‘Going public’: constructing the personal in a television news interview

Abstract

In this article I examine how a ‘private’, inside story was constructed through an extended news interview ( ‘Tonight’ with Trevor Macdonald, ITV1) drawing on models of both the experiential and the accountable broadcast interview. The analysis, based on aspects of adjacency sequencing, question/ response design, and narrative organization, explores the ways in which a personal account is elicited about an event that had been highly prominent in the news. However, I also look at how ‘accountability’ emerges as an issue during the interview, and on how the tensions between these two types of interview are played out in its design and subsequent editing. Although the interview displays many of the characteristics identified by Montgomery (2007) as ‘experiential’, where the interviewee is positioned as ‘one of us’, with knowledge and experience of an event she is not to be held accountable for as a result of her high profile in the news coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis (in April 2007), Faye Turney had already become a public figure during the time she was held in Iran. Furthermore, she had already been positioned by the media as accountable for some of her actions during her captivity. I show that the personal dimensions of the interview as interaction are framed by the interview as documentary, thus producing a hybrid form in which both the experiential and the accountable can be managed.