Cops, popes, and garbage collectors: metaphor and antagonism in an atheist/Christian YouTube video thread

Using a discourse dynamics, metaphor-led analysis, this article investigates the use of metaphor in three YouTube videos made by two American YouTube users: one fundamentalist Christian and one atheist. The focus of the analysis is on how metaphor was produced dynamically in the interaction between the users as they discussed the appropriateness of user actions. Metaphorical language was of key importance to the discourse event, and was explicitly oriented to by the participants: The Christian user suggests an analogy between himself and a “cop,” the atheist retaliates that the Christian believes himself to be “the Pope of YouTube,” and the Christian resists this characterization, with other users leaving text comments that also directly respond to the “Pope of YouTube” metaphor. The analysis shows that YouTube users employed metaphors to describe and validate their activity on YouTube, and that although metaphor use did not differ depending on the user's ideological position, users reinterpreted and subverted the metaphor use of others to assert their own opinions about the community

The Socially Responsible Existentialist: A Normative Emphasis for Journalists in a New Media Environment

In an open and virtually boundless media environment, old responses to the question of who is a journalist, based primarily on roles associated with the process of gathering and disseminating information, no longer apply. This article suggests a reconceptualization of the journalist based instead on normative constructs. Specifically, it advocates a blend of two competing philosophical approaches, existentialism and social responsibility theory, as well as two roughly corresponding professional norms, independence and accountability. The combination produces a “socially responsible existentialist,” a journalist who chooses to act as a trustworthy source of information that serves the public interest. That framework is applied at both a concrete level, through consideration of Weblogs and the proliferation of partisan information sources, and a conceptual level, through consideration of gatekeeping and agenda-setting functions