“New Sincerity” Interview Strategies: Million Dollar Questions and Smaller Conversational Exchanges

Abstract

The article deals with the techniques of building a dialogue in the interview genre that encourage the interlocutor to be sincere. The intrusion of a journalist into the addressee’s private space, as well as the interviewee’s expression of their own identity through answers to “uncomfortable” questions can be considered as the discursive indicators for determining whether a text belongs to the tendency of “new sincerity” described in the present paper. The material of the study includes text fragments from the interviews of the Russian journalists with famous cultural figures and politicians published in the media or posted on the Internet platforms within the period of 2018–2023. It has been established that in order to determine the markers of “new sincerity” in the genre of a journalistic interview, one should consider the following essential discursive characteristics: thematic variety, methods of requesting (finding out) information by a journalist, the interlocutor’s reaction to a question that is on the borderline between public and private communication, techniques of euphemization and implication/explication of taboo meanings. “New sincerity” is found, first of all, in the expanded zone of thematic freedom acceptable in public communication. The main topics discussed in journalistic interviews, which reveal this trend (finances, health, appearance, etc.) are described in the article. The subject of the study is various methods of stimulating the “confessional” statement of the interlocutor and their latter’s reaction to violations of the acceptable boundaries of sincerity in public communication. The study also reveals metalinguistic markers of “new sincerity” that represent the strategies of speech behavior of both the journalist and their interlocutor. The results of the study show that “new sincerity” is becoming a technology that is used in mass media as a tool to influence the audience; thereby it shapes the communicative culture of the society in the public space.