‘We are not putschists’: Accountability and the negotiation of membership categories in political news interviews

Abstract

This paper observes the emergence of membership categories and their role in the construction of accountability in news interview interactions on two Arabic networks. It adopts a Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to analyse how these categories contribute to the design of interviewers’ questions and interviewees’ answers. The data include twenty-eight hours of recorded Arab news interviews from four shows. The findings demonstrate that there are three interactional patterns in which membership categories are invoked. In the first pattern, interviewees engage in negotiating their incumbency or their political allies in accountable categories in interviewers’ questions. In the second pattern, interviewees display membership categories to obviate the shown accountability, while in the third pattern, they show negation of their incumbency of some categories even though they have not been explicitly included in these categories in interviewers’ questions.