Choosing Sources Out Of Digital Landscape: The Criteria Of Legitimacy And Of Authority Used By Journalists In The “Black-out” Media Event Construction In Belgium

This paper analyzes the selection and hierarchy process used by journalists in their interactions with communication officers of Belgian nuclear electricity producers and of Belgian anti-nuclear organizations in order to cover the threat of an electricity “black-out” in the Winters 2016, 2017 and 2018 in Belgium. This “black-out” threat was linked to a possible lack of electricity due to incidents in several of the 7 Belgian nuclear reactors. Using interviews with journalists and communication professionals of pro- and anti-nuclear organizations about the black-out, our study aimed at 1/ describing the digital tools that journalists use to interact and retrieve information from their pro- and anti-nuclear sources (Twitter, blog post, youtube video…), 2/ identifying the criteria used by journalists to choose and classify their sources among the digital landscape of the nuclear debate and 3/ analyzing the processes of discourse transformation throughout the different interactions between communication professionals and journalists (Guilhaumou 2006; Calabrese 2013; Turbide 2015) in the digital context. We especially focus on the interaction with actors from the civil society (anti-nuclear actors particularly active on websites and social media) in order to understand how they gain – or not - media worthiness from journalists. Our results show that different kind of arguments (emotional vs rational) corresponding to different figure (concerned citizen vs expert) are used by the different actors on different digital media (texts, video, tweet) to interact with the journalists and that the legitimacy and the authority granted to the actors by the journalists vary according these different strategies