Co-construction and Deconstruction of Poverty on Serbian News Websites

Users’ comments posted on the news websites of traditional media organisations still pertain to asymmetric relations between producers of mainstream news and interactive audiences. Yet, when structurally positioned on a website interface to immediately follow the news, users’ comments are user-generated content most directly linked to journalists’ stories and they constitute discursive space in which mass media representations of the world are legitimised, negotiated and contested. The aim of this study is to examine these relations between mainstream news discourses and the discourses of users’ comments about the specific societal issue – poverty. By adopting methods of critical discourse analysis performed on 121 news stories about poverty and corresponding users’ comments posted on the two most popular news websites in Serbia B92.net and Blic.rs, the article reveals how the two media construct poverty and social exclusion, and how users in the comments contest these discursive constructions. The results show that there is a significant level of contestation and that the most contested aspects of news stories are boundaries of poverty, legitimacy of sources and attribution of responsibility