The Impact of Social Media Journalism on Negotiation Practices between the Belizean

Government and the Belize National Teachers Union.

Eugenie N. Castillo (320049912)

University of the West Indies, Open Campus

MA in English Language

Discourse Styles of English

LING6407

Course Instructor: Mrs. Michelle Evelyn

April 14, 2023

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1 Introduction

This research investigates the impact of social media journalism on the bargaining

procedures of the Belizean government (GoB) and the Belize National Teachers Union (BNTU).

As the name implies, BNTU represents all Belizean educators and "employed persons of

educational institutions" (BNTU, n.d.). They ensure educators have the resources, support,

consideration, benefits, and salary increases needed to live and work comfortably. Unfortunately,

BNTU and the GoB have had various misunderstandings over the years, resulting in several

negotiations. One of the most recent negotiations took place in April 2021, when BNTU sought

to prevent the GoB from imposing a 10% salary cut and a 3-year increment freeze on

government employees. However, this resulted in a stalemate, forcing teachers to return to the

classroom and BNTU to file legal action against the Belizean government.

During this time, several news outlets used social media, particularly Facebook, to

document and distribute information about the process, keeping Belizeans up to date at all stages

of the negotiations. However, the scope of this article is limited to three of Belize's major

broadcasting and media production companies: News 5 Live, 7 News Belize, and Love FM

Belize. BBC News has acknowledged all three media outlets, which are claimed to be free of

political affiliation unlike others (BBC News, 2023). These production firms are based in Belize

City, Belize District. They have a combined Facebook following of 359,000, 303,000, and

314,000 people. As a result, they reach the vast majority of Belizeans. These media outlets

produce effectively organized and meticulously planned headlines when they publish their

articles on Facebook. Hence, the author will investigate the impact of language and the

significance of word choice in the news heading. The author will then conduct a Critical

Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the perlocutionary effects of the word choice on BNTU and GoB's
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decision to stalemate using secondary sources. Three distinct corpora will be created from

Facebook news stories, each with five headlines. Examining the headlines of news articles will

ultimately reveal how social media journalism drives the Belizean public to take sides and how

this leads negotiators to change their practices.

Following that, the author presents a hypothesis and three research questions that will

drive the development of this study. The study's objectives, restrictions, and goals are further

provided to discuss the author's research objectives and constraints. In addition, a complete

literature review of ten scholarly articles that synthesize significant research on this topic has

been presented. The author then discusses the research methods, including the study design,

sample population, instruments and investigative approach, ethical considerations, and the

reliability and validity of secondary data used in this report. The author has also explained why

she chose each strategy indicated in the methodology.

1.1 Aim of Study

BNTU and GoB have had countless negotiations and will almost certainly do so again.

This article aims to analyze fifteen news headlines about the negotiations between BNTU and

GoB about the 10% salary cut and three-year increment freeze. In addition, the author aims to

interpret the perlocutionary consequences of word choice in the news article’s headlines. The

author will determine how this affects the negotiating parties' methods and stance. Another

purpose of this research is to bridge the gap between addressing and researching this topic, as no

current research on this phenomenon has been conducted in this country or region.

1.2 Objectives

This piece will investigate the impact of social media journalism on GoB and BNTU bargaining

practices.
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The following are the precise goals of this thesis:

● To examine/highlight the perlocutionary influence of online news headlines.

● To ascertain how social media journalism affects GoB and BNTU bargaining practices.

● To discuss how social media journalism affects GoB and BNTU bargaining procedures.

1.3 Limitations

There are several constraints associated with completing this paper. One of the greatest

challenges is that the chosen negotiation took place in April 2021; therefore, news stories about

this event will be difficult to obtain as the articles will be buried on the news outlets’ Facebook

page. As a result, locating news stories will require time, time that could be spent working on

other elements of this paper. Furthermore, to the best knowledge of the researcher, no previous

research on the impact of social media journalism on negotiations in Belize and the Caribbean

has been conducted. Therefore, obtaining reputable sources to back up this paper's claims will be

challenging.

1.4 Hypotheses and Research Questions

This study contends that social media journalism has substantially impacted the

negotiation procedures of the Belizean government and the Belize National Teachers Union

(BNTU). The author will analyze the corpus data to determine (1) how news networks use

Facebook headlines to trigger a perlocutionary effect, (2) the frequency of lexical manipulation

to enhance a perlocutionary effect, (3) how the Belizean public conveys the perlocutionary act

via the Facebook platform, and (4) how the percolation act influences the negotiations between

BNTU and GoB.

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2 Literature Review

2.1 Social Media Journalism

Social media is becoming an everyday aspect of people's lives and interactions with the

rest of the globe. This is still true when using social media to get news and information.

According to Kuyucu (2020), news organizations and reporters who utilize social media to

communicate news or information are involved in social media journalism. He contends,

however, that social media journalism and online journalism, though sometimes used

interchangeably, are at opposite ends of the professionalism and accuracy spectrum. This

distinction is important in this research since the author will use the terms interchangeably but

concentrate on online traditional journalism, which Kuyucu (2020) claims is more credible. He

also presented a detailed description of "social media journalism," which he defines as gathering,

analyzing, generating, and presenting information or news using social media.

While Vázquez-Herrero et al. (2022) agreed with several of Kuyucu's (2020) statements,

they presented a different perspective on news outlets' use of language and the motivation behind

language choice. They assert that platformization of journalism primarily appeals to young

people, forcing news providers to utilize terminology that will spark the attention and interest of

the young audience. Catering to a younger audience is one of the key goals of online journalism,

as it ensures long-term consumer loyalty. However, Vázquez-Herrero et al. (2022) observes this

might raise concerns about professionalism and credibility.

2.2 News Headlines

News organizations frequently capture viewers' attention with well-structured and well-

thought-out news headlines. Sari (2019) cited Van Dijk's three important functions of headlines
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in her study about discourse analysis of news headlines: providing a summary of the main news

to viewers, attracting attention through the use of various font sizes and vocabulary, and

indicating the content and style of the news values. While these functions correspond with

newspaper articles, they can also be applied to the media houses selected for this study, as

newspapers and online news pieces aim to deliver relevant information to the audience. Her

research demonstrated that news providers employ figurative language in their titles to attract the

audience's attention.

Rachma and Ariyanti (2016) and Sari (2019) found that in the United Kingdom news

outlet studies used phrasal post-modifiers, clausal post-modifiers, active voice, and direct and

indirect quotations when writing their headlines. Geethakumary (2004), on the other hand,

discovered that Indian newspapers use rhetorical terms and idiomatic compounds to make their

headlines more captivating and sardonic, hence increasing circulation. Even though her study is a

little more outdated than the others, she presents a comprehensive framework on which this

author will develop.

2.3 Perlocutionary Acts in Pragmatics and Cyberpragmatics

The impact of social media journalism on negotiation practices necessitates the use of

pragmatic lenses, specifically the function of perlocutionary effects on negotiation decisions.

Perlocutionary acts are parts of speech that have an impact on the listener. According to Wijaya

et al. (2021), this speech act is one of three acts, including locutionary and illocutionary acts,

utilized to indicate the speaker's intent and purpose. Rahardi (2020), in addition to defining

"perlocutionary acts," discusses how these acts are designed to express the impacts of a headline.

He argues that this is evident in internet ads, which aim to persuade people to buy specific

products or services. He claims this is related to pragmatic perlocutionary acts and can be applied
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to other areas, such as the subject of this paper. According to Rahardi (2020), pragmatics is the

discipline of linguistics that investigates the speaker's meaning. He contends that pragmatic and

semantic meanings are frequently contrasted, with exterior characteristics associated with

pragmatic meaning and internal aspects associated with semantic meaning. He said that

pragmatic meanings are triadic, but semantic meanings are dyadic. In pragmatics, the two

dimensions are recognized alongside one other aspect: external contexts. The absence of context

in pragmatics will lead to misunderstanding the headline's meaning.

2.4 Negotiation

Since the scope of this study is limited to negotiations, the author will not perform a

discourse analysis of bargaining techniques, negotiators' arguments, or information sharing.

Instead, this article will investigate how the perlocutionary effect of online news headlines

influences negotiators' judgments. This research will employ Teucher et al. (2013)'s definition of

negotiation, which describes it as an event that occurs when people cannot fulfill their particular

aims and require the participation of another party. Morris (2002) claims that negotiating is one

of the major functions of Caribbean trade unions. However, he includes that there is constant

tension between the state and unions in the Caribbean countries, which often serves as a

barometer of the country's economic status. In countries where most people are wage or salary

earners, he also highlights the necessity of trade unions in managing the local economy. While

the information in this article was useful, Morris (2002) concentrated on many other trade union

management issues unrelated to this research. Similarly, in 2016, the Caribbean International

Labor Office emphasized that trade unions were supposed to safeguard their members against

arbitrary measures. It concentrated on employer-union bargaining rather than potential disputes

between governments and unions. They needed to depict the full spectrum of unions in emerging
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Caribbean nations with continual economic problems because the film focuses mostly on the

Caribbean.

3 Research Methodology

3.1 Study Design

After deciding on a research topic, the author concentrated on the Facebook platform and

the three major Belizean news networks. This was done carefully to guarantee that the Facebook

pages were public, reducing privacy concerns. As a result, the author opted to use a mixed-

method approach for this research, combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

According to Dawadi et al. (2021), integrating the two procedures strengthens research because

the researcher can maximize both methodologies in one study. They explained that the

combination provides a comprehensive picture and an opportunity for a wider variety of

conflicting or complementary viewpoints, which are valuable since they lead to more reflection,

deepen understanding of a phenomenon, and create new routes for future research.

Because this study does not require participant involvement, the author will compile a

corpus of news stories and headlines related to the BNTU-GoB negotiations. Each news outlet

will be given a separate file to reduce confusion and keep the information safe. The Facebook

headlines will be reviewed, examined, analyzed, and tagged. The author will build a table of

words that exist across all three networks as a result of this method and draw logical conclusions

based on the qualitative component of the approach.

3.2 Sample Population

The paper will concentrate on the following news networks: News 5 Live, 7 News Belize,

and Love FM Belize. This is a non-intrusive study.

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3.5 Instrumentation and Investigative Technique

The information will be gathered from the Facebook sites of News 5 Live, 7 News

Belize, and Love FM. The data will be saved in three different Microsoft Word files, each tagged

with the name of the news network from which the headlines were obtained. The author will use

five (5) headlines from each news outlet relating to the BNTU-GoB negotiations. The researcher

will use thematic analysis to assess the qualitative data, reading the corpus and noting patterns in

the data's meaning. Furthermore, the author will use the tagged data to conduct a statistical

analysis, creating a numerical overview of the information using tagged words from the thematic

analysis.

3.4 Ethical Considerations

According to Samuel and Buchanan (2020), offline research has clear and familiar

boundaries to which many people are accustomed. However, social media research has standards

that can be difficult to understand. Nonetheless, he added that when conducting social media

research, particular challenges are participant privacy, identifiability, vulnerability, potential

harm, intrusiveness, and confidentiality. However, Gupta (2017) discovered that non-intrusive

online research might not comply with many of these elements because the participants are

unaware of the research, and the material is not disseminated in a way that will cause them to

harm or destroy their reputation or identify them. Nonetheless, she notes that a researcher

undertaking such a study must be mindful of the privacy of users, the website's privacy policy,

and other legal factors. Users' privacy is not an issue in this study because it is focused on news

networks that provide public information. The researcher will not name any persons involved

with the articles to avoid ethical misbehavior. Finally, the findings of this study will be

accurately recorded.
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3.7 Reliability and Validity

This study drew on data from ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and Google. Each search

engine offers peer-reviewed journals and books relevant to this paper's goal of using accurate and

reliable data. In addition, to ensure relevance, the author will concentrate on sources published

within the last six years. However, older periodicals and books will be evaluated to ensure the

content is legitimate, trustworthy, and relevant to the present Caribbean or Belizean situation.

The authors of the sources used in this research will also be scrutinized to determine their

reliability. Their credentials, research interests, and scholarly achievements will all be

considered, ensuring they are valuable contributors to this work.

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Dawadi, S., Shrestha, S., & Giri, R. A. (2021). Mixed-Methods Research: A Discussion on its

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