Live Text Coverage of Political Events : Combining Content and Corpus-based Discourse Analysis

Live text (LT) has emerged as a web-native CMC alternative to traditional forms of live broadcasting. Through a combined content and corpus-based discourse analysis of the LT coverage of a major political event (the 2020 US presidential debates), the present study tests (i) how current LTs emphasize transparency and accountability, and (ii) how they are a form of journalistic communication that normalizes professional norms of objectivity in hybrid media settings. Political LT emerges as multi-layered and multi-authored discourse that places strong emphasis on accountability and disclosure transparency by updating and linking information, while maintaining the journalistic gatekeeping/gatewatching function. Linguistically, it is characterized by an informal tone but also by a continuation of traditional news media practices as regards objectivity, as instantiated by the salience of debate topics and political terms and – unlike the more widely studied sports LT – by a clear delineation of information from opinion and contextualization.