly or implicitly. The role of the journalist as an amplifier or as a challenger is at the core of this research, and the analysis reflects its importance.

RQ1: Do Finnish digital news articles challenge the discourse of the tweets embedded in them and how do they do it?

The role of the journalist Here I will discuss two articles from IL as examples of how the role of the journalist affects the discourse of the article. In an article about an incident where a True Finns Party representative wasn’t accepted to be a part of a televised campaign debate, the leader of the party plays the part of the victim, stating that “the replacement representative wasn’t welcome” and that “the same rule didn’t apply to the Coalition party”. Both quotes are jabs on democracy and equality, which should be cornerstones of the nation and Yle, the public broadcasting company. The article amplifies this discourse by hinting in the headline that Yle might have “misunderstood” the party (whose populism is often based on the idea that they are a misunderstood underdog), then by positioning the counterarguments and explanations of Yle’s head of communications far from the beginning of the article where Halla-aho gets most of the space. From the perspective of this study, the journalist is not passive, but the selections that she made during the newsmaking process clearly influence the discourse to the benefit of Halla-aho. The party also gets the last word in the article, with their political planner calling

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Yle “cold”. The article is written from the perspective of misunderstanding, which makes Yle accountable from the wrongdoing, even when they have a plausible explanation for the incident. Visually, the article portrays the True Finns as a collection of humans, as there are two important party members presented visually, one as a Twitter profile and one as a photo, and Yle as a faceless bureaucracy, which is represented by flags and the famous broadcast tower. Machin and Mayr (2012, 102) argue that it is important to understand who is visually excluded from the story, and in this case, as the representative for Yle is not visually portrayed, it makes less present and less active, and possibly harder to relate to, making the rhetoric of Yle less powerful in the discourse. To sum up, the headline, the order of the messages presented and the visual saliency of the politicians versus Yle make up for a discourse that is very pro-Halla-aho and pro-conflict, which was initiated by the party leader.

A less dramatic example of amplification is the article about MEP Eija-Riitta Korhola starting out her campaign for another term in the European Parliament. In the selected tweets she portrays herself as a “human being” rather than a “politician”, and the journalist has a similar message to support this. Rather than focusing on the controversial environmental policies (“business over the environment”) suggested by Korhola, the article portrays her as a survivor of breast cancer, bringing to light the human side of politics and making her seem like an “average Jill” with problems that could be a part of anyone’s life. The policies that she suggests are presented in a positive light, as she is told to have a doctorate in environmental politics, signaling that she would be capable of handling those issues. From a visual perspective, the tweets take up a large part of the article, and thus influences the discourse heavily. The article at the same time portrays Korhola as normal and extraordinary, which mirrors classic populist rhetoric (Schoor 2017: 661). The amplification of Korhola’s titles and human side along with the dismissal of her problematic policy suggestions makes the news piece appear more like a campaign advertisement than political news. Thus, the role of the journalist here seems to be to enhance her chances of getting elected. The parts where she should be challenged are left out and the facts of her “human side” have been amplified by the journalist.

Clearly the journalist can use her power as a newsmaker to challenge and amplify the discourse presented in the tweets. When their role is passive, they do not challenge the tweets, which always come from a position of political influence, and they fail to make a difference in the power struggle. From the perspective of CDA and from the perspective of journalism this is very problematic, as the politicians are often able to commandeer the discourse of an entire 35

article, sometimes an entire newspaper when a story becomes the story of the day, towards their gain with a single, well-timed and well-written tweet.

Rationality versus emotion: The journalist in an active role However, some articles challenge the discourse suggested by the tweeting politicians very well. For example, in the article about Swedish People’s Party MP Joakim Strand and Green Party MP Emma Kari claiming that the voting system in the parliament was broken during a vote and didn’t register his vote, Kari gets ridiculed for making the same mistake twice. In this case, the tweet works as a punchline, as the journalist has quoted her tweet from the previous autumn where she claims, as she does now, that there must be something wrong with the system. The journalist suggests that Kari tried to mask her own mistake as the system’s fault, labeling it as “an old trick”. The news piece quickly debunks Kari’s claim with information from the parliament’s director of legislative affairs that tells otherwise. Another aspect to consider is the emotionality of Kari’s tweet: she says she’s angry. The journalist does not tap into the emotion, but counters it with rationality, making her a much more active participant in the discourse-forming. In this case, Kari’s tweet is not embedded, which makes her argument less salient visually, too. I would argue that regarding the power struggle, quoting instead of embedding makes the journalist seem to be much more in control and able to influence the discourse; as noted, quoting is not a literal practice, so the journalist can cut and paste the quotes to form a statement that suits her desired discourse.

Another example of a journalist as an active participant is the article about mining legislation. Only one tweet by active tweeter and Green Party MP Ville Niinistö is quoted, the rest of the comments are taken from various expert sources. The tweet is dramatic, claiming that the caretaker government is about to weaken the country’s environmental policy even when they should remain as apolitical as possible in their current status. The other comments except for the one told by the minister for economic affairs are also critical towards the suggested legislation. Niinistö is told to “scold” the government’s decision, which also makes his discourse slightly more emotional. The long article has been filled to the brim with messages from various sources, mostly written as “rational” comments, which makes the article’s discourse quite thorough and deep-delving. Instead of forming the article around the tweet, this article uses the tweet more as flavor and political diversity, which makes it much less powerful in discourse-forming. Again, visually, the tweet is not very salient as it is not embedded, which makes it more on par with other comments coming from politicians. The variety of comments selected in the article, the clearly critical viewpoint towards the 36

legislation and the portrayed rational-emotional dichotomy working against the tweet’s emotional discourse make the journalist here a very active participant who also challenges the tweet, even when they seem to be on the same side regarding the ethics of the legislation.

Hybridity Embedded quotes and tweets are always examples of hybridity in the media system: a tweet gets picked up by a medium (newspaper) from another medium (Twitter), then transferred back to the original medium as a new tweet including a hyperlink to the new medium, often sparking up a conversation on the original medium which now includes the discourse and power-struggle that happened on the article. As argued, there is also interplay between new internet media logics and old internet media logics. Some articles in this analysis are very good examples of hybridity, which also has implications regarding the power use between the journalist-newspaper and the tweeter.

President Sauli Niinistö’s tweet about the fact that foreign and security policies “should be talked about” before the elections was sparked originally by a comment written on IS by experienced political journalist Timo Haapala. In essence, Haapala’s story got picked up at face value by Niinistö, then tweeted with a hyperlink to the comment. 29 minutes later Niinistö tweeted again, sharing the same opinion, this time without a link or mention of the source. IS picked up Niinistö’s tweets and embedded them into a story that contains simply the embedded tweets and a mention about Haapala’s comment. Even though it seems that this medium-to-medium-to-medium transition seems to do nothing to the original comment’s discourse, it has important implications on the power struggle. Haapala is powerful as a journalist in his own right, but when an opinion gets restated by the most powerful person in the country, the discourse changes dramatically: this is most probably also why IS commenced to make another article about the opinion. Now Haapala has managed to use power over the president, a rare occurrence. At the same time, Haapala’s power is conditional, as he would ultimately be powerless if the president decided to counter Haapala’s argument. On the article, the president is portrayed as the one stating the opinion in the headline and in the running text, not Haapala, suggesting that ultimately what matters is that the president tweeted. I would argue this is a fine example of how hybridity influences the power struggle on digital news articles, and also how in the end, the politician does gain the upper hand even when they plainly repeat what the journalist has told before.

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A similar development happens in the article about social democrat leader Antti Rinne and the coalition party: Rinne has first hinted in an interview that a policy change in the upcoming healthcare reform might be possible, and this view has made it into an article on IL. Based on that article, an IL journalist has written an opinion piece, arguing that “the coalition and the social democrats have found each other”. Coalition members picked up on the opinion piece, posting comments on Twitter about how excited they are that the SD has changed their policies, even though no policy change has happened yet. Again, in a hybrid media system, it becomes difficult to understand from the newest articles what has actually happened, and the answer is: not much. A single “maybe” has evolved into several articles on two news platforms and exaggerated excitement on Twitter. In any case, the intertextual chain described by Linell is clearly visible and becomes a part of the discourse (1998: 149-150). This is also a testament on how powerful politicians can be over the media, both as an individual leader of the party and as a collective party. Interesting to note here is the fact that even though the observation of the parties getting closer to each other in policies was made originally by the IL journalist, the headline suggests that it was actually the coalition that came up with it. Another interesting observation regarding hybridity in the power struggle is the fact that the IS journalist decided to not quote Sanni Grahn-Laasonen’s tweet in full, disregarding her speculation about Rinne’s statement “seeming to be a panic reaction by the social democrats”, suggesting that hybridity also influences quotes and statements and affects their discourse.

Another example of hybridity in the power struggle is the article about “the next prime minister” Antti Rinne reacting on Twitter to an advertisement shown the most coveted ad space in the country: the front page of Helsingin Sanomat. The ad suggests that “entrepreneurs”, actually a collection of 16 small-to-medium business owners, are collectively pleading that the voters should not vote for the social democrats because they would be bad for the economy. So, an advert got noticed by Rinne, who tweeted about it promoting unity and rationality in economic matters, and the tweet was picked up by IS which tried to pit Rinne against the “entrepreneurs” using the rational-emotional dichotomy, suggesting that Rinne got emotional and “must have spilled his morning coffee” when he saw the ad. The first page of Helsingin Sanomat gets featured on other news outlets occasionally, so the setting is not exactly new, but the power struggle that happens on the articles and between the mediums is certainly notable. Again, without the comment by a high-powered politician, the advertisement would most probably have gone by without a news story, but the ad-makers managed to tap into the power and status of Rinne, who bit into it, and the story was written

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about the reaction. On the article the journalist tries to use his power to spin the perspective towards “rationality in politics is good, emotional is bad, and Rinne is emotional”, but a deeper look at the messages in the conversation show that there is no emotional reaction here, neither from Rinne nor the “entrepreneurs”.

How messages are told Following Machin and Mayr’s key points, in the analysis I tried to focus on how messages are told to have been said. In Finnish journalism, neutral verbs such as “tells”, “says” and “writes” are undoubtedly the most common way to label quotes, and this seems to ring true with the articles in this analysis, too, as most of the quotes from tweets are labeled as “writes” or “tweets”. When people are written to “scold”, “rejoice” or “claim”, the discourse of the article and the embedded tweet changes considerably, especially considering the grand discourse of journalism in Finland where grey neutrality is the gold standard.

A good example is the article about Left Alliance and opposition MP Paavo Arhinmäki, who “claims” that the other parties in the government got the information about the government’s disbanding via text message from a news service. While “saying” is read as something objective and reliable, “claiming” invites doubt and cynicism to the discourse, and even more so as the verb appears both in the headline and in the beginning of the running text. It also makes the politician appear unreliable, making the journalist here certainly a user of power. It was later revealed from other sources that Arhinmäki’s claim was a fact, but this article was not corrected after, which would have journalistically been the right thing to do, especially in easily modifiable online news. On the other hand, the politician appears powerful, too, as there are no other sources of information here. Considering this, it is interesting to note how a single verb can work as a counter-discourse to the discourse presented by Arhinmäki on Twitter. It has to be noted that the counter-discourse supports the grand discourse of opposition versus the government: if the statement came from a governmental party, the discourse would have been very different, perhaps focusing on why there was a governmental party politician trying to discredit PM Juha Sipilä’s methods.

IL’s article about the disappearance of True Finns leader and MP Jussi Halla-aho’s tells that Halla-aho “was appalled/shocked” when he found out that the debate had disappeared. The description is based on his tweet and is on the very beginning of the article along with the embedded tweet, setting up the discourse, which portrays the situation as something of a shock, at least from Halla-aho’s perspective, suggesting also that this is a shock for

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democracy, too, as the public knows that Yle as a public service institution should be as neutral as possible. The tweet also suggests bias, as Halla-aho tells that all of the other party leaders have their campaign debates available on the streaming service. The rest of the article follows a similar discourse but focuses more on the mistakes of Yle than the feelings of Halla- aho. However, it also closely resembles the discourse provided by Halla-aho about Yle’s biases and does nothing to challenge it.

Another example of a verb affecting the discourse, while politically less inclined towards neither the left nor the right, is the article about president Niinistö “reminding” the public about the handling of foreign and security policies under the upcoming elections. Power-wise, the fact that the highest-powered politician “reminds” everyone else about an issue does portray him as someone who knows better than the politicians, suggesting that they are not doing a good job in their campaigns. While implicit, it discredits the politicians on all sides and suggests that ultimately the president is the one that should be allowed to affect the grand discourse of campaigning. If the tweet was posted by another politician with a lesser status, it probably would have gone sans article, which also suggests that the president does have power over both the media and the other politicians.

Modality This analysis shows that tweets that are embedded or quoted in news articles are not only reactive, but also often signal low modality, which is not often challenged. This means that while politicians tweet about issues that are bothering them, very rarely they signal that they are going to do something about it: sometimes they explicitly state that other politicians should take charge. When challenged, this could be a way for the journalist to influence the power struggle decisively, making the politician appear unable to function in the role the people have put them.

One example of low modality is the article about schoolgoers protesting, arguing directly to the politicians and in front of the parliament building that the politicians are not doing enough to combat climate change in Finland, especially when it comes to concrete actions. The youth get the prime space in the article, and the comments of the politicians have been put further down. Here all of the politicians, even the meat and forestry industry supporting Center party, agree that their message is important. Petteri Orpo and Kai Mykkänen from the Coalition “promise” on Twitter that this will influence their own policies. A group of Center party MPs have tweeted on their party’s Twitter handle that they are listening, along with a punchline:

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“The climate won’t wait!” Even when their messages seem to support the agenda of the protesters, there is a clear line between them: the politicians are not speaking about policy changes or concrete actions. Their message is “something must be done”, signaling that there is nothing they are willing to change right now. The Coalition MPs try to appear willing by “promising” that something will be done, but no one actually says what will be done to combat climate change. This would have been a great opportunity for the journalist to follow up these statements with “how” and “what”, but instead the messages are left unchallenged.

Another example is the article about president Niinistö tweeting that foreign and security policies “should be talked about” before the elections. Even with presidential power he does not specify which issues the candidates should talk about or who should lead the discussion: judging by his tweet, he proposes that it won’t be him who should take charge in the discussion. The low modality goes unchallenged, perhaps because of the difficulty in getting a comment from the president or because the tweet was a reaction to a comment by another IS journalist, which is mostly about the age-old question of should Finland join NATO or not, especially pointing towards the Coalition to bring up the discussion. Either way, the journalist in this article could have made a difference in the power struggle and directed the discourse of the article towards concrete issues if she had even suggested that the tweet had something to do with NATO and questioned the way Niinistö brought up the issue: pointing the finger but saying nothing.

There are some examples of tweets that signal high modality, too: when PM Juha Sipilä tries to persuade other parties to negotiate with him about the future of the healthcare reform, Paavo Arhinmäki in one article replies that this is not plausible in a democracy, and in another article Sanna Marin plainly states that this is not possible. Regarding modality, it shows that both are absolutely not willing to begin a conversation about the reform with him, but instead wish to wait until after the elections to see what the people wish for, also directing the people to head to the election booths. Another interesting tweet is the one from Left Alliance MP Aino-Kaisa Pekonen, who at the same time tweets that “no one is saying anything” about the apparent failure of the healthcare reform and by doing this breaks the silence and brings the issue up. The tweet was only picked up by IS after the reform had failed in the parliament, making her seem very knowledgeable and thus, powerful.

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Tweets as visual discourse-makers Visually, tweets are a powerful tool to influence how the articles are read and how the articles are laid out, keeping in mind the classic structure of a news article. As stated, online news articles can be read in a multitude of ways and directions, with some readers scrolling through the articles quickly to find quotes, some focusing on the photos, some on video, some on the embedded tweets, some skipping the entire article for the comment section on the news website or on social media, some spending minutes on end to read a short article, etc.

Like in online news, in this analysis, too, some tweets are embedded, some are embedded and quoted, some are merely quoted, and some are included in the picture, too. There might have been articles or tweets missed in this analysis because they didn’t include the source of the quote. In terms of visual saliency, it makes all the difference how the tweet is presented. When the tweet is only quoted, it disappears among the other quotes in the article and on the newspaper, working similarly as any other quoted statement. When it’s embedded, it works as visual flavor and an eye-catcher, making the message and the suggested discourse more easily accessed by the reader. From a power perspective this is interesting, too, as one could argue that for a newspaper, the quotes derived directly from an interview with a politician are more important, as they are harder to copy and redistribute by other news outlets. Embedding tweets seems to work against the newspaper, as the quote accessible and embeddable by everyone gets much more visual attention than plain quotes. In comparison, IS embeds tweets much more often than IL, and discourse-wise the articles on IL seem to be much more balanced in power; I would argue that the visual saliency of embedded tweets is a major part of this observation. Another issue to note is the power and influence Twitter gets in the article when tweets are embedded, as every tweet has a logo and a signature style, arguably making the embedded tweets also work as advertisements for the company.

Placement matters. Even when fast-forwarding through a story, the beginning is always seen, so when analyzing the discourses, the elements at the very beginning, such as the headline, the lead paragraph and the main picture should be given more weight. Very rarely in the news article structure the important information is at the end. In the articles in this analysis, the tweets are often featured at the very beginning, making them visually salient and thus, powerful in discourse-forming. Even when the politician was interviewed directly by the journalist, the tweets are often given the prime space in the article, working as a starting point to the story. On the other hand, because of their visual saliency, the tweets embedded in the middle part of the story influence the discourse much more than tweets that are quoted. A 42

tweet that includes a photo is visually much more salient than a tweet without a photo. The length of the tweet also makes a difference, as well as the paragraph count. It’s possible to make a tweet very large visually.

For example, Ville Niinistö’s tweet on IL in the article about mining legislation and Emma Kari’s tweet on the IL article about the voting mishap in the parliament are merely quoted, so the visual space the tweets get is much smaller than if they were embedded, making them much less powerful. In comparison, the article about Paavo Arhinmäki’s claim shows no one else but Arhinmäki, even when the issue does not in essence concern him, but the relationships inside the disbanded government.

Two articles from IS and one from IL featuring Halla-aho’s tweets have the tweet not only embedded into the text, but also pasted onto the main picture. Interestingly, other politicians’ tweets are not pasted onto the pictures in any article; one can only speculate why this space is reserved for one person. All of the three articles are written about different incidents and feature different tweets, so the importance of one tweet is clearly not the reason for this practice. The main commonality between the articles is that they are all about the True Finns party’s maltreatment, and combined together, along with Halla-aho’s face, makes it seem that Halla-aho and his party are constantly the subjects of wrongdoing, playing into the hands of the populist discourse which labels them the underdogs or victims. With articles like this, Halla-aho has been established not only the main spokesperson for the party, but also a victim of constant misunderstanding and mistreatment. With the space given to him in these articles, Halla-aho’s Twitter persona becomes a powerful anti-elite in the articles, making his messages influence the discourse in an all-encompassing way. The most interesting testament to his power over the media is the article about the Blues party getting harassed while campaigning, but instead of them receiving space in the article, it is Halla-aho, who wasn’t even interviewed, getting the only visual space on it via a tweet pasted on the main picture and the same tweet embedded and indirectly quoted. The point of the article was to ask the True Finns if they have been harassed, but because of the visual saliency of the tweet, it instead becomes a one-man show of Halla-aho getting his opinion seen and heard. The other two articles portray two incidents including Yle, one against the True Finns and one against Halla-aho himself as the leader of the party. Visually, though, in both it looks like the most important message in the story is what Halla-aho himself thinks about the incidents: he is bigger than the party, and he can modify the party’s portrayed discourse as he wishes. Another aspect to note is the visual absence of the interviewees of the “other side” of the 43

conflict, making Yle seem much more insignificant than Halla-aho, and also portraying the public broadcaster as a faceless bureaucracy: instead, in one of the articles, Yle is depicted as the famous broadcast tower in Pasila. In another IL article about the Yle versus Halla-aho conflict, Halla-aho’s picture is at the front, and his tweet is again directly quoted and embedded, while the CEO of Yle Merja Ylä-Anttila is only quoted indirectly from Twitter. In all of the four articles Halla-aho definitely gets the upper hand, with much of it coming from his visual presence.

In comparison, the IL article about the controversial new mining legislation has only one picture, a dark photo from a mining operation in a dark tunnel with some kind of mining vehicle inside. The photo does not show any information about the legislation or the act of mining, and it doesn’t personify the controversy to any degree. Also discursively, this article seems to be one rare example of an article about the actual issue and not the discussion surrounding it, and these kinds of visuals support the same discourse. In the article there are comments from various sources with one quoted tweet included, with the minister of economic affairs Mika Lintilä getting the most space, although his interview is placed at the end of the long article. I would argue that if the tweet was embedded instead of quoted, the visual saliency would have made Ville Niinistö’s tweet much more significant and powerful in discourse-forming, as he would have been the only one to get his profile seen in the article. Judging from these examples, I would also argue that embedded tweets are a powerful visual way to personify almost any incident or message. This also implies that a misplaced tweet can distort the power struggle on the articles, meaning that the most important message could be visually buried inside the story, while an embedded tweet in a supporting or counter- discursive role can make it seem much more important visually. In the online news sphere where visual elements and messages are becoming more and more important, the discourses presented in embedded tweets are also becoming more powerful.

How politicians’ messages are challenged In a journalistically sound newsroom, the messages and discourses provided by politicians should always be challenged in some way. As noted, this only happens sporadically. This section focuses on how the messages are challenged and what elements in the articles make up for challenging the discourse that politicians have tweeted out. Thus, I will focus on the articles where challenging does occur.

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In yet another article featuring a tweet by Jussi Halla-aho, it is told that his bicycle was “destroyed” by someone. In his tweet, he tries to flirt with the idea that his bicycle was mangled because of political purposes, stating that “if this was indeed some kind of accident and not a political statement, I ask you to contact me”. Halla-aho’s tweet also brings up a somewhat vigilante point of view to dealing with the incident, as he asks the public to contact him directly if someone has seen what happened instead of dealing with the authorities. Not biting on the low-hanging fruit, the journalist simply writes about where and when the bicycle was when it was destroyed and how the tweeted picture looks like. The writing is in passive form, suggesting that there is no person or group blamed for the deed at this moment. The flirt is not included in the headline nor does the picture point towards it. The journalist has taken a purely technical perspective to the incident against the political flirtation of Halla-aho, working as a counter-discourse. The challenge could have been even more poignant if Halla- aho was asked why he didn’t file a police report, but it would probably have given him more space to message his discourse about the possible political motive.

In the article about mining legislation there is only one tweet here by Ville Niinistö as a supporting tweet, and it is quoted, not embedded. While Niinistö’s tweets portrays an emotional discourse which quite clearly undermines how the caretaker government is handling the new legislation, the discourse of the rest of the article is more rational and thorough, showing a multitude of different perspectives from the opposition, the government and also experts outside of politics along with information and facts about the legislation itself. This makes up for a complete set of opinions, also making up for a rational and thorough discourse. While Niinistö’s tweet is an emotional reaction, the complete article is based on much more than that, which arguably challenges the discourse of the tweet in a very successful manner.

The article about the voting “screw-up” in the parliament also has a supporting tweet which works as a backstory to the incident, as the new incident becomes even more interesting when it is known that this has happened before to the same person, Green MP Emma Kari. The tweet and the other interviews try to convey a discourse of MP’s left powerless against a machine error, the discourse of the article instead focuses on a politically neutral, technical perspective, with interviews from the staff of the parliament. In the interviews, it is made clear that the mishap was not because of the voting system, and the discourse provided from those sources is also technical, as they refer to facts about how the voting system would malfunction very differently if MP’s votes did not register and how the system has been 45

working perfectly just before the voting mishap, pointing towards human error. Here, the emotionality of the tweet, in which Kari bluntly tells she’s angry, is not challenged by a rational perspective, but a purely technical fact, making the claims by Kari and Swedish People’s Party MP Joakim Strand appear even more ridiculous. It could be argued that because the headline here portrays an emotional discourse, the tweet is not challenged, but the rest of the article, along with the neutral pictures showing no emotion, follows the “technical fact” discourse, making the emotionality of the claim seem arbitrary.

The article about future PM Rinne not being interested in a “discussion over the round table” with current PM Juha Sipilä features one tweet from the vice chairperson of the social democrats Sanna Marin, who “speaks out” that “it is clear” that Sipilä cannot be the one taking charge over the discussions about the future of the healthcare reform. The tweet is in a supporting role here, and portrays a discourse that “the people” will in the elections decide which party will take over, signaling that Sipilä is trying to work undemocratically. While both Rinne and Marin appear to be on the same page, Rinne doesn’t question the legitimacy of Sipilä’s proposal, but instead focuses on the parliamentary and protocol-related issues, even hinting that the negotiations might be possible, forming a discourse based more on solidarity. What also challenges the discourse of Marin’s tweet is that Sipilä’s original proposition has been put at the beginning of the article, while the tweet is near the end. Marin is not given the prime space in the article, but other views that support co-operation are.

A wholly different example is the article where Antti Rinne reacts on Twitter to the advertisement made by the “entrepreneurs” on Helsingin Sanomat. Unlike in the previous examples, here the tweet by Rinne is at the very center of the story and the story would not work without it. While Rinne’s tweet conveys a discourse of unity and co-operation, as he invites the makers of the ad to discuss about the future policies of the social democrats. In a rare example, the journalist here uses his power to portray Rinne as someone emotional enough to “spill his morning coffee” because of an ad, which challenges his tweet that does not portray him as an emotional person. The journalist also challenges the tweet by trying to create a head-to-head scenario between the two sides, challenging the co-operational discourse of Rinne. The picture also shows Rinne and the advertisement side by side with Rinne smirking towards the empty space on the photograph, which is filled with the advertisement. This article is also an example of how the journalist can write up a scene not based on anything but speculation, and while it seems to be harmless, it instantly conveys a discourse of rationality versus emotion, making Rinne appear less statesman-like and thus, 46

less powerful. If the entrepreneurs were also portrayed as panicking over the policies of the future prime minister, the discourse would have been much different.

The final example of a successful challenge of a tweet is the article where Green candidate Otso Kivekäs is told to have been threatened with violence while campaigning. In his tweet, Kivekäs disregards the incident by saying that he was a stereotypical “drunk far right MP candidate”, “it was not a very serious threat” and ending with “this (campaigning) has gone mental, really”, making the discourse seem humorous. The article itself shows a much more serious discourse, clearly stating that Kivekäs was threatened with violence, giving more detail about the incident through a quoted interview with Kivekäs and bringing up the Helsinki police with their confirmation that this incident took place. The journalist challenges the dry humour and indifference portrayed by Kivekäs by handling the issue in a serious way, making the discourse much more official.

Who gets to tell the message? Most tweets embedded or quoted in these articles are reactions to something that someone or something, most of the time politicians or parties, said or did, which points towards the reactive nature of Twitter. In few instances new information is given on an embedded tweet, with most of them being an opinion or a counterargument. One major issue derived from the analysis is that sometimes the tweets are treated as new information even when they contain nothing else but an opinion about an issue: journalistically, second-hand information should be avoided as much as possible, and power-wise, the one who gets to tell and interpret the information is raised on a pedestal.

There are some examples of politicians tweeting new information that was made into a news article. In the IS article about green MP candidate Otso Kivekäs getting threatened by a citizen, the incident was first reported by Kivekäs himself via Twitter, along with an opinion telling that “campaigning has going crazy”. The journalist has followed up the tweet with an interview from Kivekäs and the Helsinki police department. With some similar incidents happening before the elections, it would have been easy for politicians to hijack this tweet, remind the audiences about the incident concerning their own party, or turn this into a debate about the state of democracy in Finland, which could have been poignant enough to make it into a news story. Another example is the article about Left Alliance MP Aino-Kaisa Pekonen informing on Twitter about the parliament’s schedule next week which seems to support the fact that the healthcare reform will soon be cancelled in its current state and following that,

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the government will disband. In the same article there’s an embedded tweet from Green MP Touko Aalto that tries to convey the same message, but includes no factual evidence about future developments, which makes his tweet much less powerful than Pekonen’s tweet.

The IL article about the disappearance of Halla-aho’s campaign debate is especially problematic. As stated before, the article is all about Halla-aho, even when there are two sides to the story. This is highlighted by the fact that it is Halla-aho who gets to tell what Yle told him about the incident, even when there are other tweets and interviewees available to quote from directly. For some reason, the chance to explain both the incident and Yle’s defense is given to Halla-aho, which makes him appear even more powerful over the media and on the article. At the very end of the article, Yle’s head of communications finally gets a say in the matter, but he is quoted indirectly and very briefly, and the placement of the quote makes it impossible for the statement to work as a legitimate counter-discourse. Had the journalist placed the explanation, however short, at the beginning of the article, the article would have been much less lopsided in terms of power. One can also argue that on a tabloid newspaper, giving a better space for a competitor in Yle would have also given them more legitimacy as a competitor: in the hybrid media system, the struggle for power is not only between the journalist and the politician, but also between different mediums.

Another example of a reactive tweet which gets its discourse heard over the first statement is the article about Coalition MPs “rejoicing” over the message of future PM Antti Rinne about a different healthcare model. The article informs us that Rinne was originally interviewed by IL. The tweeters of the Coalition party managed to hijack his message and promote their own agenda by interpreting the interview from their perspective, and their perspective is the one that was picked up by IS and made into an article. On the article it is also told that the Social Democrats did not react to the interpretations at all, but no interview from their side was conducted. This means that the discourse portrayed in the article is about how the Coalition party was, after all, the ones who were right all along with their proposed healthcare model. The journalist tries to explain the differences and similarities of the two propositions, but once again, his interpretation is short and at the end of the article, making it arbitrary compared to the rejoicing in the tweets. Interestingly, though, Rinne’s picture is in the article not less than four times, but as he isn’t really quoted about the Coalition’s interpretations, he looks more like a bystander as the Coalition celebrates his demise.

I would argue that the reactive nature of Twitter along with the fast-paced atmosphere of online news make up for a grand discourse where many newsrooms feel the pressure to 48

publish articles such as these, composed mostly of reactions without proper context. This makes up for a setting where reactions are news, and the original message or event gets obscured by interpretations from parties that ultimately try their hardest to promote their own messages and values. Journalistically, the one writing the news should be the one to explain the situation and make their own as-objective-as-possible interpretation, but as the clock ticks, it would be hard to convince the newsroom to wait for a day to interview everyone relevant. On the other hand, it seems that the politicians who manage to message new and interesting information can get their voice heard via Twitter, too.

How people are presented The analysis shows that one effective way of influencing the discourse and the power-related roles is labeling the people represented in the articles in certain ways. If a minister is labeled as a regular MP instead of the full title, it instantly takes credibility from them as a commentator, even when the label is true. As an example, in one article, Green party MP Touko Aalto is referred to with just his name and no party affiliation or MP status. Some politicians receive extra titles, as it is with the example of Coalition MEP candidate Eija-Riitta Korhola, whose history as an MEP and doctorate in environmental policy is brought to light, giving her extra legitimacy as a commentator on environmental policy. Some politicians might be described to be angry when they are not, which shows that they are not the ultrarational beings politicians are expected to be, such as in the article where Antti Rinne is told to have “spilled his morning coffee”. Many of the articles show labels that could be argued to be distorting the discourse, depending on the perspective.

An interesting example is the article about harassment at the Blue Future party’s campaign tents, in which the True Finns get to explain that they haven’t been harassed. At the beginning of the article, the Blue Future party is labeled as a party that detached from the True Finns. This is true. However, the True Finns split into two different parties over two years before the article, so it should be questioned why the True Finns are still kept attached to the Blue Future with labels such as this one. With their common history it is understandable why the two are kept connected with this kind of discourse, but it also keeps them both from forming their own public image as individual parties. Keeping in mind that the Blue Future is much less popular and they ultimately failed to gain a single seat in the parliament, it definitely benefits the True Finns, as they have a solid base of supporters. It could be argued that this kind of labeling and discourse portrayed in the media was vital in keeping them from establishing their own identity as a party. In the article the Blue Future party is visually non-existent and 49

there are no direct quotes from the party, which makes them appear very passive and powerless.

The article about schoolgoers protesting against climate change policy portrays the protesters as “youth” and “schoolgoers”, which, at least from a political-practical perspective, signals that they do not have to be taken as seriously as people who are already able to vote. As seen with Greta Thunberg, youth sends the message that a person isn’t yet able to think critically to the degree of adults, meaning that young people are often seen as dreamers without a practical or realistic grip on issues. Ironically, in this article, it is the youth who demand practical measures to combat climate change, with politicians agreeing to do “something”. The power roles are further enhanced in the discourse by stating that they “want to be taken seriously”: if they were people who were able to vote, they would automatically be taken seriously as voters with power of the vote. In the headline the youth are “pointing out their anger”, which further delegitimizes them as people who should be taken seriously in a rational way. The article would have been wholly different if the protesters were labeled as protesters or even future voters, giving them much more legitimacy as political commentators.

Politicians label each other, too, as is the case with Paavo Arhinmäki, who on Twitter labels PM Juha Sipilä as a “business executive who acts like a business executive”. Sipilä was initially elected to the parliament because of his background high regard in business, which Arhinmäki now frowns upon after Sipilä’s government disbanded. Throughout his tenure as PM, Sipilä was criticized for making decisions without consulting other ministers, which now makes him an easy target. Interestingly, four years after his election success he is blamed for the same exact reason that made him prime minister. What Arhinmäki’s labeling tries to do is portray him as someone who knew better all along and was able to see the demise of the PM before the parliament caught up, making him seem powerful in his wisdom. In this case, the article gives no backstory or comment to the claim, leaving the label and Arhinmäki in charge of describing Sipilä and fitting his qualities into the discourse that he conveys.

RQ2: What roles do the embedded tweets have in the discourse of the news article? The second research question should be studied together with the results of the first research question, as the roles of the tweets in the articles influence the discourse of the articles considerably. From the analysis it seems that when tweets are used as the starting point to the story, the discourse of the tweets affect the discourse of the articles much more than if they 50

are used as supporting tweets or background information. In 10 of the articles there is a tweet in a central role, in 6 there is a tweet in a supporting role, in 2 there is a tweet in a role of adding background information and in one there is a tweet in a counter-discursive role. Relating to RQ1, this also shows that tweets are not often used in digital news articles as challengers themselves, even when it is known that Twitter holds a mass of opinions from all over the political spectrum.

Tweets in a central role I have classified tweets as being in a central role by analyzing if the story would have been written at all if it wasn’t for the tweet. In some articles the tweets are so visually salient that their role becomes central even though they are not essential to the article. It could be argued that there are many more of these kinds of stories where a tweet is central, but wasn’t embedded or quoted, with the journalist opting for an interview instead, but these articles have been left out of this analysis, as it is mainly about embedded and quoted tweets.

For example, in both the story about Jussi Halla-aho’s bike getting mangled and the story about Otso Kivekäs getting threatened with violence the tweets work as a starting point to the story, as they contain the information that ultimately became the piece of news. Without the tweets by the politicians, both incidents would most probably have gone undetected, as no official or reliable information existed before the tweets. In both cases the fact that it was made into a news article is a testament to the power of politicians, and of Twitter: bike- manglings and threats of violence happen in Finland every day, but only the combination of the politician as a subject and Twitter as an information-relayer will result in a news article made this way. If the subjects weren’t powerful at all, there wouldn’t be a story. If the incidents were posted somewhere else than on social media, their reception would have been different, and the path from the incident into a news article would have arguably been more difficult, as the embedding makes it very easy for a journalist to turn a tweet into a news article. In Kivekäs’ case, the article would have been probable even if the incident was messaged somewhere else, as there had been other incidents of politicians getting harassed before during the campaigning.

The most shocking incident was the attack on Blue Future MP and political veteran Timo Soini, which is also featured in the analysis as an article made up mostly of tweets from other politicians condemning the attack. There are a total of six tweets here from six different parties, with all of them speaking against political violence. In this article, the tweets work in

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a rare collaboration of both opinion and discourse, and together they are at the center of the story. Interestingly, if there was only one or two tweets here the tweets would work as supporting the discourse of condemning the attack, but as there is a whole collection of them from all parties, they arguably work as one central collection of tweets, and also as the official opinion of the parliamentary parties. Even the headline works towards this collective condemning and discourse, stating that “politicians” are shocked because of the attack.

Another interesting duo of central tweets are the reactions by Coalition MP and minister of education Sanni Grahn-Laasonen and the party’s secretary Janne Pesonen to an interview from Antti Rinne. Also here the tweets portray a similar discourse, and as the tweets come from the same party, the journalist took the opportunity to label the “rejoicing” in the tweets as the opinion of the party: the headline states that “the Coalition got excited” over Rinne’s interview. While Grahn-Laasonen’s tweet could have worked on its own as a central tweet, the fact that the whole party is labeled to be behind the rejoicing makes is much more poignant: this is not Grahn-Laasonen versus Rinne, but Coalition versus Rinne. Thus, both tweets are required for the portrayed discourse. I would argue that if the tweets were placed separately visually, as they now are placed together in the article, the tweet by the lesser- known Pesonen would have worked as a supporting tweet. This signals that visual placement influences the role of the tweets, too.

I would also argue that the articles about Jussi Halla-aho and Yle having different conflicts could have been written without the tweets, but the visual saliency of those tweets makes them central both in the story and in the discourse. This is rather interesting, as the articles do feature interviews from him, too, but the tweets are still given the prime space in the articles.

Supporting tweets The tweets classified as supporting tweets have much less influence on the discourse of the articles. I have classified tweets as supporting if they are not essential to the story, but instead bring something else to the discourse of the article: for example, a new person supporting the article’s discourse or saying something witty or flamboyant that the journalist could not have written herself, working as “flavor” in the article.

One example of a supporting tweet Petteri Orpo’s tweet in the article about Centre Party MP and minister of health and social services Annika Saarikko “badmouthing” big healthcare companies for trying to take advantage over the failure of the healthcare reform. While the article would have worked without Orpo’s tweet, it gives some extra legitimacy to Saarikko,

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as he supports her view. As Orpo is from the economic right-wing Coalition party, which is notorious for its MPs hopping from the parliament to work for the very same healthcare giants featured in the article, the tweet certainly influences the discourse: it shows that the parliament is more unified in the cause. The role of the tweet is solidified when the journalist does not comment or expand Orpo’s statement in any way, leaving it as it is on Twitter.

An article can contain both central and supportive tweets. In the article about Aino-Kaisa Pekonen’s foreseeing of the healthcare policy failure, Green MP Touko Aalto also gets his tweet embedded. On the surface Aalto’s tweet seems to confirm Pekonen’s view on her tweet, but actually Aalto is tweeting about something more general; in essence, he is arguing that the government will resign “probably soon”, whereas Pekonen is saying that it will resign before next week, and it’s possible it already happened behind the curtains. Nonetheless, it adds to the same discourse about the disbanding of the government happening before it was officially announced. Aalto’s tweet is visually not as salient, either, as it is placed at the end of the article. Sanna Marin’s tweet in the article about Antti Rinne deflecting the propositions by the PM to continue working on the healthcare reform works in the same fashion: she is plainly restating what Rinne already told in the interview. It seems that her tweet was put in the story for visual interest alone.

Counter-discourse Surprisingly, there was only a single article that features a tweet working in the role of counter-discourse: Antti Rinne’s tweet about the advertisement by “the entrepreneurs”. While the story tries to portray that entrepreneurs and the social democrats are in conflict or should be in conflict, Rinne’s tweet promotes collaboration and unity. While the article was written because of Rinne’s tweet, which makes it central to the discourse, it takes up an instant turn towards a conflict, which was for the most part invented by the journalist to make the story more compelling. The tweets handled in the section about the journalist challenging the tweets are also working as counter-discursive to some extent, but Rinne’s tweet in this story is the only one where the tweet is clearly and directly working against all the discursive elements in the rest of the article.

I would argue that this surprising result shows that even though arguing and quarreling is very much a part of the grand discourse of Twitter, it does not directly transfer to digital news articles when tweets are embedded. The conflicts on the articles are most often derived from other sources, and in the case of Rinne, sometimes made up by the journalist.

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Background information Two tweets in the analysis work as background information to the focal point in the articles: Eija-Riitta Korhola’s tweet about her beating cancer and Emma Kari’s tweet about her previous voting mishap in the parliament. Kari’s tweet is put in the background information category because of timing, as it was posted months before the article was conceived. It is important to the story, as the new incident of missing the vote directly relates to the old one. Korhola’s tweet is put in this category because of its unpolitical nature and the fact it journalistically does not have much to do with the rest of the article besides the cancer survivor being the same person as the one running for the European Parliament. The tweet was probably embedded because of the timing and dramatic nature of the tweet, and it does make the politician seem more human than without it. The fact that background information is so rarely used in these articles brings up a question of the temporality of the tweets: are they important at all if they were posted more than two days ago?

Conclusions

The source material for this analysis provided a multitude of different types of digital news articles ranging from simple single-tweet based news pieces about violent incidents to in- depth analyses about legislation. All of them include tweets that are either embedded or quoted and were posted by politicians from differing backgrounds: most of them were in the parliament, some of them were in the opposition, some in the governmental parties and some were not in the parliament at all at the time the article was conceived. The results show that tweets can be used in many different ways, even though most of them were used as commentary to breaking news of the day.

Regarding RQ1, from a critical standpoint the results are somewhat disappointing, as only a third of the articles try to challenge the discourse of the tweets. This is very problematic, as it is known that politicians are using both digital news media and social media to try to influence the public and the grand discourse of the elections. It seems that when politicians have something interesting enough to use in a news story, their messages are recontextualized with much of the same discourse as they are portraying. As Twitter is still not as popular in Finland as for example Facebook or Instagram, and certainly not as popular as the two digital news platforms in this analysis, politicians are often able to tap into the power and influence 54

of those platforms by using an elite discussion medium. This makes both the politicians and Twitter disproportionally influential when compared to their readership.

The analysis shows that journalists are able to challenge the discourses of the politicians’ tweets in many different ways. For example, how the speakers are presented to speak, how their modality is brought to question, what kind of images are featured in the articles and how much space, visually and textually, are given to the politicians. I would argue that the most successful challenges of the tweets happen when the articles portray a more rational discourse with a multitude of sources and differing opinions. As it is with scientific articles, in journalism, too, the more sources and perspectives featured in an article, the less chance of a single discourse overpowering other sources there is. For example, the use of expert political researchers and commentators would have made most articles much less dependent of the tweets. In these articles they were used rarely. Another use of social media, showing the opinions and messages of non-politicians, is also near-non-existent on the articles. This would have also challenged not only their messages, but also their powerful role in being the only ones who can participate in the discussion on the news articles. This also shows that Twitter is being portrayed as an elite medium on the digital news outlets.

In total, 7 of the 18 articles here feature the journalist as a passive participant, which could be argued to be the gold standard in Nordic objectivity. These articles where the journalist does not challenge the discourse of the tweets seem to be neutral on the surface, but ultimately work as a loudspeaker for the politicians, as their messages and discourse are presented as they are to a much wider audience. This is especially problematic during pre-election times, as power to make decisions is shifting. As newspapers are deemed more trustworthy than social media or politicians, it could be argued that this loudspeaker-like action makes the politicians’ tweets more factual and valid, too. Broersma and Graham have also argued that this might be the case (2013: 461). This is something that should be studied more in some form of CDA-influenced audience research.

In 4 of the 18 articles the journalist is not only staying neutral, but amplifying the discourse of the politician’s tweets. The amplification is done in different ways, too, from undermining the legitimacy of the opposing views to completely disregarding the concrete questions made by the public. It could be argued that when the journalist amplifies the discourse, she is trying to critically challenge the opposing view. This, however, disregards the fact that journalists should show their critique towards the original statement in the article instead of plainly agreeing what they have to say. When a politician messages that she is competent for a certain 55

position, the journalist should ask why and write about it openly and critically instead of adding more information that supports her cause and self-portrayal. I would argue that amplification can be justified in some cases, but for it to work properly it should be backed with other, as apolitical as possible perspectives. For example, if a politician tweeted about climate change messaging what is happening and why, the journalist could amplify that message by quoting research or researchers: this would ultimately benefit both the politician and the newspaper.

From this analysis we can see that Twitter is a medium based in reactions, which are often emotional and one-sided in their perspective and portrayed discourse. The analysis shows that the rational-emotional dichotomy is often a key part in the discourse, and much of the successful challenges are made when a politician is tweeting emotionally, but it is countered with something more rational, such as expert opinions or a multitude of other sources which either challenge or counter the emotionality. This kind of challenge also counters the grand discourse of Twitter, in which emotional reactions, humor and wittiness are promoted by both algorithms and users. As noted, both IS and IL in the articles of this analysis have countered it to some extent by not showing the quarreling that happens on Twitter, but instead focusing on individual tweets. I would argue that in general, the embedded and quoted tweets show a quite different picture of Twitter than Twitter itself.

The analysis also shows that hybridity is a key ingredient in the discursive power struggle. When tweets are embedded, they gain different discursive characteristics: power and arguments of a journalist can be legitimized through a presidential tweet, then recontextualized via the original newspaper, bringing the president’s message to an even wider audience and at the same time legitimizing the original argument even more. An advertisement on a newspaper can go mostly undetected if it wasn’t for the “next prime minister” bringing it up, then discussed further on Twitter. A well-timed tweet about a healthcare policy interview on a rival medium can become much more powerful when it gets picked up by another digital news platform. The winners of the struggle for power here might often be the politicians, who get their voices heard and brought to a wider audience, with the Twitter elite picking up the messages more easily because they were featured on a digital news platform. More research is needed, but it seems that because hybridity promotes certain powerful figures and messages, it works towards the benefit of the politicians already in power, amplifying their messages over and over again between media.

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Embedded tweets work as powerful visual discourse-makers. For example, they take up a lot of space in the articles they are embedded in, they allow the pictures and messages of the politicians to be recontextualized in near-full form, they keep the names of the politicians in the middle of the discourse with a larger font-size and they are often featured at the very beginning of the story, which is the prime space for discourse-forming. The articles where Jussi Halla-aho’s tweets are featured multiple times visually are the ones where Halla-aho seems most powerful both as a person and in discourse-forming, and the ones with Paavo Arhinmäki and president Niinistö having two tweets embedded without other people quoted work similarly. Adding to this, the tweets that are plainly quoted and not embedded do not seem to have the same impact on the discourse of the articles, as they are visually much less salient. I would also argue that embedded tweets overpower other quotes simply because of their visual power, which makes the newspaper’s own interviews less powerful in the discourse: embedding tweets works against the newspaper’s possibility to manage their own discourse. There is a clear difference in the power of the politicians on the discourse between IS, who uses embedded tweets much more often, and IL, who quotes instead of embedding more often.

Regarding RQ2, the analysis shows four distinctly different roles for the embedded tweets. Most of them were used in a central role, which makes them also influence the discourse much more than supporting tweets or background information tweets. In some articles a collection of tweets work as a central discourse-maker, making them all central. In all but one article, when a tweet was classified as central, they were also embedded in the article. I would argue that putting tweets in a central role gives them an edge in the power struggle, as the articles are often built around them and their visual saliency is high. I would also argue that the journalist could influence the power struggle much more and have a tighter grip on the discourse by using the tweets as starting points to the articles, but not embedding them on the article itself. By using interviews where the politicians would be able to convey their messages in a less Twitter-influenced way would be beneficial for both the objectivity and the critical perspective of the articles, making for better journalism. Using tweets in a supporting role, quoting instead of embedding and making them visually less salient would even out the discursive power struggle, too.

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Reflections and Further research

When doing preliminary research for this thesis, I found out that research articles that study embedded tweets are few and far between. As Twitter is already 14 years old, the embedding feature has been in existence for most of that and embedded tweets (along with other social media embeddings) are used in the media to a great extent, this is surprising. As social media gains more power and influence every day and it is a part of many people’s everyday lives, this connection between new and old internet media, between social media logics and the logics of traditional media that are still prevalent in digital media and between newspapers and social media giants should be researched much more. Thus, this research opens up a different perspective to the interconnected media landscape that especially focuses on the relationship between social media and digital news outlets, benefiting the entire field of research both methodically and as a short case study.

I have taken a CDA approach to this research to analyze the power struggles and imbalances in the articles that relate to a short but important political period of time. More research should be done from perspectives of the audience, political economy and digital media ethnography. For example, what kind of tweets do the audiences prefer to read on news articles? How does the reading experience change when tweets are read from a digital news article instead of Twitter? How does embedding influence the power struggle between media corporations? How are articles read when there are tweets embedded in it compared to ones that have plain quotes from Twitter? Answering these questions would benefit the understanding of the mechanics and influences of embedding.

Looking back at this research, the results give a good perspective on how much embedded tweets influence the discourse of the articles where they are embedded. The amount of articles to analyze was not massive, which gave me the opportunity to look at them much more deeply: originally I had planned to analyze around 50 articles from a longer timeframe, which would have made the analysis much more shallow, but there probably would have been more interesting connections between the articles and the results could have been categorized better. Then again, with the number of articles here it was possible to dive into the grand discourses of the political climate at the moment, at least for a little bit, which are undeniably important for discourse analysis. The research could have also improved if there was an audience research aspect to it: a preliminary study relating to this one showed that there were

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many similarities between the researchers discourse analysis and the observations made by readers of the articles.

Another downside to this research is the translating of parts of articles: although I have tried my best to include the explanations for words and expressions that are ultimately untranslatable to a different language and cultural context, there will always be a gap of expression when translating from one language to another. Adding to that, I believe it is helpful to analyze articles written in my mother tongue, as the deeper meanings and histories of messages might have gone undetected more easily if I had selected the source material from English language digital news media. As noted before, the theories and previous publications here are also rooted mostly in foreign languages, which do not take into account the special characteristics of the Finnish media system.

Regarding the grand discourses, if there were less articles to analyze even more deeply, the articles could have been better analyzed as a part of a whole media system, atmosphere and grand discourses. This also would have benefited from doing the research in real time, possibly following suitable hashtags on Twitter and other news outlets to form a wider perspective on the events that happened during the pre-election phase. This is arguably a common downside to all CDA research, as it tries to bring up all possible perspectives, grand discourses and themes of the world to a single study, but always comes up short: it is not possible to analyze everything.

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Appendices

Overview of the articles

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Medium Story Discourse of the tweets Discourse of the story RQ1: How does it challenge? RQ2: Role of the tweets IL Koululaiset The three tweets form a discourse where The power imbalance is clear, as the story keeps The discourse of both is very similar. The The tweets of the politicians are not osoittivat the politicians appear to commit to repeating how the youth demand the adults to act, journalist explains the tweets in a similar an essential part of the story, as they suuttumuksensa - “something” as they hold the opinion of but there is uncertainty whether they will. The modality as the tweets are but doesn’t repeat the same message that the tuhansien mielestä the youth in high regard and “listen” to youth are kept at a distance from the adults both challenge the commitment of the politicians interviewed on the spot päättäjät eivät tee what they have to say, but no action is visually, where they are always separated from the politicians, who signal low modality. tell; it seems they were embedded tarpeeksi ilmaston promised. adults, and textually, where they are quoted to and quoted only to diversify the eteen: ”Ihmiset speak in a childlike broken Finnish and always parties represented in the article. ovat maapallon referred to as “youth”, never “demonstrators” or loisia” “people”, signaling their lack of concrete power.

IL ESS: Eija-Riitta The tweet embedded signals merely that The story is written in a way that seems as neutral The tweet's discourse is reflected in the The role of the tweet seems to be to Korhola lähtee despite being a high-powered politician, as possible, but analyzing it more deeply makes it news text, which does not challenge the humanize the politician, but eurovaaleihin MEP Eija-Riitta Korhola is a human appear almost ad-like: she has 15 years of EU tweet, but actually makes it more potent by considering that the tweets fills a being with the same problems as policy experience and she wants to “influence showing additional information that large visual portion of the article, everyone else, with the photo showing “a climate and human rights policies”, which is supports the “human as politician” which is relatively short and mostly celebration” with a very un-celebratory, quoted, in very abstract language, to mean that she discourse and connects it to the political tells about Korhola’s political views, average Joe setting with cardboard coffee would choose economy over the environment, a news discourse. it could be argued that the tweet is cups and a scramble of newspapers. quite extreme view nowadays even in the embedded to make the article appear economic right wing Coalition party, and she has a visually bigger or more important. degree in environmental politics to back her views up.

IL Jussi Halla-aho In his tweet, Halla-aho hints that the Although the perspective of Halla-aho portrayed in The discourse takes a technical rather than The role of the tweet here is central, etsii incident might be politically motivated the article seems unpolitical at first glance, it does political perspective to the incident, even as not much other information polkupyöränsä but leaves it as a possibility and not a tap into the “vigilante” and “anti-institution” when a chance of politicizing this was there regarding the event is shown; the way tuhoajaa: ”Hei, fact. In the article, however, this is not principles of populist parties; Halla-aho does not for the taking. Thus, I will argue that the the article shows the events signals sinä...” explicitly implied, making it hint in his tweet that he has made a police report of article does challenge the tweet, as the that the tweet is not the only considerably more unpolitical. the incident or that he will in the future, but wants discourse of the article is considerably less discourse-maker, but the journalist to take the handling into his own hands, making political than the discourse of the tweet. has taken an active role in it, too. him appear an “average Joe” who trusts “the The challenge could have been even more public”, including the person who did it, to help poignant if it was inquired why Halla-aho him in his need. did not file a police report; this would have given Halla-aho space to show a more political perspective, however.

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Medium Story Discourse of the tweets Discourse of the story RQ1: How does it challenge? RQ2: Role of the tweets IL Hyökkäysyritys As the party leaders are all arguing The headline argues that “The attack on Soini Multimodality-wise this article is an The role of the tweets here is central, Soinin kimppuun similarly and the journalist simply shocks politicians” and while often these kinds of interesting example because of the video as the article is based in these views järkyttää acknowledges this, the discourse of the collective emotions do not exist, here it seems to footage and the lack of embedding; and doesn’t contain much more poliitikkoja - article can be described to promote unity be plausible, as all of the politicians quoted have visually, the video is very salient, and the information, and they also set up ”Demokratiaa and democracy. True Finns leader Jussi the same or very similar message: this is an attack tweets are not, making them less dominant most of the discourse. halveksuville Halla-aho is the only one whose tweet on democracy and violence is never acceptable. in the discourse, as well. This also tahoille laitettava has a political message: Finland should The attacker was wearing insignia from extreme represents the problem of reading, as many stoppi nyt heti” be “kept as it is, without barbwire right wing nationalist group Soldiers of Odin. The readers will probably skim through the fences”, hinting that we shouldn’t accept attacker did not manage to set the discourse, but it article skipping the video completely, but foreign influences which would lead to a was regarded by the politicians and the journalist the ones who watch it will have a different greater divide between groups of people. as something surprising and non-Finnish in its view on the incident. Therefore, I would non-democracy; “political violence” has no place argue that the article does challenge the here. The article includes a video of the attacker discourse of the tweets in the sense that the being captured by two police officers, which in a video is so salient and powerful in its multimodal article that does not contain any partiality. On the other hand, the news text pictures or embedded tweets is very influential in itself does not challenge the discourse, but discourse-making; it is the only non-textual visual leans into the views portrayed by the element. The video is somewhat dramatic, as it politicians. shows the physicality of the aftermath. It’s also commentated by the man who shot the footage in a way that condemns him harshly, saying that "this is a humiliation that he'll never forget" and that his "raging is useless", among other things. This helps to make the attacker seem very disempowered, making the humiliation of the attacker a part of the discourse. IL Yle: Tämän takia Halla-aho’s tweets immediately The tension here is between the public To summarize, the discourse of this article The role of the tweet here is not as Halla-ahon perpetrate Yle as the one who removed broadcasting company and Halla-aho, a faceless is dominated by Halla-aho’s presence, and central as it appears, as the article vaalitentti poistui the debate, letting his emotions show as bureaucracy and a politician whose face appears even though the journalist tries to make Yle could have very well been written Areenasta he “can’t believe his eyes” when he on the article three times. The order of presentation seem less active in the disappearance of the with only the information that the notices the absence of his debate while matters: Halla-aho gets his voice heard and his program, it is debatable if two passive verbs program has disappeared; this is how all the other party leaders’ debates are face seen multiple times before Yle gets a say in actually make much of a difference as IS, for example, published the same still visible. Halla-aho’s tweet is very the incident, even though the headline proposes Halla-aho’s words are pasted on the article news. Thus, the role seems to be to prominent on the article, as it is on the that the mystery of what happened to the debate on three different occasions. Thus, the personify the incident and give it picture next to his face, as a quote and as will be solved. Power-wise, simply the giving of article does try to challenge the discourse of more “flavor” in terms of emotions an embedded tweet. space to Halla-aho makes him appear very Halla-aho’s tweets, but ultimately the and visual saliency. powerful. The journalist does his best to avoid amount of space given to the politician starting the blame game to a slightly comic degree, makes it seem arbitrary. as in the headline it’s told that the debate “left” the streaming service, as if it has walked out the door by itself. 66

Medium Story Discourse of the tweets Discourse of the story RQ1: How does it challenge? RQ2: Role of the tweets IL Jussi Halla-aho The discourse of the embedded tweet is Another article about the disappearance of Halla- The journalist does nothing to answer the The role of the embedded tweet is hämmästelee Ylen very, very similar to the discourse of the aho’s campaign debate. Here Halla-aho is even questions proposed by Halla-aho, making important as the starter of the muuttuvia article, and the role of the journalist as an more dominant, which is best described by the fact the reader ultimately responsible for conversation and discourse, but selityksiä interpreter or a user of power is non- that he gets to make interpretations of Yle’s coming up with a “true” explanation for the ultimately the tweet is not that vaalitentin existent. actions with almost no counterarguments from the strange incident. Another example of bias, necessary here as the politician gets katoamisesta: public broadcaster. For example, he is quoted the tweet of Halla-aho, which was his voice heard without it, too; here it ”Mielenkiintoinen about the explanations of Yle, but the actual embedded and quoted in the other article, as works to give the story a proper sattuma” explanations are not on the article. He gets to well, is present here, but the apology of introduction about the event, speak on behalf a public institution with which he Yle’s CEO Merja Ylä-Anttila is only however biased the introduction is known to be on bad terms with. Halla-aho is mentioned, but not quoted or embedded. journalistically is. given most of the space on the article and he uses The discourse could thus be described as it well by arguing that the incident is “an “ambiguous”, “conspiratorial” and “pro- interesting coincidence”, meaning that it could Halla-aho”. very well not be a coincidence at all, he explicitly says that their explanation doesn’t look like a technical error as Yle has told, and he also raises ambiguity as he tells that he “doesn’t have the means to evaluate the issue”. This is a good example of low modality.

IL Kiisteltyyn There is only one tweet here, by the The article portrays the new legislation as mostly Although the perspective of the government The role of the tweet on the article is kaivoslakiin viime prolific tweeter and Green Party MP negative, with opinions from opposition only appears well into the article, it is there, not very big, as it is bunched up with hetken muutos, Ville Niinistö, who argues that it is politicians, scholars and leaders of environmental and it is portrayed thoroughly. Niinistö is other opinions by opposition vaikka hallitus “strange that even during a caretaker organizations. Almost everyone is portrayed to be told to “scold” the decision, which seems to politicians: a press release from the kaatui: government these parties can't not against foreign mining companies getting the be accurate as a description. Thus, I would Left Alliance and a speech in the Kaivosfirmat weaken environmental protection". upper hand against Finnish ones; although it is told argue that the discourse of the article does parliamentary plenary session from saavat nyt Niinistö’s tweet portrays the situation at the end of the article by the Minister for challenge the tweet by being much more the True Finns. It is not embedded, helpommin much more dramatically than the article, Economic Affairs Mika Lintilä that Finnish thorough and rational (in terms of either, only quoted, which makes it etuoikeuden and there is no background information companies that could open a mine don’t actually delivering facts to the reader) than the visually much less salient and thus lupaan or fact to support his points. exist. The tension here comes from the fact that the tweet, which is much more based on an less effective in the forming of the government had just folded and thus shouldn’t be emotional reaction. Both seem to suggest, discourse. The tweet seems to be here able to make such political decisions; and the fact however, that there is something wrong mostly for flavor and political that there has been talk about the "first come first about the way the decision was handled. diversity, but not for diversity of serve" policy for mining companies both Finnish opinion. and foreign in Finland, which has caused alarm from environmentalists and economics. The discourse is also about controversy, as the latest controversial decision comes on top of an already controversial legislation, which could make the environmental impacts of mining companies more severe. 67

Medium Story Discourse of the tweets Discourse of the story RQ1: How does it challenge? RQ2: Role of the tweets IL RKP:n Green Party MP Emma Kari tells that she The article is about an incident where Joakim As the response by the staff and the The role of the tweet here is to kansanedustajalla “screwed up” because she didn’t double Strand from the Swedish People’s Party “snapped” chairperson are unpolitical, they are given provide historical information and a meni kuppi nurin - check the vote, and in the previous because of an important vote in the parliament plenty of space and they give absolutely no background story, which signals why vaati puhemiestä incident, which is referred to in a tweet went the wrong way by a margin of a single vote. possibility for a machine error, the this incident was significant. korjaamaan by Kari from a few months before, she Green Party MP Emma Kari argues that she voted discourse of the article makes the Vaasan laajaa tells that she’s “angry”. Kari’s tweet but her vote didn’t register. This is the second time politicians’ attempt to overturn the vote päivystystä regarding the older incident is very this has happened to Kari, but both times the seem arbitrary. Interestingly, other than the koskevan emotional, which is reflected in the employees of the parliament have confirmed that descriptions by the journalist, there is no äänestystuloksen discourse of the story. there was nothing wrong with the voting system. evidence of Strand acting emotionally jälkikäteen The discourse of the story can thus be described to during the incident. I would argue that the be about “man versus machine” and the futility of article does challenge the discourse of the the attempt by the politicians to overturn the vote. tweet quoted here, as it reflects the The humanity is enhanced by the fact that Strand’s emotionality of it, but at the same time reaction is described as emotional: he “snapped” makes it look almost ridiculous as all of the and “didn’t put up with the result, while his party claims of is are debunked. had “fiercely promoted” the issue.

IS Aino-Kaisa Left Alliance MP Aino-Kaisa Pekonen’s The discourse of the story is focused on While Pekonen did not say “I told you so” The government’s resignation was Pekonen huomasi tweet speculates on the government’s temporality and the dynamics of telling and not or anything similar, the story makes it seem periodically spoken about ever since erikoisen sote- resignation and provides a fact about the telling, an “I told you so”, which would have been that she does, not only agreeing with what the election, so the timing of the yksityiskohdan jo parliament’s schedule next week which easily disregarded completely had the government she wants to say but actually making her tweets, especially Aalto’s, is the main torstaina: ”Kukaan seems to support that it will be not resigned. The journalist has chosen facts that and her statements appear more competent reason for it to get embedded on the ei sano disbanded. Pekonen’s tweet is supported support Pekonen’s speculation, such as mentioning (in the eyes of the public) than she would article. The role of Pekonen’s tweet eduskunnassa by another tweet from Green Party MP that it was announced “publicly” on Friday that the be judging from the tweet alone; thus, is to be the main conversation-starter, mitään ääneen” Touko Aalto, which on the surface seems government will resign; this signals that it already portraying a very similar discourse as on which is supported and amplified by to confirm her view, but actually Aalto is happened before, but it was not told about. the tweets, but more convincingly. the discourse of the rest of the article. tweeting about something more general; Aalto’s tweet is portrayed to support in essence, he is arguing that the her speculation. government will resign “soon, probably”, whereas Pekonen is saying that it will resign before next week, and it’s possible it already happened behind the curtains.

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Medium Story Discourse of the tweets Discourse of the story RQ1: How does it challenge? RQ2: Role of the tweets IS Paavo Arhinmäki Another article made on the basis of a The headline suggests that Arhinmäki's proposal is By using the verb “claim”, the journalist The role of the first tweet is to be the väittää: Sipilän single tweet: Left Alliance MP Paavo taken with a grain of salt; the verb "claim" is a does challenge the information by the center of the discourse, which is hallituskumppanit Arhinmäki suggests on Twitter that the metapropositional expressive verb, which invites politician, making him seem unreliable. reflected in all of the supporting saivat tiedon governmental colleagues of PM Sipilä doubt and uncertainty to the claim (Machin and However, when Arhinmäki claims that elements in the story, including the erosta got the information of the government’s Mayr 2012: 61). As it is with headlines, it sets the Sipilä is bad at governing, it goes video. The second tweet, also by tekstiviestillä resignation via text message from a tone for the discourse, too, signaling that he is not unchallenged; the unchecked fact is Arhinmäki, is a supporting one, Finnish news service. a reliable commentator. The claim was confirmed challenged, but a political opinion is not. In which does not bring new by governmental party politicians, but on this this case, both the tweets and the unreliable information to the story. story, it was left as a “claim”. The claim suggests information (and also the unreliability of that Sipilä wasn't honest enough to announce the the information) signals that the discourse resignation internally before dealing with it of Arhinmäki, however unreliable as the externally, and supports Arhinmäki's later tweet source of the information, speaking about where he says that Sipilä works "not like a Sipilä is true, and the discourse of the story politician, but a CEO" as the PM. It also signals is very similar. that there were hidden conflicts inside the government which are not spoken of.

IS Rinne ei lämpene There is one tweet embedded from the This article is an interesting example on how a The politicians here are treated differently, Following this, discourse-wise this Sipilän vice chairperson of the SD party Sanna journalist can use her power; without the article as with Rinne’s quotes and Marin’s quote article can be regarded as ehdotukselle soten Marin, who supports Rinne and quite a connector, there is no “head to head” situation, being regarded as opinion or opinionated, “confrontational” and “pro- ”pyöreän pöydän decisively argues that Sipilä has no future but only a statement from Sipilä asking all of the but Sipilä’s quote as neutral or fact. The government”. The tweet embedded keskusteluista” – as the leader of the reform negotiations. other parties to collaborate with him in the discourse of Marin’s tweet is also here is not essential to the story, but ”Käydään vaalit ja healthcare reform. As Rinne is the probable prime confrontational, but is written from the is likely to have been put there to sen jälkeen minister due to the SD’s being in clear lead in the point of view of “the people” and provide visual interest and flavor. selviää, kuka polls, he is also the first person who should be seemingly with their interest, which is most johtaa asked about collaboration, and he takes a stance probably the leadership of the SD party, in valmistelua” that makes it possible to create a conflict on the mind, whereas the article is more about a article, making the journalist seem implicitly quite political power struggle; this means that the powerful. article’s discourse does challenge the discourse of the tweet, though the tweet has a non-essential role in the article.

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Medium Story Discourse of the tweets Discourse of the story RQ1: How does it challenge? RQ2: Role of the tweets IS Ministeri Saarikko The embedded tweet on the article is The dramatic headline sets up the discourse: The journalist uses her power to put the As a supporting tweet from a slightly haukkui from the economic right-wing Coalition Saarikko "badmouthed the healthcare giants – ‘I actors in the story head to head and further surprising perspective, Orpo’s tweet terveysjätit – Party’s leader Petteri Orpo, who argues: would like to call this dancing on graves’”. Annika the conflict with her interpretation but does give Saarikko's statement more ”Tekisi mieli "The law that limits healthcare Saarikko states this with not one but two burial doesn’t reveal her own opinion. Discourse- credibility, and also sends a message sanoa haudoilla outsourcing must absolutely be kept in metaphors, signaling both that the reform has been wise the tweet is more rational than the about the unity of Finnish economic tanssimiseksi” force until the entire country has a dealt with once and for all, and it should remain story, which is written in an emotion-driven right-wing parties about the matter, sustainable policy for the future. The untouched; the nation is mourning now. Death is a manner, but both are absolute in their who arguably should be the ones health companies must now restrain their powerful metaphor, combining both hyperbole (in proposed solutions. The story does not supporting the interests of private sayings." Coming from the economical this case, as the reform will surely be reanimated exactly challenge the tweet (nor the press companies. right wing, the extremity of this in the future) and personification (Machin and release of Saarikko), but the mood of the statement is surprising. Both "absolutely" Mayr 2012: 170-171). Putting "badmouth" in the discourse is certainly different on the tweet. and "must" signal that there is no room headline immediately creates a conflict in the for negotiation. The Coalition party has story. The verb can be classified as a also received critique in the recent past metapropositional expressive, meaning that it for having many politicians jump into marks the journalist's interpretation of the speaker working for the healthcare companies on (Machin and Mayr 2012: 60); in this case, the way the fly, so the tweet has some extended of speaking is interpreted as hostile and accusing. implications, too.

IS Sinisten The tweet by Jussi Halla-aho, which is This article describes the conversation and The journalist goes to great lengths to The role of the tweet in the article is vaalipäällikkö embedded both in the text and the picture viewpoints of the True Finns party and the Blue create a conflict between first the parties central: it takes up a lot of visual valittaa jatkuvasta of the article, seems to condemn the Future party, which split from the True Finns 1,5 and then the parties and the “extreme space, as the leader of the party it häiriköinnistä – incident, too, but without sympathy for years before, after the well-known populist of the commentators”, using his power to modify becomes the official perspective of Perussuomalaiset Soini; they have been political rivals ever Blues Timo Soini was attacked while campaigning the discourse, but ultimately no one plays the True Finns, and there is no quote kiistävät uhkailun: since Halla-aho emerged as an for the upcoming election. The Blues did not along. The article is full of ambiguity, from for example Timo Soini or ”Joitakin immigration-critiquing populist. The manage to shake off their reputation as an offshoot starting from the confusion of “which party someone else in a similar position in kirjoituksia tweet can be read in another way, too, as of the True Finns in their short-lived existence, is which”, trying to portray a conflict where politics. verkossa on” he argues that “Finland is an exceptional which shows on this article, too, as the True Finns there is none and even flirting with country” and “let’s keep Finland like this get the most of the space in the article even when conspiracy theories, which from a in the future” clearly distinguishes they absolutely condemn the incident and detach journalistic perspective should have been Finland from “others”, who are a threat themselves from the pro-attack comments. The backed up with heavy facts, not only to the peaceful political climate here. discourse of the article is based on the incident as a anonymous Twitter comments. Thus, the conflict, but when the journalist tries to use his journalist does try to challenge the fairly power to put the parties head to head, the parties amicable tweet of Halla-aho, but the do not play along at all. opposing views offered are not on par to challenge it.

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Medium Story Discourse of the tweets Discourse of the story RQ1: How does it challenge? RQ2: Role of the tweets IS Rinne väläytti Coalition members picked up on an The coalition tweets are the main element of the Power-wise this article is interesting, as the The role of the tweets on this article suurten opinion piece on IL, posting comments story, even when the tweets are heavily original interpretation was actually is central, as they are both the starting kaupunkien omia on Twitter about how excited they are interpreted. The journalist does explicitly say that suggested first by the IL journalist, meaning point of the story, but they are also sotealueita – that the SD has “changed their policies”, they are “interpreting” Rinne’s interview answer, that while the IS journalist doesn’t really put right into the headline and the Kokoomus which is at this point exaggeration. but as the viewpoints and emotions by the argue against or challenge the coalition beginning of the article, making them riemastui: politicians are not countered with a contrasting members, the one forming the discourse the one forming the discourse. ”Kappas! Sdp view, they seem factual. At the end of the article, was a journalist, but from a rival vaihtoi lennosta there is a mention that “SD has not responded to newspaper. One element of the story where kokoomuksen the coalition interpretations in any way”. This is an the IS journalist does use her power is when linjoille” example of placement in discourse, as if this non- she does not quote the coalition’s Sanni statement would have been at the start of the story Grahn-Laasonen’s tweet in full, ignoring next to the “rejoicing” coalition member tweets, the part where she argues that “this looks the discourse would have been much different. like a panic reaction by the social Even in the photos the parties are made to look democrats”. visually close to each other, supporting Coalition’s interpretations.

IS Presidentti In the tweets, president Sauli Niinistö An important feature of the discourse is the way an The article does not challenge the discourse The role of Niinistö’s tweets here is Niinistö muistutti proposes that the foreign and security opinion circulates, this time without modifications portrayed by Niinistö on Twitter; Niinistö central, but they are interestingly also vaalien alla policies of the country “should be talked or additional information, which would have been has even put the hyperlink of the opinion supporting a perspective that unohdetusta about more”, directly agreeing with what easily conjured by embedding more tweets by piece to his tweet, doing exactly the same originally came from IS, making their aiheesta: ”Olisi journalist Timo Haapala wrote before on leading politicians. Another important piece of the as IS does in the follow-up article. All of role self-congratulatory, too. hyvä keskustella, his opinion piece. discourse is how meta it is: there is no mentioning this promotes hybridity as a discourse in the mitä linjaa kukin of the nature of the foreign and security policies on same manner. Both articles also focus on tavoittelee” the article, as the tweets and the article focus on the meta discussion about the policies, the discussion about it; only arguing that while not taking any responsibility to start “something should be talked about”. Modality- the conversation, making the discourses wise this shows low modality, as no one seems to strikingly similar. be willing to start the conversation, but many fingers are pointed towards the campaigning politicians.

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Medium Story Discourse of the tweets Discourse of the story RQ1: How does it challenge? RQ2: Role of the tweets IS Rinne reagoi The discourses of the article and the The article portrays two opposing forces, the Power-wise the article shows the The role of the tweet in this article is yrittäjien tweet are quite different here: in his “entrepreneurs” and the “union man” Rinne, who “entrepreneurs” as a force, which is for the the starting point for the article, but mainokseen tweet, Rinne proposes to collaborate and is also in this article told to be “the next prime most part because Rinne reacted to their after Rinne’s initial tweet, the Hesarissa – discuss about the issues the entrepreneurs minister”. The image shows Rinne smirking in argument with a tweet. It also shows that discourse goes to another direction ”Tervetuloa find problematic in a peaceful way that towards the advert. The text argues that his this particular ad space can amplify a completely, leaving his tweet alone keskustelemaan promotes unity, albeit worded in a "morning coffee must have spilled this morning simple political message to a broad as a vague counter-discourse and Sdp:n campaign-like style. when he was reading Helsingin Sanomat" and audience, a testament to the power of the highlighting the fact that he is a tulevaisuuslinjasta argues that Rinne’s mood must have been bad after medium. As Rinne tries to convey a subject in the power struggle. !” reading the ad; there is no evidence on the tweet or message of peace and unity and the article otherwise to back up these moods. Thus, the article tries to counter that with conflict and tries to portray Rinne as an emotional person, and emotion spilling over the edges, this article emotion shows in the words of the ad, too, as parts tries to challenge the discourse of the tweet of it are quoted at the end of the article; it tries to using the advert’s point of view. show a setting of emotion versus rationality, as well. The rational ones are the “entrepreneurs”.

IS Vihreiden Green MP Otso Kivekäs’s tweets show a Compared to the other article about the The article does not try to deal with power Again, the tweet works as a starting kansanedustajaehd much less serious stance on the incident disturbances at True Finns and Blue Future other than portraying that the far-right point to the story, but as the facts okasta uhkailtiin than the interview by IS: The wording of campaign tents, here the discourse focuses much candidate is something not to be taken have been verified by the police and väkivallalla "this has gone mental" and "(seriously)" more on what happened and who did this rather seriously, and the tweets of Kivekäs form a Kivekäs has been interviewed by IS, Helsingissä signals that there is a dry-humorous side than political speculation. The headline presents similar discourse. While Kivekäs goes as too, its role is to work as “flavor” to this, perhaps because the threat was a the attacked politician as a “green party far as hinting that the attacker is the joke by with colorful expressions that could stereotypical "drunk far right" slob. I parliamentary candidate”, signaling that he doesn’t saying “this has gone mental, really”, the not be as easily said in an article would argue that the grand discourse of have enough reputation to make the headlines with newspaper’s discourse is more official. about crime, but also supporting the Twitter has influenced the way Kivekäs his name. The journalist presents the events in a Thus, the newspaper does challenge the discourse formed by the article. portrays this threat, as from a neutral neutral fashion; the only value-related statements tone and discourse of the tweet. standpoint there is not much to make fun are ones by both IS and Kivekäs where the attacker of if someone threats someone else's life; is described as a “drunk” and a “troublemaker”, on Twitter this sort of poignant rhetoric signaling that even though this was a threat on his would be appreciated. life, it wasn’t that serious.

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Medium Story Discourse of the tweets Discourse of the story RQ1: How does it challenge? RQ2: Role of the tweets IS Miksi Ylen It seems that the article was written In the beginning of the article Yle is portrayed as The discourse suggested by Halla-aho in his The role of the tweet here is central ruotsinkielinen because of party leader Halla-aho’s an institute that simply didn’t allow a replacement tweet is picked up at face value by the to the discourse and the making of vaalitentti käytiin tweet, where he argues that “the for the party leader, even though other parties’ journalist and even though the the article, but in the finished article ilman replacement representative wasn’t replacements were allowed; later in the article the counterargument is in the article, it is it is not essential, as the discourse is perussuomalaisia? welcome” and that “the same rule didn’t producer of the show explains why this happened, portrayed with doubt included; the made clear in other ways, too. Osapuolet apply to the Coalition party”, which is but the journalist uses his power to not connect the journalist does not challenge the discourse vastaavat: quite simply a lie; the producer of the dots at all, leaving the party in the role of a victim but amplifies it. ”Perussuomalaiste show confirms that they needed a higher- of elitism and possibly misinterpretation, as in the n ilmoitus kuulosti ranking politician from the party to take headline it is hinted that Yle might have lopulliselta” part in the debate. accidentally accepted that the party would provide no representative. Even though Yle’s campaign debate could be regarded as a neutral medium for the parties, here they are pitted against the True Finns party using one of the classic populist rhetoric tools, anti-elitism, on two levels: first, the “elitist” Yle wouldn’t accept a candidate of the “people’s party”, making the party a victim of elitism, exactly the position where they have so far thrived in. Second, and much more under the surface, the proposed representative is in a completely different political position than the other party representatives who took part in the debate, signaling that the proposed candidate was not “elite enough” to take part.

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The full analysis of the articles

IL: Koululaiset osoittivat suuttumuksensa - tuhansien mielestä päättäjät eivät tee tarpeeksi ilmaston eteen: ”Ihmiset ovat maapallon loisia”

The story is about the “thousands of youth” demonstrating in Helsinki, told from the perspective of adults. The power imbalance is clear, as the story keeps repeating how the youth demand the adults to act, but there is uncertainty whether they will. The youth are kept at a distance from the adults both visually, where they are always separated from the adults, and textually, where they are quoted to speak in a childlike broken Finnish and always referred to as “youth”, never “demonstrators” or “people”, signaling their lack of concrete power. One look at the comment section of the article tells that many adults disregard the youth just because of their age, and even when the politicians “promise” to do something about this, they are actually not committing to any concrete actions. The “youth” are told to be “angry” and “serious” from the headline onwards, and the quotes from them signal the same, making their concern more emotional than rational, something that usually doesn’t resonate well in rationality-driven Finnish political discourse. Clearly, the “youth” here are “them” and “adults” are “us”, who are listening but not committing. The youth get plenty of space in the story to spread their message, but their delivery is childlike and not interpreted by the journalist. Besides giving more space and the first turn to speak to the youth, the journalist does nothing to level the power imbalance between the politicians and the demonstrators.

The tweets of the politicians are not an essential part of the story, as they repeat the same message that the politicians interviewed on the spot tell; it seems they were embedded and quoted only to diversify the parties represented in the article (RQ2). Nevertheless, the three tweets form a very similar discourse as the story, as the politicians appear to commit to “something” as they hold the opinion of the youth in high regard and “listen” to what they have to say, but no action is promised. The journalist explains the tweets in a similar modality as the tweets are, but doesn’t challenge the commitment, either (RQ1).

IL: ESS: Eija-Riitta Korhola lähtee eurovaaleihin

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The story is about Coalition Party member Eija-Riitta Korhola announcing that she will run for the EU Parliament. The story is written in a way that seems as neutral as possible, but analyzing it more deeply makes it appear almost ad-like: she has 15 years of EU policy experience and she wants to “influence climate and human rights policies”, which is quoted, in very abstract language, to mean that she would choose economy over the environment, a quite extreme view nowadays even in the economic right wing Coalition party, and she has a degree in environmental politics to back her views up. The journalist has decided to bring up her political views and her qualifications sans critique (for example, what has she been doing for the last five years remains a mystery), signaling that she would be fit for the parliament. Especially the controversial environmental view being left unchallenged should be alarming. According to the photos she is “normal, but presentable” and she has a “human side”, meaning that she’s had breast cancer for the last two years, but it’s now in recession.

The tweet embedded signals merely that she is a human being with the same problems as everyone else, with the photo showing “a celebration” with a very un-celebratory, average Joe setting with cardboard coffee cups and a scramble of newspapers. This is reflected in the news text, which does not challenge the tweet, but actually makes it more potent by showing additional information that supports the “human as politician” discourse and connects it to the political news discourse (RQ1). The role of the tweet seems to be similar, but considering that the tweets fills a large visual portion of the article, which is relatively short and mostly tells about Korhola’s political views, it could be argued that the tweet is embedded to make the article appear visually bigger or more important. The tweet by itself seems unpolitical, but the fact that the tweeter is a politician and the tweet is embedded on a story about running for parliament makes it political, and signals the classic populist rhetoric of being normal and extraordinary at the same time (Schoor 2017: 661), as well as pointing towards the personalization of politics in general (Enli and Skogerbø 2013: 759).

IS: Aino-Kaisa Pekonen huomasi erikoisen sote-yksityiskohdan jo torstaina: ”Kukaan ei sano eduskunnassa mitään ääneen”

The story is based on a tweet by Left Alliance MP Aino-Kaisa Pekonen published on the previous day the government resigned. The tweet speculates on the resignation and provides a 75

fact about the parliament’s schedule next week which seems to support the fact that it will be disbanded. Pekonen’s tweet is supported by another tweet from Green Party MP Touko Aalto, which on the surface seems to confirm her view, but actually Aalto is tweeting about something more general; in essence, he is arguing that the government will resign “probably soon”, whereas Pekonen is saying that it will resign before next week, and it’s possible it already happened behind the curtains.

The discourse of the story is focused on temporality and the dynamics of telling and not telling, an “I told you so”, which would have been easily disregarded completely had the government not resigned. While Pekonen did not say “I told you so” or anything similar, the story makes it seem that she does, not only agreeing with what she wants to say but actually making her and her statements appear more competent (in the eyes of the public) than she would be judging from the tweet alone; thus, portraying a very similar discourse as on the tweets, but more convincingly (RQ1). Pekonen’s tweet is quoted multiple times in the story, but not actually interpreted. Aalto’s tweet is plainly quoted, too, but the context makes it more significant than it actually was; it seems that many politicians knew about it before it happened. The journalist has chosen facts that support Pekonen’s speculation, such as mentioning that it was announced “publicly” on Friday that the government will resign; this signals that it already happened before, but it was not told about. Putting this into larger context, the government’s resignation was periodically spoken about ever since the election, so the timing of the tweets, especially Aalto’s, is the main reason for it to get embedded on the article. The role of Pekonen’s tweet is to be the main conversation-starter, which is supported and amplified by the discourse of the rest of the article (RQ2). Aalto’s tweet is portrayed to support her speculation (RQ2).

IS: Paavo Arhinmäki väittää: Sipilän hallituskumppanit saivat tiedon erosta tekstiviestillä

Another article made on the basis of a single tweet: Left Alliance MP Paavo Arhinmäki suggests on Twitter that the governmental colleagues of PM Sipilä got the information of the government’s resignation via text message from a Finnish news service. The headline suggests that Arhinmäki's proposal is taken with a grain of salt; the verb "claim" is a metapropositional expressive verb, which invites doubt and uncertainty to the claim (Machin and Mayr 2012: 61). As it is with headlines, it sets the tone for the discourse, too, signaling

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that he is not a reliable commentator. The claim itself was quoted in many different outlets and stories throughout the day, and was also confirmed by governmental party politicians, but on this story it was left as a “claim”. The claim suggests that Sipilä wasn't honest enough to announce the resignation internally before dealing with it externally, and supports Arhinmäki's later tweet where he says that Sipilä works "not like a politician, but a CEO" as the PM. It also signals that there were hidden conflicts inside the government which are not spoken of.

By using the verb “claim”, the journalist does challenge the information by the politician, making him seem unreliable. However, when Arhinmäki claims that Sipilä is bad at governing, it goes unchallenged; the unchecked fact is challenged, but a political opinion is not. In this case, both the tweets and the unreliable information (and also the unreliability of the information) signals that the discourse of Arhinmäki, however unreliable as the source of the information, speaking about Sipilä is true, and the discourse of the story is very similar (RQ1). This is supported by the fact that no one else is quoted on the article, even though it would have been simple to dig a statement from him that would explain more about his way of governance. Power-wise it is concerning that an unchecked fact makes the story, and the story ultimately amplifies Arhinmäki’s political statements. The role of the first tweet is to be the center of the discourse, which is reflected in all of the supporting elements in the story, including the video (RQ2). The second tweet is again a supporting one, which does not bring new information to the story (RQ2). Visually, it is interesting that tweets written by a single politician take up so much of the space on the article, also signaling how much power over the media Arhinmäki has (and Twitter as a competing medium has, too) as a prolific and highly opinionated tweeter-politician.

IS: Rinne ei lämpene Sipilän ehdotukselle soten ”pyöreän pöydän keskusteluista” – ”Käydään vaalit ja sen jälkeen selviää, kuka johtaa valmistelua”

The story brings the future (and at the time of publishing, very probable) prime minister Antti Rinne head to head with the current, resigned prime minister Juha Sipilä. There is one tweet embedded from the vice chairperson of the SD party Sanna Marin, who supports Rinne and quite decisively argues that Sipilä has no future as the leader of the reform negotiations. This article is an interesting example on how a journalist can use her power; without the article as a

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connector, there is no “head to head” situation, but only a statement from Sipilä asking all of the other parties to collaborate with him in the healthcare reform. As Rinne is the probable prime minister due to the SD’s being in clear lead in the polls, he is also the first person who should be asked about collaboration, and he takes a stance that makes it possible to create a conflict on the article, making the journalist seem implicitly quite powerful. The politicians here are treated differently, with Rinne’s quotes and Marin’s quote being regarded as opinion or opinionated, but Sipilä’s quote as neutral or fact. Interesting here is also the way Sipilä’s quote about the “dire future of the provinces because of the reform’s failure” is disconnected from the information that contradicts this; the additional information is buried somewhere between two huge visual masses, a photo of Rinne and the tweet by Marin. Sipilä is portrayed as a man who offers collaboration, and Rinne as a man who confidently refuses, as he knows how the polls are right now. Temporally this article come at a time when the “tables have turned” and Sipilä no longer has an iron grip over the parliament. The article deals with the past, the present and the future.

Following this, discourse-wise this article can be regarded as “confrontational” and “pro- government”. The tweet embedded here is not essential to the story, but is likely to have been put there to provide visual interest (RQ2). The discourse of Marin’s tweet is also confrontational, but is written from the point of view of “the people” (Marin refers to the people selecting the next parliament soon) and seemingly with their interest, which is most probably the leadership of the SD party, in mind, whereas the article is more about a political power struggle; this means that the article’s discourse does challenge the discourse of the tweet (RQ1), though the tweet has a non-essential role in the article.

IS: Ministeri Saarikko haukkui terveysjätit – ”Tekisi mieli sanoa haudoilla tanssimiseksi”

In the aftermath of the failure of the healthcare reform, three healthcare “giants” published a statement saying that they should have more room for outsourcing, to which the Minister of Family Affairs and Social Services Annika Saarikko strongly disagrees. The dramatic headline sets up the discourse: Saarikko "badmouthed the healthcare giants – ‘I would like to call this dancing on graves’”. Saarikko states this with not one but two burial metaphors, signaling both that the reform has been dealt with once and for all, and it should remain untouched as a sign of respect for the people involved; the nation is mourning now. Death is a

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powerful metaphor, combining both hyperbole (in this case, as the reform will surely be reanimated in the future) and personification (Machin and Mayr 2012: 170-171). Putting "badmouth" in the headline immediately creates a conflict in the story. The verb can be classified as a metapropositional expressive, meaning that it marks the journalist's interpretation of the speaker (Machin and Mayr 2012: 60); in this case, the way of speaking is interpreted as hostile and accusing. The quote featured in the headline is trying to suggest that saying that the companies are "dancing on the grave of the reform" would be too much, so Saarikko signals that she isn't actually saying it, but instead suggesting that "it could be said". Thus, she is not committing to what she says, signaling low modality on an extreme statement. The beginning of the story continues the discourse in a similar way, with Saarikko defending the position of the municipalities, “the people”, against “giant companies”, using two out of the three populist major components of populist political communication: the centrality of ordinary people and antielitism, but the third, popular sovereignty, is notably disregarded, instead highlighting trust in governance (Schmuck and Hameleers 2019: 1534). In the end of the article, Saarikko is said to distance her politics from the leftist opposition, as she argues that the failure of the healthcare reform was the opposition’s fault, and it has led to this economic right wing proposition from private companies.

The embedded tweet on the article is from the economic right wing Coalition Party’s leader Petteri Orpo, who argues: "The law that limits healthcare outsourcing must absolutely be kept in force until the entire country has a sustainable policy for the future. The health companies must now restrain their sayings." Coming from the economical right wing, the extremity of this statement is surprising. Both "absolutely" and "must" signal that there is no room for negotiation. The Coalition party has also received critique in the recent past for having many politicians jump into working for the healthcare companies on the fly, so the tweet has some extended implications, too. Both Saarikko and Orpo are definite about the statement, but Saarikko gives it a more emotional twist, whereas Orpo's argument is based more on his person and the trust in his opinion and his party's status; "this is how I think and it is final". The journalist uses her power to put the actors in the story head to head and further the conflict with her interpretation but doesn’t reveal her own opinion. Discourse-wise the tweet is more rational than the story, which is written in an emotion-driven manner, but both are absolute in their proposed solutions. The story does not exactly challenge the tweet (nor the press release of Saarikko), but the mood of the discourse is certainly different on the tweet (RQ1). As a supporting tweet from a slightly surprising perspective, Orpo’s tweet does give

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Saarikko's statement more credibility, and also sends a message about the unity of Finnish economic right-wing parties about the matter, who arguably should be the ones supporting the interests of private companies (RQ2).

IS: Sinisten vaalipäällikkö valittaa jatkuvasta häiriköinnistä – Perussuomalaiset kiistävät uhkailun: ”Joitakin kirjoituksia verkossa on”

This article describes the conversation and viewpoints of the True Finns party and the Blue Future party, which split from the True Finns 1,5 years before, after the well-known populist of the Blues Timo Soini was attacked while campaigning for the upcoming election. The Blues did not manage to shake off their reputation as an offshoot of the True Finns in their short-lived existence, which shows on this article, too, as the True Finns get the most of the space in the article even when they absolutely condemn the incident and detach themselves from the pro-attack comments. The discourse of the article is based on the incident as a conflict, but when the journalist tries to use his power to put the parties head to head, the parties do not play along at all. The True Finns campaign managers tell IS that there has been no heckling and the Blues campaign manager tells that there has been heckling but doesn’t blame anyone. The tweet by True Finns leader and popular populist Jussi Halla-aho, which is embedded both in the text and the picture of the article, seems to condemn the incident, too, but without sympathy for Soini; they have been political rivals ever since Halla-aho emerged as an immigration-critiquing populist. The tweet can be read in another way, too, as he argues that “Finland is an exceptional country” and “let’s keep Finland like this in the future” clearly distinguishes Finland from “others”, who are a threat to the peaceful political climate here. When the parties agree, the journalist brings out “Twitter comments” that argue that “Soini got what he asked for and “it’s understandable that someone got fed up with him”, trying to show that people who are pro-attack actually exist. This is undermined by the fact that they are not embedded or even quoted with their Twitter handles. The article also flirts with “conspiracy”, as the True Finns are quoted to say that “it’s peculiar that the election tents of the two parties are so close in so many places” and later that “True Finns candidate Arto Luukkainen [sic] hints that the attack was a deliberate trick”, making the discourse even more ambiguous.

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The journalist goes to great lengths to create a conflict between first the parties and then the parties and the “extreme commentators”, using his power to modify the discourse, but ultimately no one plays along. The article is full of ambiguity, starting from the confusion of “which party is which”, trying to portray a conflict where there is none and even flirting with conspiracy theories, which from a journalistic perspective should have been backed up with heavy facts, not only anonymous Twitter comments. Thus, the journalist does try to challenge the fairly amicable tweet of Halla-aho, but the opposing views offered are not on par to challenge it (RQ1). The role of the tweet in the article is central: it takes up a lot of visual space, as the leader of the party it becomes the official perspective of the True Finns, and there is no quote from for example Timo Soini or someone else in a similar position in politics (RQ2).

IS: Rinne väläytti suurten kaupunkien omia sotealueita – Kokoomus riemastui: ”Kappas! Sdp vaihtoi lennosta kokoomuksen linjoille”

The article portrays a situation where the coalition party is “getting excited” because the social democratic party, which is leading the polls, has suggested that a change might be possible in their proposed healthcare reform model towards the model proposed by the coalition. From the perspective of hybridity, this is a very interesting article, as it is here so prevalent that it becomes part of the discourse: SD leader Antti Rinne has first hinted that the policy change might be possible in an interview, and this view has made it into an article on IL. Based on that article, an IL journalist has written an opinion piece, arguing that “the coalition and the social democrats have found each other”. Coalition members picked up on the opinion piece, posting comments on Twitter about how excited they are that the SD has changed their policies, which is at this point exaggeration. From these tweets IS made their own article, which put the coalition tweets into the headline, making it seem even more that the policy change is a fact. Tracing the story back it almost sounds like a game of broken telephone, making the intertextual chain described by Linell clearly visible and part of the discourse (1998: 149-150). As said, the coalition tweets are the main element of the story, even when the tweets are heavily interpreted. The journalist does explicitly say that they are “interpreting” Rinne’s interview answer, but as the viewpoints and emotions by the politicians are not countered with a contrasting view, they are made to seem very factual. At the end of

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the article, there is a mention that “SD has not responded to the coalition interpretations in any way”. This is another example of placement matters, as if this non-statement would have been at the start of the story next to the “rejoicing” coalition member tweets, the discourse would have been much different. Even in the photos the parties are made to look visually close to each other, supporting the exchange of interpretations in the article.

Power-wise this article is interesting as well, as the original interpretation was actually suggested first by the IL journalist, meaning that while the IS journalist doesn’t really argue against or challenge the coalition members (RQ1), the one forming the discourse was a journalist, but from a rival newspaper. One element of the story where the IS journalist does use her power is when she does not quote the coalition’s Sanni Grahn-Laasonen’s tweet in full, ignoring the part where she argues that “this looks like a panic reaction by the social democrats”. The role of the tweets on this article is central, as they are both the starting point of the story, but they are also put right into the headline and the beginning of the article, making them the one forming the discourse (RQ2).

IS: Presidentti Niinistö muistutti vaalien alla unohdetusta aiheesta: ”Olisi hyvä keskustella, mitä linjaa kukin tavoittelee”

Another example of the intertextual chain of the politics-media-social media triangle: Finland’s president Sauli Niinistö tweeted in agreement with an opinion piece written by IS journalist Timo Haapala, who is a prolific political commentator, and Niinistö’s tweets are made into a story. In the tweets, Niinistö proposes that the foreign and security policies of the country “should be talked about more”, directly agreeing with what Timo Haapala before wrote on his opinion piece. As Haapala is the original discourse-maker here, the fact that the journalist on the article does not challenge the president’s tweets seems reasonable. Again, an important feature of the discourse is the way the opinion circulates, this time without modifications or additional information, which, according to a very quick glimpse of Twitter, would have been easily conjured by embedding more tweets by leading politicians. Another important piece of the discourse is how meta it is: there is no mentioning of the nature of the foreign and security policies on the article, as the tweets and the article focus on the discussion about it; only arguing that “something should be talked about”. Modality-wise this shows low modality, as no one seems to be willing to start the conversation, but many fingers

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are pointed towards the campaigning politicians. Visually the tweets take up a lot of space, and not much additional information is given outside of a link to the opinion piece and the mention that the president does have legal authority over foreign and security policies.

Thus, the article does not challenge the discourse portrayed by Niinistö on Twitter; Niinistö has even put the hyperlink of the opinion piece to his tweet, doing exactly the same as IS does in the follow-up article. All of this promotes hybridity as a discourse in the same manner. Both articles also focus on the meta discussion about the policies, while not taking any responsibility to start the conversation, making the discourses strikingly similar (RQ1). The role of Niinistö’s tweets here is again central, but they are interestingly also supporting a perspective that originally came from IS, making their role self-congratulatory, too (RQ2).

IS: Rinne reagoi yrittäjien mainokseen Hesarissa – ”Tervetuloa keskustelemaan Sdp:n tulevaisuuslinjasta!”

The article is about SD leader Antti Rinne ”reacting” to a pro-entrepreneurship ad that was purchased by “entrepreneurs”, later explained to be 16 CEO’s of Finnish companies, on the most coveted ad space in the country, the front page of Helsingin Sanomat. The article portrays two opposing forces, the “entrepreneurs” and the “union man” Rinne, who is also in this article told to be “the next prime minister”. The discourses of the article and the tweet are quite different here: in his tweet, Rinne proposes to collaborate and discuss about the issues the entrepreneurs find problematic in a peaceful way that promotes unity, albeit worded in a campaign-like style. The article, however, shows Rinne smirking in the photo towards the advert, argues that his "morning coffee must have spilled this morning when he was reading Helsingin Sanomat" and argues that Rinne’s mood must have been bad after reading the ad; there is no evidence on the tweet or otherwise to back up these moods. Thus, the article tries to portray Rinne as an emotional person, and emotion shows in the words of the ad, too, as parts of it are quoted at the end of the article; it tries to show a setting of emotion versus rationality, as well. The rational ones are the “entrepreneurs”, who are actually a miniscule portion of entrepreneurs in Finland, and the ad is not signed by the union of entrepreneurs, either, although it was later supported by them in other articles. The article doesn’t show what the social democrats’ actual policies on entrepreneurship are, telling only that they “want to raise their taxes”, whereas the advert’s arguments are explained more thoroughly.

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Power-wise the article shows the “entrepreneurs” as a force, which is for the most part because Rinne reacted to their argument with a tweet. It also shows that this particular ad space can amplify a simple political message to a broad audience, a testament to the power of the medium. As Rinne tries to convey a message of peace and unity and the article tries to counter that with conflict and emotion spilling over the edges, this article tries to challenge the discourse of the politician using the original advert’s point of view (RQ1). The role of the tweet in this article is the starting point for the article, but after Rinne’s initial tweet, the discourse goes to another direction completely, leaving his tweet alone as a vague counter discourse and highlighting the fact that he is a subject in the power struggle (RQ2).

IS: Vihreiden kansanedustajaehdokasta uhkailtiin väkivallalla Helsingissä

Among the articles this one is somewhat different, as it focuses more on the incident where a green party politician was threatened rather than the political implications of the incident. Compared to the other article about the disturbances at True Finns and Blue Future campaign tents, here the discourse focuses much more on what happened and who did this rather than political speculation. The headline presents the attacked politician as a “green party parliamentary candidate”, signaling that he doesn’t have enough reputation to make the headlines with his name. The journalist presents the events in a neutral fashion; the only value-related statements are ones by both IS and Kivekäs where the attacker is described as a “drunk” and a “troublemaker”, signaling that even though this was a threat on his life, it wasn’t that serious. Interestingly, though, Kivekäs’s tweets show a much less serious stance on the incident than the interview by IS: The wording of "this has gone mental" and "(seriously)" signals that there is a dry-humorous side to this, perhaps because the threat was a stereotypical "drunk far right" slob. I would argue that the grand discourse of Twitter has influenced the way Kivekäs portrays this threat, as from a neutral standpoint there is not much to make fun of if someone threats someone else's life; on Twitter this sort of poignant rhetoric would be appreciated much more than on some other medium, such as a serious interview in a newspaper, and this article works as an example of that, too. At the end of the article it is told that the incident was verified by the police, which makes the discourse even more politically neutral; in Finland the police is very much a neutral informant, and the article is worded in this way, too. It is also told that there have been three other incidents similar to this in the

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campaign season, but the journalist does not use his power to exaggerate this into a “phenomenon” or a “series” of incidents, which would have been easy to do. Similarly, the original tweet of Kivekäs would have been prime headline quote material, but the journalist has decided to tell a dry story instead.

The article does not try to deal with power other than portraying that the far-right candidate is something not to be taken seriously, and the tweets of Kivekäs form a similar discourse. While Kivekäs goes as far as hinting that the attacker is the joke by saying “this has gone mental, really”, the newspaper’s discourse is more official. Thus, the newspaper does challenge the tone of the tweet, but not the actual incident (RQ1). Again, the tweet works as a starting point to the story, but as the facts have been verified by the police and Kivekäs has been interviewed by IS, too, it’s role is to work as “flavor” with colorful expressions that could not be as easily said in an article about crime, but also supporting the discourse formed by the article (RQ2).

IS: Miksi Ylen ruotsinkielinen vaalitentti käytiin ilman perussuomalaisia? Osapuolet vastaavat: ”Perussuomalaisten ilmoitus kuulosti lopulliselta”

The article deals with an incident where the True Finns were “left out” of a Swedish-speaking campaign debate some days before election day as the public broadcasting company Yle “wouldn’t accept the replacement representative of the party”. In the beginning of the article Yle is portrayed as an institute that simply didn’t allow a replacement for the party leader, even though other parties’ replacements were allowed; later in the article the producer of the show explains why this happened, but the journalist uses his power to not connect the dots at all, leaving the party in the role of a victim of elitism and possibly misinterpretation, as in the headline it is hinted that Yle might have accidentally accepted that the party would provide no representative. Even though Yle’s campaign debate could be regarded as a neutral medium for the parties, here they are pitted against the True Finns party using one of the classic populist rhetoric tools, anti-elitism, on two levels: first, the “elitist” Yle wouldn’t accept a candidate of the “people’s party”, making the party a victim of elitism, exactly the position where they have so far thrived in. Second, and much more under the surface, the proposed representative is in a completely different political position than the other party representatives who took part in the debate, signaling that the proposed candidate was not “elite enough” to take part. It

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seems that the article was written because of party leader Halla-aho’s tweet, where he argues that “the replacement representative wasn’t welcome” and that “the same rule didn’t apply to the Coalition party”, which is quite simply a lie; the producer of the show confirms that they needed a higher-ranking politician from the party to take part in the debate.

The discourse of the article plays with the position of the victim and the elite, with the victim’s views taking up most of the space (even the producer of the debate quotes the email of the True Finns; third-party quotes like this are simply bad journalism). The counterargument by the producer is not interpreted in any way other than through the eyes of the True Finns, making it seem irrational, even though from a power perspective a representative who has never been in the parliament would be a clear underdog in the debate. The discourse suggested by Halla-aho in his tweet is picked up at face value by the journalist and even though the counterargument is in the article, it is portrayed with doubt included; the journalist does not challenge the discourse, but amplifies it (RQ1). The role of the tweet here is central to the discourse and the making of the article, but in the finished article it is not essential, as the discourse is made clear in other ways, too (RQ2).

IL: Jussi Halla-aho etsii polkupyöränsä tuhoajaa: ”Hei, sinä...”

The article is about the bicycle of the True Finns leader Jussi Halla-aho being “destroyed” by someone, and about Halla-aho looking for information on who did it. Although the perspective of Halla-aho portrayed in the article seems unpolitical at first glance, it does tap into the “vigilante” and “anti-institution” principles of populist parties; Halla-aho does not hint in his tweet that he has made a police report of the incident or that he will in the future, but wants to take the handling into his own hands, making him appear an “average Joe” who trusts “the public”, including the person who did it, to help him in his need. In his tweet, Halla-aho hints that the incident might be politically motivated but leaves it as a possibility and not a fact. In the article, however, this is not explicitly implied, making it considerably more unpolitical. The discourse of the article is similar to the “Green Party MP threatened with violence” article, as it takes a technical rather than political perspective to the incident, even when a chance of politicizing this was there for the taking. Thus, I will argue that the article does challenge the tweet, as the discourse of the article is considerably less political than the discourse of the tweet (RQ1). The challenge could have been more poignant if it was

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inquired why Halla-aho did not file a police report; this would have given Halla-aho space to show a more political perspective, however. The role of the tweet here is central, as not much other information regarding the event is shown; the way the article shows the events signals that the tweet is not the only discourse-maker, but the journalist has taken an active role in it, too (RQ2).

IL: Hyökkäysyritys Soinin kimppuun järkyttää poliitikkoja - ”Demokratiaa halveksuville tahoille laitettava stoppi nyt heti”

Another article dealing with the attempted attack on foreign minister Timo Soini while campaigning, this is considerably different from the other one, as it presents quotes from across the whole political spectrum, not just from the right-wing populists. The headline argues that “The attack on Soini shocks politicians” and while often these kinds of collective emotions do not exist, here it seems to be plausible, as all of the politicians quoted have the same or very similar message: this is an attack on democracy and violence is never acceptable. True Finns leader Jussi Halla-aho is the only one whose tweet has a political message: Finland should be “kept as it is, without barbwire fences”, hinting that we shouldn’t accept foreign influences which would lead to a greater divide between groups of people. This is the only nationalist view on the article, which is interesting as the attacker was wearing insignia from extreme right wing nationalist group Soldiers of Odin: the attacker did not manage to set the discourse, but it was regarded by the politicians and the journalist as something surprising and non-Finnish in its non-democracy; “political violence” has no place here. The article includes a video of the attacker being captured by two police officers, which in a multimodal article that does not contain any pictures or embedded tweets is very influential in discourse-making; it is the only non-textual visual element. The video is somewhat dramatic, as it shows the physicality of the aftermath. It’s also commentated by the man who shot the footage in a way that condemns him harshly, saying that "this is a humiliation that he'll never forget" and that his "raging is useless", among other things. This helps to make the attacker seem very disempowered, making the humiliation of the attacker a part of the discourse. An interesting side note is that in this article, the ministers are explicitly regarded as ministers of the caretaker government, which signals that they are not as powerful

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as before; this is a good example of how a journalist can use her power to disempower politicians.

As the party leaders are all arguing similarly and the journalist simply acknowledges this, the discourse of the article can be described to promote unity and democracy. The journalist also legitimizes the views by showing “neutral information” from the police, who confirms the incident. Multimodality-wise this article is an interesting example because of the video footage and the lack of embedding; visually, the video is very salient, and the tweets are not, making them less dominant in the discourse, as well. This also represents the problem of reading, as many readers will probably skim through the article skipping the video completely, but the ones who watch it will have a different view on the incident. Therefore, I would argue that the article does challenge the discourse of the tweets in the sense that the video is so salient and powerful in its partiality (RQ1). On the other hand, the news text itself does not challenge the discourse, but leans into the views portrayed by the politicians (RQ1). The role of the tweets here is central, as the article is based in these views and doesn’t contain much more information, and they also set up most of the discourse (RQ2).

IL: Yle: Tämän takia Halla-ahon vaalitentti poistui Areenasta

The article tells about the disappearance of Jussi Halla-aho’s campaign debate from the on- demand video service of the public broadcaster Yle. The absence of the debate was noted by the party leader himself and he promptly pointed this out on Twitter, causing yet another conflict between Yle and the True Finns in the weeks before the election. Halla-aho’s tweet is very prominent on the article, as it is on the picture next to his face, as a quote and as an embedded tweet. The tension here is between the public broadcasting company and Halla- aho, a faceless bureaucracy and a politician whose face appears on the article three times. The order of presentation matters: Halla-aho gets his voice heard and his face seen multiple times before Yle gets a say in the incident, even though the headline proposes that the mystery of what happened to the debate will be solved. Power-wise, simply the giving of space to Halla- aho makes him appear very powerful. The journalist does his best to avoid starting the blame game to a slightly comic degree, as in the headline it’s told that the debate “left” the streaming service, as if it has walked out the door by itself. This is in sharp contrast to what Halla-aho tweets, immediately perpetrating Yle as the one who removed the debate, letting his emotions

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show as he “can’t believe his eyes” when he notices the absence of his debate while all the other party leaders’ debates are still visible. Yle’s representative appears with only a name and a title, explaining the incident in technical terms, but ultimately revealing that Halla-aho’s outcry has made them put returning the debate on the top of their priority list, signaling how much power Halla-aho and the media have over the public broadcaster, but also making it appear less bureaucratic. As Yle and the True Finns have been in conflict before, the grand discourse automatically makes the discourse of this article conflictious.

To summarize, the discourse of this article is dominated by Halla-aho’s presence, and even though the journalist tries to make Yle seem less active in the disappearance of the program, it is debatable if two passive verbs actually make much of a difference as Halla-aho’s words are pasted on the article on three different occasions. Thus, the article does try to challenge the discourse of Halla-aho’s tweets, but ultimately the amount of space given to the politician makes it seem arbitrary (RQ1). The role of the tweet here is not as central as it appears, as the article could have very well been written with only the information that the program has disappeared; this is how IS, for example, published the same news. Thus, the role seems to be to personify the incident and give it more “flavor” in terms of emotions and visual saliency (RQ2).

IL: Jussi Halla-aho hämmästelee Ylen muuttuvia selityksiä vaalitentin katoamisesta: ”Mielenkiintoinen sattuma”

Another article about the disappearance of Halla-aho’s campaign debate. In this article, Halla- aho is interviewed about the incident. Here Halla-aho is even more dominant, which is best described by the fact that he gets to make interpretations of Yle’s actions with almost no counterarguments from the public broadcaster. For example, he is quoted about the explanations of Yle, but the actual explanations are not on the article. From a journalistic perspective, this is an absolute blunder, and it makes the discourse very biased, as a single individual gets to speak on behalf a public institution with which he is known to be on bad terms with. Halla-aho is given most of the space on the article and he uses it well by arguing that the incident is “an interesting coincidence”, meaning that it could very well not be a coincidence at all, he explicitly says that their explanation doesn’t look like a technical error as Yle has told, and he also raises ambiguity as he tells that he “doesn’t have the means to

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evaluate the issue”. This is a good example of low modality, as Halla-aho raises questions about the credibility of Yle and their explanations, but also takes no responsibility by saying that he is not capable of answering them; the journalist does nothing to answer them either, making the reader ultimately responsible for coming up with a “true” explanation for the strange incident. Another example of biasedness, the tweet of Halla-aho, which was embedded and quoted in the other article, as well, is present here, but the apology of Yle’s CEO Merja Ylä-Anttila is only mentioned, but not quoted or embedded. The discourse could thus be described as “ambiguous”, “conspiratorial” and “pro-Halla-aho”.

Power-wise this article is all about Halla-aho, as the journalist makes no interpretations or counter-discourse, and Yle is barely given space at all. The discourse of the embedded tweet is very, very similar to the discourse of the article, and the role of the journalist as an interpreter or power-user is non-existent. Therefore, the discourse of the tweet by the politician goes unchallenged (RQ1). The role of the embedded tweet is important as the starter of the conversation and discourse, but ultimately the tweet is not that necessary here as the politician gets his voice heard without it, too; here it works to give the story a proper introduction about the event, however biased the introduction journalistically is (RQ2).

IL: Kiisteltyyn kaivoslakiin viime hetken muutos, vaikka hallitus kaatui: Kaivosfirmat saavat nyt helpommin etuoikeuden lupaan

The article is about a “controversial” new mining legislation which seems to work out better for foreign mining companies as the permit process is more straightforward. The article portrays the new legislation as mostly negative, with opinions coming from opposition politicians, scholars and leaders of environmental organizations. Even the governmental parties are portrayed to be against foreign mining companies getting the upper hand against Finnish ones; although it is told at the end of the article by the Minister for Economic Affairs Mika Lintilä that Finnish companies that could open a mine don’t actually exist. This is one of the few articles that are not about the discussion, but the actual issue. The tension here comes from the fact that the government had just folded and thus shouldn’t be able to make such political decisions; and the fact that there has been talk about the "first come first serve" policy for mining companies both Finnish and foreign in Finland, which has caused alarm from both environmentalists and economics. The discourse is mostly about controversy, as the

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latest controversial decision comes on top of an already controversial legislation, which could make the environmental impacts of mining companies more severe than they are now; although, there is no agreement from the experts if this is true or not.

There is only one tweet here by the prolific tweeter and Green Party MP Ville Niinistö, who argues that it is “strange that even during a caretaker government these parties can't not weaken environmental protection". Niinistö’s tweet portrays the situation much more dramatic as the article, and there is no background information or fact to support his points. Although the perspective of the government only appears well into the article, it is there, and it is portrayed thoroughly. Niinistö is told to “scold” the decision, which seems to be accurate as a description. Thus, I would argue that the discourse of the article does challenge the tweet by being much more thorough and rational (in terms of delivering facts to the reader) than the tweet, which is much more based on an emotional reaction (RQ1). Both seem to suggest, however, that there is something wrong about the way the decision was handled. The role of the tweet on the article is not very big, as it is bunched up with other opinions by opposition politicians: a press release from the Left Alliance and a speech in the parliamentary plenary session from the True Finns. It is not embedded, either, only quoted, which makes it visually much less salient and thus less effective in the forming of the discourse. The tweet seems to be here mostly for flavor and political diversity, but not for diversity of opinion (RQ2).

IL: RKP:n kansanedustajalla meni kuppi nurin - vaati puhemiestä korjaamaan Vaasan laajaa päivystystä koskevan äänestystuloksen jälkikäteen

The article is about an incident where Joakim Strand from the Swedish People’s Party “snapped” because of an important vote in the parliament went the wrong way by a margin of a single vote; subsequently, Strand officially asked for the vote to be reversed, which was greeted with a calm refusal by the chairperson of the parliament. Green Party MP Emma Kari argues in the story that she voted but her vote didn’t register at all. This is the second time this has happened to Kari, but both times the non-political employees of the parliament have confirmed that there was nothing wrong with the voting system and it was most likely caused by a human error. The discourse of the story can thus be described to be about “man versus machine” and the futility of the attempt by the politicians to overturn the vote. This is enhanced by the fact that Strand’s reaction is described as emotional: he “snapped” and

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“didn’t put up with the result, while his party had “fiercely promoted” the issue. Kari also tells that she “screwed up” because she didn’t double check the vote, and in the previous incident, which is referred to in a tweet by Kari from a few months before, she tells that she’s “angry”. The machine obviously doesn’t have an opinion, and the people supporting the bureaucracy of the parliament, including the staff and the chairperson of the parliament, have calm and rational responses which sternly argue that there cannot be issues like this with the voting machine, nor can the parliamentary proceedings be changed to suit the overturning of the vote.

As the response by the staff and the chairperson are unpolitical, they are given plenty of space and they give absolutely no possibility for a machine error, the discourse of the article makes the politicians’ attempt to overturn the vote seem arbitrary. Interestingly, other than the descriptions by the journalist, there is no evidence of Strand acting emotionally during the incident. Kari’s tweet regarding the older incident is very emotional, though, which is reflected in the discourse of the story. I would argue that the article does challenge the discourse of the tweet quoted here, as it reflects the emotionality of it, but at the same time makes it look almost ridiculous as all of the claims of is are debunked (RQ1). The role of the tweet here is to provide historical information and a background story, which signals why this incident was significant (RQ2).

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