‘Softballs’ for ‘Hardballs’: The congenial political interview on right-wing partisan TV news outlets

Abstract

Taking a conversation-analytic approach, this article examines potentially shifting norms of political interviewing against the surge of authoritarian populism and increasingly legitimated forms of political and discursive bias on affiliated partisan TV outlets. Based on four political interviews of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon on Fox News and GB News, the analysis documents changes in interviewing practices away from the conventions of accountability interviewing. These changes involve the design of IR questions, the interpersonal dynamics between IR and IE, and the interactional work performed by questions and political interviewing at large. It is demonstrated that, in the aftermath of organizational and ideological disruptions affecting partisan right-wing media such as Fox News, political interviewing enacts a congenial type of questioning, with attendant transformations in the negotiation of accountability. The analysis documents two variations of congenial interviewing practices, one in the absence of adversarial questioning, and the other in the presence of ostensibly accountability questions, that are nevertheless deployed as interviewer resources for doing strategic image-repair work in the benefit of the interviewee. The attested questioning practices have implications for the normalization of authoritarian populist discourses and agendas, and, also, for the future of journalism as watchdog and safeguard of democratic institutions in liberal democracies.