Dialogue and dissemination in news media interviews

This article examines the structured panel discussion as a new form of broadcast news interaction. This involves live conversation among the anchorperson and news journalists on political news stories. The article draws upon the conversation analytic literature on news interviews, as well as detailed discourse analysis of journalistic discourse. By analysing data from Greek commercial prime-time news, it is argued that both the sequential organization and intra-turn design of journalists' talk help construct their professional role as that of an authoritative expert (analyst and opinionated commentator) on political current affairs. The rhetoric of expertise legitimizes the journalists' attribution of accountability, as well as their formulation of personal points of view. Given the absence of political actors from such extended exchanges, journalists are enabled to 'impose' their preferred readings of political actions and events on the audience. The structured panel discussion is a unique inter-journalistic conversational format, which exists alongside the more standard news interview, and is consequential for the representation of politics and political actors by the broadcast media.

Discourse & Communication.1/4: 387-406, 2007

This paper aims to examine journalists’ adversarial challenges within the Australian political news interview. Within the Australian context, journalists tend to challenge interviewees (1) by challenging the content of the prior turn, (2) by ‘interrupting’ the prior turn, and (3) by initially presenting their challenge as a free-standing assertion, not attributed to a third party. As a result, journalists could be interpreted as expressing their own perspective on the topic at hand, rather than maintaining a neutralistic stance. Although the challenging nature of journalistic questions has been previously noted within the Australian context (e.g. Adkins, 1992), there have been minimal analyses of such challenges. Using the framework of conversation analysis, the aim of the following paper is to examine adversarial challenges in more detail. In particular, the paper will focus on how interviewers (IR) and interviewees (IE) collaboratively produce the political news interview in such a way as to avoid accusations of bias or non-neutrality. First, the paper will focus on the challenging nature of the IR’s turn, by examining the various techniques used by journalists to ensure that they maintain a neutralistic stance. Second, it will examine the way in which IEs respond to such adversarial challenges. It will show how although politicians do not overtly accuse IRs of bias or impartiality, they clearly orient to the challenging nature of the journalists’ turn.

Processes of media answerability are important for the professional conduct of media organizations and their analysis allows a better understanding of the negotiation among public actors over journalistic practices perceived as deviant. By intersecting public criticism over perceived deviant political interviews with Israeli ombudsmen's responses to these complaints, our aims are to (1) characterize processes of media answerability within the institution of the ombudsman and in the open public arena; (2) identify diversions between the public and the ombudsmen perspectives regarding perceived deviating practices (overaggressive and over-deferent style of interviewing) and their causes (political bias and violations of interpersonal codes of behavior); (3) pin point the outcomes of media answerability processes. Our findings suggest that while a disrespectful attitude toward public figures bothers the public more than an overly deferential approach, the ombudsmen tend to reject both types of complaint. At the causal level, while citizens point to interviewers' ideological bias as the main explanation for all types of deviations, the ombudsmen tend to accept complaints regarding violations of interpersonal codes of behavior and reject claims of political bias. In conclusion, we point to the advantages and limitations of a media answerability process.

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2010

This book is a series of analyses of how interviewers and interviewees position themselves and each other in Israeli television news interviews, all based on interviews from the early evening current affairs show, 'Erev Xadash' in the early 1990s. There is a lot of convincing, not to

This article focuses on journalistic self-presentations within political television talk. While previous studies have explored quite extensively how journalists manage to achieve a “neutralistic” posture within news interviews and other forms of political broadcast talk, they have been cautious about incorporating reflections on the role of programme formats. This study raises questions about how televisual formats (can) play a role in the formulation of a professional, distancing journalistic self in political television programmes. The analysis draws on transcriptions of 19 pre-election debates broadcast on Flemish public service television (VRT) in 2009. Inspired by a conversation analytic framework and building on Steven E. Clayman’s (1988, 1992, 2002, 2007) findings on the use of footing shifts in news interviews, the analysis shows that the presence of pre-produced, format-related components, such as public surveys, reportages and expert commentaries, enlarges the journalist-presenters’ “pool” of strategic resources to reach, defend and legitimise a neutralistic stance.

2015

ii The present study uses a Conversation Analytic (CA) framework to investigate how interviewers and interviewees display political alignment or disalignment with each other in news interviews. It looks at interviewers ’ use and design of questions: negated questions; prefaced questions; disjunctive and prefaced questions. It, then, examines both interviewers ’ and interviewees ’ use of membership categorization devices as a means of displaying even stronger alignment and disalignment. Use of ethnic and religious categories such as ‘brother ’ and ‘friend ’ are examined as well as the use of attributes such as ‘terrorist. ’ The final section of this thesis examines instances of code-switching to display alignment. Data used in this thesis are taken from video-taped interviews with ambassadors concerned with the ‘Question of Palestine ’ and were collected from the United Nations web archive. Taken as a whole, this thesis could be used to compare political discourse in one culture/lang...

Journalism Practice, 2023

This article aims to examine the rhetorical strategies employed by interviewers and interviewees to understand how adversarialism unfolds in television broadcasts. While most studies to date analyze a single interview or compare how the same interviewer confronts several interviewees, we capture how different panels of interviewers address adversarial questions in the same program format. We use mixed methods to assess nine interviews with Brazilian presidential candidates on the Roda Viva program aired during the 2018 elections. The results reveal that the structural characteristics of Roda Viva reduce the opportunities for equivocation gaps. In addition, while media professionals adopt a more assertive stance toward candidates (seeking to deauthenticate them), some interviewers from outside journalism offered the interviewees moral support. In turn, politicians avoided tricky questions and criticized the media coverage when placed in "embarrassing" situations. We also discuss how adversarial questions may help populist candidates since they use such opportunities to play the victim's role and attack the interviewers' credibility. Besides scrutinizing the media's performance in a non-Western setting, the paper contributes to the work of journalists, candidates, and political consultants by highlighting which rhetorical elements favor or harm the efficiency of those participating in such interviews.

Journalism Studies, 2014

Discussions and practices related to participatory and interactive journalism emphasize the dialogical aspects of journalism. However, throughout history, the idea of dialogue in journalism has taken a variety of forms. This paper puts dialogue as a journalistic ideal under scrutiny. Our aim is twofold: First, we map out the development and different functions of the ideal in some decisive eras in the history of journalism and in the current context of digital journalism. Second, we will present a model of how to best capture and understand the significance of dialogue to contemporary journalism. The model is based on an exploration of philosophical preconditions for dialogue as an ideal in journalism. We will also look at the significance of dialogue in different genres and in interactive dimensions of journalism.

Journalism, 2016

Ekström and Kroon Lundell, Ekström, Hutchby refer to hybridity in political news interviews as the mix of activities or the systematic shifting between speech exchange systems otherwise associated with non-interview settings. In their examination of journalists’ mixed interactional activities, both Hutchby and Ekström discuss how hybridity is explored as an interactional resource to question politicians and/or create an argumentative environment, breaching the neutralistic role of the broadcast news journalist. In this article, I examine instances of journalists’ breaching neutralism not through their hybrid questioning practices but through their listening practices in one-on-one interviews conducted during the 2012 Greek general election campaigns. In my data, journalists use hybrid listening practices to co-produce politicians’ arguments and to answer their own questions. Findings indicate that journalists’ hybrid listening practices provide political actors with new ways to main...

The analysis of political discourse as featured in the media

Journal of Pragmatics, 2006

The paper discusses the complex interrelations between social roles, interactional roles and personal identities in mediated political talk, focusing on news interviews in the Israeli context. Following notion of multiplicity of roles and the person-role continuum, I propose to explore role-perception in media-talk in contexts other than news interviews, and to analyse the negotiation of role within the framework of news interviews.

DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 2005

In this paper, I am attempting to throw into relief significant aspects of the function of television debate as a public sphere. My working assumption is that public dialogue, including its televised versions, involves primarily the establishment of a meaning horizon which delimits what is to be said and known, and which authorises as true certain meanings and knowledges at the expense of others. Put differently, there is a 'politics of truth' at play in every mediated debate which is central in the constitution of the debate as a public sphere. It is precisely this politics that I want to examine in this article. Using empirical material from a prime-time debate programme in Danish television, which is concerned with the right to privacy of public personalities, I analyse the forms of interactional control and dialogic organisation employed in the debate, so as to address the following questions: What are the communicative practices which confer upon the television debate g...

Television & New Media

The article examines emerging practices of personalization in political talk shows on Romanian television. Our interest lies in the reconfiguration of the role of critical journalist, as performed by talk show hosts on private TV channels, in the context of increasing commercialization and instrumentalization of the Romanian media in postcommunism. This development consists of the strategic use of personalization, achieved through the talk show dispositive, for the enactment of positions of journalistic interpretation, adversarialness, and intervention on behalf of the citizens. The findings indicate shifts in the symmetry/asymmetry relationships between journalists, guests, politicians, and publics, as well as new ways of constructing and understanding public issues. Two main patterns of personalization have been identified: the journalist as a fully engaged voice, effectively substituting itself for the public opinion, and the journalist as an ordinary person, who has the capacity...

Journalism Studies, 2014

"Abstract In this paper we focus on the use of extended repetitions in political news interviews. Drawing on conversation analysis and discourse analysis we examine a corpus of examples where particular forms of repeated questions and/or answers appear within two main practices of political interviewing. We refer to these as the spectacular live interview and the non-live interview. Our analysis shows that the design of repetitions, which we describe as either “stripped” or “embedded”, differs significantly in these practices as they are oriented to differing political/media communication work. We argue that the use of repeated repetition highlights a locally organized powerful form of control of the interactional event with implications for the professional status of the parties involved."