Discursive strategies for evading answers in confrontational news interviews

Abstract

Television interview has been the basic journalists' medium for both collecting information and informing the public for decades. The key element of the interview is information, and the basic underlying idea is that the information should be true. However, this is not always the case. In this paper we have researched the discursive strategies the interviewees occasionally use to avoid answering a question, partially or completely, i.e. to avoid providing the public with the truth about a current issue. This problem falls into the domain of Critical Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis. By applying those two methods we have tried to identify different strategies used for truth evasion in the corpus of confrontational television interviews. There are two general ways of evading the truth: (1) overt evasiveness and (2) covert evasiveness. Overt evasiveness ranges from explicit refusal to answer a question, which is rare, to different strategies of providing partial or inadequate answers. Covert evasiveness, which is more difficult to be observed, covers various strategies such as answering the introductory part of the question, changing the focus of the question, or even answering with a question. We can conclude that even in a Hardtalk interview which assumes direct, provocative and even hostile questions to which the public expects direct answers, the truth is not necessarily revealed. The results of a critical discourse analysis or/and conversation analysis may be of great help to both interviewees in their attempts to avoid answering sensitive questions and to interviewers and discourse analysts to be able to identify them.