Doing being objective: Turn design in the preliminary to a journalist’s question at the press conference of the National People’s Congress of China

Abstract

A press conference, which is a type of news interview, is a speech exchange system which normally involves journalists raising questions and officials providing answers to these questions. Taking the annual press conference of the National People’s Congress of China from 2015 to 2019 as data for this research and using conversation analysis as the research methodology, this study probes into how journalists adopt ‘being objective’ approach at an interactional level (rather than at a factual level) in terms of designing the preliminary to their questions by strictly distinguishing opinions from facts in turn design. Constructing opinions and facts with certain linguistic devices enables the journalists to be professionally distant and interactionally reserved at the same time.