Conversation Analysis and News Interviews

Abstract

The news interview is a prominent interactional arena for broadcast news production, and its investigation provides a window into journalistic norms, press-state relations, and sociopolitical culture. It is a relatively formal type of interaction, with a restrictive turn-taking system normatively organized around questions and answers exchanged for the benefit of an audience. Questions to politicians are sensitive to the journalistic norms of neutralism and adversarialness. The neutralism norm is relatively robust, implemented by interviewers adhering to the activity of questioning, and avoiding declarative assertions except as prefaces to a question or as attributed to a third party. The adversarialism norm is more contextually variable, implemented through agenda setting, presupposition, and response preference, each of which can be enhanced through question prefaces. Adversarial questioning has increased significantly in the United States over time, and in some other national contexts. Adversarial questioning creates an incentive for resistant responses from politicians, which are managed with overt forms of damage control and covert forms of concealment. News interviews with nonpartisan experts and ordinary people are generally less adversarial and more cooperative. Various hybrid interview genres have emerged in recent years, which incorporate practices from other forms of broadcast talk (e.g., celebrity talk shows, confrontational debates) within a more loosely organized interview framework. These hybrid forms have become increasingly prominent in contemporary political campaigns and current affairs discussions.