Negotiation Games

… of the ANZCA 2008 Conference, Wellington …, 2008

1989

The relationship between journalists and public relations practitioners is at once cooperative and fraught with conflict and implies a double negotiation: over the exchange of resources, and over the rules regulating this exchange. This article discusses several hypotheses regarding the tactics and strategies of both actors. Les relations entre les journalistes et les relationnistes sont h la fois coop6ratives et conflictuelles et impliquent un double jeu de nkgociation: il y a marchandage et khange de ressources, et il y a nkgociation autour des rkgles qui regissent cet Bchange. L'article examine quelques hypothkses h props des tactiques et des strat6gies des acteurs.

2014

According to the canons of liberal democracy, both political and media systems constitute two spheres which strongly interact but still are separated and fulfill different aims. The actors belonging to these spheres play specific social roles, due to sets of rules called (respectively) the logic of politics and media logic. Politicians are supposed to create and reshape the world gaining electorate support while the media should show, explain and interpret the world in a way that attracts its audience. The two are expected to compete inside their spheres but not with each other. Today, however, the mediatization of politics and politicization of the media have changed the relationship between politicians and journalists. The aim of the article is to describe the phenomenon of redefinition of roles of the main actors of political communication, using content analysis of television political interviews during an election campaign. Elections create a special situation of mutual interde...

This article investigates interactions between journalists and a local authority’s public relations team captured on video during an organised visit to a waterfront development site in New Zealand. Three interactions, which are part of a larger ethnographic study, are examined from Goffman’s dramaturgy perspective. The performance displayed by the public relations practitioners (PRPs) and its reception by journalists are analysed in detail from both a verbal and non-verbal perspective. The article provides new evidence of how PRPs’ efforts to manage interactions, by controlling access to a media conference as well as the sources of information, enabled them to manipulate the way the journalists covered the subsequent news stories.

Brazilian Journalism Research

Journalists make use of a number of interpretative repertoires to describe their relationship to the PR industry. Among these : they tap into the institutional discourses of both their own field and that of their PR counterparts ; they dip in and out of the deontological code of the journalistic profession ; they exploit a repertoire that we refer to here as «realist» discourse. That journalists can touch upon a range of repertoires within a single sentence points to the complexities that lie at the heart of this relationship. It also speaks to the way that journalists manage to distinguish themselves from PR professionals while at the same time, collaborating with them. These are among the findings to emerge from interviews conducted with twenty journalists working the daily beat in Montreal.

2019

The focus of this anthology has been the relationship between political journalists and their sources in government. The results from this three-year project show the many dimensions, contradictions, and uncertainties of the relationship. Both sides need each other in their daily work, but there are also conflicting interests in the struggle for control of information flows. Both sides need close and personal relationships, but also distance and a division of roles. Journalists and sources perform a daily trade of information in exchange for publicity – a daily negotiation based on power and personal contacts. The rules governing this trade are written by media logics, and both parts know these rules and use them for their own purposes. The negotiations are mostly hidden, but their results are visible in the public image of government politics and the control of information flows in politics. This anthology lists many examples of this daily exchange between political journalists and...

In Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences, Geoffrey Craig examines media interactions between politicians and journalists as power struggles that have come to be seen as crucial in indicating the potential success and competence of political leaders. While the book understands politics through largely conventional terms that bypass the emergence of newer political movements, it nonetheless serves to promote greater literacy and understanding of contemporary political communication and the battlegrounds therein, writes Mithilesh Kumar Jha. Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences. Geoffrey Craig. Polity. 2016. Find this book: Media – electronic and print as well as social – plays a major role in contemporary politics, not just in 'orchestrating' but also in shaping public and political discourse. It has radically altered the ways politicians interact and communicate with the public, and also how the public itself participates in such conversations. Geoffrey Craig's Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences critically examines processes of political communication and classifies the places and occasions where these interactions take place as a site of struggle between journalists and politicians. His is a fascinating study of how politicians and journalists, while speaking in the name of 'the public', are actually engaged in a power struggle, and how for politicians these interactions turn out to be a platform for performing their leadership styles and substantive visions on various social and political issues. We are increasingly experiencing our politics and political discourses as being shaped by media. A disconnect has emerged between the masses and their representatives, and audiovisual, 24/7 media houses and channels have gained enormous power by acquiring the middle space between the two. To a great extent, the increasing 'presidentialisation' and 'individualisation' of politics is the net outcome of this culture. The public standing of politicians is greatly dependent on their coverage by the media: in other words, their presence in media spaces matters more than their actual connection with the people. It turns out that encounters between politicians and media elites and journalists are more to do with 'style' and 'performance' than the conventional role of media to interrogate politicians and hold them accountable. This book is a welcome addition to understanding this phenomenon in our public political life. In fact, in these interactions, Craig argues that we frequently witness a discursive struggle between politicians and the media for the maximisation of their own individual power while simultaneously invoking the 'concerns' of the public. With the rise of social media and new trends such as including a 'studio audience' to represent 'ordinary people', we do get a sense of 'people's participations' in these encounters. However, we also know that these opportunities to participate, ask questions or intervene are still determined by the news anchor. Hence these events are seen by many as 'controlled' or 'orchestrated', and therefore put a challenge before politicians across the political spectrum: to engage smartly, intelligently and with some degree of openness and flexibility. How they perform and are seen through these interactions does matter. Performing Politics therefore seeks to seriously

Oye: Journal of Language, Literature and Popular Culture, 2020

Conversation strategies in political communication reveal politicians’ political wills. Existing studies on political discourses have concentrated largely on written texts, almost to the exclusion of television-based political interviews within the Nigerian context. Analysing selected episodes of Politics Today spanning the years 2011 and 2015, this study investigates the discourse functions of conversation strategies in the discourse of Channels Television’s Politics Today (CTPT). Conversation strategies on CTPT bifurcate into Presenter’s Conversation Strategies (PCS) and Guests’ Conversation Strategies (GCS). The PCS capture three strategies: identity-profiling, elicitation and shadowing. The GCS engage three strategies: avoidance, asserting and promising. Discourse functions of these strategies manifest illocutionary acts. For the PCS, identity-profiling has informing, presenting and revealing acts; elicitation has asking and requesting acts; and shadowing has suggesting and summarising acts. For the GCS, avoidance has dodging and excusing acts; asserting has criticising, inviting and dismissing acts, and promising has disclosing and promising acts. While the presenter deployed strategies to elicit information to keep the public informed, the guests explored strategies to conceal or reveal their political wills to the public. Consequently, the discourse functions of conversation strategies on Channels Television’s Politics Today inform and misinform the public for political manipulation. Keywords: Conversation strategies, Discourse functions, Political discourse, Politics Today

Southern Review: Communication, Politics & …, 2003

The recent resignation of Alastair Campbell and the reorganisation of governmental communications at 10 Downing Street have highlighted the political influence of 'spin doctors' and other professional communicators involved in media management. This article delineates the identity and functions of a spin doctor. It evaluates the political influence of spin doctors, acknowledging their significance in contemporary political communication but also arguing that their powers are tempered when considered in the longer-term contexts of political process. Spin doctors are nonetheless posited as necessary figures in modern politics, given the mediated basis of public life.

Discourse & Communication, 8(2), pp. 155-179, 2014

In this article I examine the differences between broadcast political interviews in commercial and public service broadcasters in Spain. The study focuses in particular on political interviews broadcast on ‘morning show’ type programmes. The analysis distinguishes the characteristics that make up the news interview turn-taking system in order to explore the degree to which information and entertainment come together in political interviews broadcast on morning shows. The results show, primarily, that political interviews shown on public service broadcasters’ morning shows adhere to the journalistic standards of neutralism and adversarialness. This is precisely how they strive to make the politician publicly accountable. In political interviews broadcast by commercial broadcasters, however, these rules are followed intermittently. The aim of these interviews appears to be different: to penetrate politicians’ personal sphere with the discernible purpose of entertaining. These differences reflect different interview styles which, in turn, reveal different conceptions of journalism, politics and society. This investigation utilizes the research tools developed in conversation analysis (CA).

Journalism Studies, 2008

In previous work on the news interview, considerable attention has been devoted to its role as an instrument for holding politicians to account, leading to studies of evasion, of challenges to questions by interviewees, of how neutrality is performed, and of how issues are pursued by interviewers. Apart from Clayman (1992) and Ekstrøm (2001), however, few accounts of the news interview examine the other roles that it can serve and its place within the overall economy of news discourse. This article sets out to explore the range of types of news interviews and suggests that it is a mistake to regard the accountability interview with a public figure as the principal or defining type, despite their public salience and despite the way which broadcasters themselves routinely regard them as the cornerstone of their public-service remit. KEYWORDS broadcast news; communicative entitlement; discourse analysis; discourse genre; news interview; quotation The Media Interview and the News Interview Since the 19th century, and particularly over the last half of the 20th century, interviews have featured as a salient genre across the range of print and broadcast media output, frequently being used in entertainment and confessional formats (see Bell and Van Leeuwen, 1994). The chat show interview, as one salient type, has been subject to much study (Bell and van Leeuwen, 1994; Tolson, 1991) and is pervasive enough as a form to be the subject of parody (see Montgomery, 1999; Tolson, 1991). One significant characteristic of media interviews as a generic form lies in the way that they work as talk for an overhearing audience. Interviewers and interviewees know that what they say will be appraised not just by their immediate interlocutor but by who-knows-how-many beyond. This is not merely a matter of pressure towards increased circumspection in one's choice of words, though that must undoubtedly exist. It is also a matter of the public performance of talk*of talking adequately for the public purposes of the encounter and of acquitting oneself well in public. A second significant aspect of the media interview as a genre is the way in which they are characterised by clear differentiation or pre-allocation of roles: one speaker asks questions and the other answers them. The speaker who asks questions does so from an institutionally defined position*one in which they hold some responsibility for setting the agenda, the terms or the topic of the discourse. Nor is it a case of simply asking questions; the media interviewer also controls the length, shape and even the style of the encounter. Conversely, interviewees have in some way or other earned their role, their ''communicative entitlement'' (Myers, 2000), by virtue of a distinctive attribute*as material for a documentary case study, as witness, as celebrity. And the nature of this entitlement is

This article concerns interviews with politicians taking place on a popular talk show. These interviews are informal and playful in character, and above all are structured around personal narratives of the "real life" or "behind-the-scenes life" of the guest. It is often claimed that such interviews have become more important for the politicians. The approach of the study addressed in the article is influenced by research on conversational storytelling and aims at exploring how politicians' more personal narratives are initiated and elaborated on by the participants. The data are comprised of six interviews with leading politicians on a Swedish celebrity talk show, Sen kväll med Luuk [Late night with Luuk]. The analysis shows that personal narratives progress in close collaboration between the host and the politician, and that this collaboration often aims at exploring the humor potential of the stories and invoking laughter from the studio audience. The main argument in this article is that for politicians an appearance on a celebrity talk show is not such a trouble-free method for selfpresentation as is often assumed.

Interrelations between politics and media are often described as a powerplay, a rumba or even a danse macabre, and the key question of political communication is "who leads and who follows" in the "power-play between politicians and journalists" (Ross, 2010, p. 274). As today "[m]eaning, media and politics become blurred, but arguably in highly gendered ways" (Holmes, 2007, p. 12), gender inevitably enters the discussion of the journalists -politicians' interactions. Based on interviews with 40 Russian and Swedish political reporters working for the "quality" press, this paper discusses the role of gender as a social practice in journalists -politicians' communication in different political and cultural contexts, which Russia and Sweden represent. The paper answers the following questions: Do journalists perceive the interrelations with politicians as gendered? Do they use gendered interrelations strategically to acquire information efficiently? How do the gendered political communication practices differ dependent on the political and cultural context? Résumé : Les interactions entre le politique et les médias sont souvent décrites comme un jeu de pouvoir, une rumba ou même une danse macabre ; la question-clé de la communication politique est « qui dirige et qui suit » dans le « jeu de pouvoir entre les politiques et les journalistes » (Ross 2010, p. 274). Aujourd'hui, « sens, médias et politique s'estompent, mais sans doute de façon très sexuée » (Holmes, 2007, p 12), le sexe pénètre inévitablement dans les interactions entre les journalistes et les politiques. Basé sur des entretiens avec 40 journalistes politiques russes et suédois, travaillant pour la presse « de qualité », cet article examine le rôle du sexe en tant que pratique sociale (Löfgren Nilsson, 2010) dans la communication Send pretty girls to the White House… journalistes et politique, dans différents contextes politiques et culturels, dont la Russie et la Suède. L'article répond aux questions suivantes : les journalistes, perçoivent-ils les interactions avec les politiques comme sexuées ? Les journalistes, utilisent-ils les interrelations sexuées de manière stratégique afin d'obtenir des informations de manière plus efficace ? Comment les pratiques de communication politique genrées diffèrent-elles selon le contexte politique et culturel ?

Doing Politics: Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse

The present chapter contributes to existing research on hybridity in broadcast news interviews (Ekström 2011; Hutchby 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2017; Baym 2005, 2013) both at a micro and a macro level. Employing Conversation Analysis on a micro level, it explores how, through their hybrid antagonistic practices, Greek politicians and journalists transform the broadcast election campaign news interview into an antagonistic arena where the winner is the one who shows that s/he plays the game of the news interview in a fair way. On a macro level, it examines how the antagonistic practices identified shape the knowledge produced for the overhearing audience (the epistemology of TV journalism in Ekström’s 2002 and Roth’s 2002 terms) in relation both to the politicians’ public portrayal and the resulting antagonistic politics foregrounded.