Broadcast Interviews Research Articles

Media Reports of Olympic Success by Chinese and American Gold Medalists: Cultural Differences in Causal Attribution

Our study examines media reports of attribution of success by American and Chinese gold medalists at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. Broadcast interviews were selected from official websites of NBC from the United States and CCTV from China. In addition, news reports from Chinese and American print media were selected through the Access World News database between August 8, 2008 (start of the Olympics) and August 31, 2008 (1 week after the closing ceremony). Results show that Chinese athletes, as reported by both Chinese broadcast and print media, attributed success to situational factors such as support and encouragement from socially important others, societal motivation, and national pride. American athletes were reported by American media to attribute success to dispositional factors such as personal characteristics and self-motivation. These results suggest that individual accounts of success as reported in the media are consistent with cultural norms and values.

Book Review: “Syndrome of a Peacock and a Parrot. 20 years of Political Transformation in Poland” [Syndrom pawia i papugi. 20 lat transformacji ustrojowej Polski], ed. Marek Sokołowski, Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, Toruń 2010, pp. 264

In Poland’s most recent history, year 2009 was a time to celebrate a special anniversary. Twenty years ago, events that started a political transformation in Poland took place. They were connected with the Round Table Talks, elections to the so-called Contract Sejm and the fact that Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the Prime Minister. In 2009 Poland also celebrated 70th anniversary of II World War, 10th anniversary of its admission to NATO and 5th anniversary of joining the European Union. The celebrations of these events involved exhibitions, conferences and scientific seminars. Articles were written and television networks broadcast interviews and documentaries about the recent historical events that happened in Poland’s history.

Adversarial Questioning and Answering Strategies in Chinese Government Press Conferences

Studying political interviews and press conferences is significant as it may provide a special insight into the change in the policy of a country, and perhaps even the well-being of a society as a whole. Previous studies on broadcast interviews have identified adversarial questioning as an increasing and pervasive style in journalistic practice in the western world (Clayman and Heritage 2002a/b). The use of such adversarial style has emerged in Hong Kong-a metropolitan city deeply influenced by both Chinese and western cultures (Yip 2003). However, the general knowledge of how journalists treat public figures in other parts of the Chinese-speaking world remains relatively unknown. This study attempts to investigate the questioning and answering patterns, in particular adversarial questioning, in Chinese government press conferences which has thus far received little scholarly attention. Drawing on Clayman and Heritage's coding system for measuring adversarial questioning in U.S. press conferences (2002b), the current study examines the question-answer sequences based on a corpus of ten government press conferences held in mainland China, and aims to present a questioning format by showing any differences in the design of questions by Chinese journalists and their foreign counterparts. The study further explores the format of the response of Chinese officials typical of these events and some possible correlation between government officials' question-taking and their setting of the political agenda.

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

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.

The before and after of a political interview on TV: Observations of off-camera interactions between journalists and politicians

This article deals with the organization of off-camera interactions between journalists and politicians. What kinds of talk transpire between the participants before and after the broadcast interview? What functions do the before and after interview interaction appear to have? What social norms and conventions seem to influence the character of the pre-interview and post-interview discourse? How are their respective professional roles negotiated in these settings? The framing of the interview as an object of study in its production context aims to contribute to existing research on the news interview, specifically within Conversation Analysis (e.g. Clayman and Heritage, 2002), which has not studied processes of production, but has mostly restricted itself to analyses of that which is broadcast to the audience.

INTERVIEWS AS COMMUNICATIVE RESOURCES IN NEWS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS BROADCASTS

This study quantitatively establishes the centrality and importance of interviews in news and current affairs broadcasts. We show how segments of interviews (from soundbites to longer recorded, or live, question-and-answer interactions) are deployed as communicative resources in the construction and presentation of news in various ways. The data allow for a cross-national comparison between the United Kingdom and Sweden which points to differences in practice between the countries. We argue that our findings may be used critically to examine various conceptualisations of broadcast interviews in general and political interviews in particular. We also show how journalists outnumber politicians as interviewees in the news, a finding that is in need of further exploration from a range of perspectives. We also believe that our study provides solid ground on which to base future critical studies of the authority of journalism, dialogical and soundbite journalism, and the alleged fragmentisation of news.

Announced refusal to answer: a study of norms and accountability in broadcast political interviews

This article investigates the announced refusal to answer as a form of dispreferred and challenging response in broadcast political interviews. The aim is to study how the rightness and wrongness of conduct is dealt with in situations of announced refusal. More specifically, the paper focuses on: (1) announced refusal as a particular type of conduct; (2) the orientation to norms and accountability in situations of announced refusal; (3) how the legitimacy of politics and journalism is negotiated in broadcast interviews. The data consist of 23 cases from Swedish election campaigns, and the analysis is based on Conversation Analysis, focusing on how the participants treat themselves and others as normatively accountable. The study indicates that the politicians understand themselves as accountable and avoid hostile actions in the interviews. Their refusals are designed mainly to be understood as appropriate distancing actions without explicitly complaining about the interviewers’ conduct.

The design and scripting of `unscripted' talk: liveness versus control in a TV broadcast interview

By combining ethnographic methods with textual analysis, this article sets out to answer the question how a scripted event on live television is infused with a sense of ‘liveness’ in order to balan ...

‘Working your words’

This paper explores the language used by Australian Football League (AFL) footballers and Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) journalists in their post-match interviews broadcast on ABC (774 Melbourne) radio. From Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Appraisal is used to investigate the evaluative language expressed by the AFL footballers in their exchanges with ABC journalists. Despite the many applications of linguistics to media discourse, especially within SFL, this research is the first to analyse the language of Australian athletes in their post-match interviews. It is found that irrespective of the result of the game, ABC journalists and AFL footballers maintain a neutral stance by countering expressions of positive Attitude with negative Attitude, as well as employing Graduation and Engagement resources that reduce authorial endorsement. These findings are summarized and discussed, including reference to neutralism from Conversation Analysis. The paper goes on to claim that the tenor between AFL footballers, ABC journalists and the broadcast audience makes it difficult for AFL footballers to express authoritative evaluations. The ultimate aim is to show that AFL footballers do well to negotiate a particularly challenging register.

‘Working your words’

This paper explores the language used by Australian Football League (AFL) footballers and Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) journalists in their post-match interviews broadcast on ABC (774 Melbourne) radio. From Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Appraisal is used to investigate the evaluative language expressed by the AFL footballers in their exchanges with ABC journalists. Despite the many applications of linguistics to media discourse, especially within SFL, this research is the first to analyse the language of Australian athletes in their post-match interviews. It is found that irrespective of the result of the game, ABC journalists and AFL footballers maintain a neutral stance by countering expressions of positive Attitude with negative Attitude, as well as employing Graduation and Engagement resources that reduce authorial endorsement. These findings are summarized and discussed, including reference to neutralism from Conversation Analysis. The paper goes on to claim that the tenor between AFL footballers, ABC journalists and the broadcast audience makes it difficult for AFL footballers to express authoritative evaluations. The ultimate aim is to show that AFL footballers do well to negotiate a particularly challenging register.

Impoliteness and identity in the American news media: The “Culture Wars”

This paper argues that identity theory can be a useful analytical tool for the scholar of relational work (Locher and Watts, Journal of Politeness Research 1: 9–13, 2005). By focusing on current news interviews broadcast in the USA, it shows how impoliteness is inextricably linked to the (co)construction of the identity of the hosts, the guests and the audience of an emergent “new” news genre; news as confrontation (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, The “new” news in America: emergence of a genre, 2007, International Review of Pragmatics, forthcoming). Impoliteness is defined as a negative identity practice (Bucholtz, Language in Society, 28: 203–223, 1999) used by the hosts to position themselves within their own community of practice. Applying Anton and Peterson's (Communication Studies, 54: 103–419, 2003) model of subject positions, an alternative definition is proposed that posits that impoliteness – and confrontation – may ensue when there is a mismatch between self asserted subject positions, i. e., the positions we temporarily choose to assume, and other asserted subject positions, i. e., the positions that others impose on us. By challenging our self asserted subject positions, the view of the world that comes along with them is questioned as well. Impoliteness is also used to forge the collective identity of one of the factions, here identified with the target audience of shows included in the study, currently waging the “Culture Wars”. This metaphor has long been used to claim that political conflict within the USA is due to a conflict between “traditional” and “progressive” values.

‘Well, I answer it by simply inviting you to look at the evidence’

In the discourse of political interviews, references to participants can be expressed explicitly by proper nouns and forms of address, and they can be expressed implicitly by personal pronouns and other indexical expressions. The meaning of personal pronouns is context-dependent and retrievable only by inference, and therefore is less determinate. Furthermore, it can shift according to the status of the participants in interaction. This may occur both in terms of social roles and in terms of roles in talk and footing. In this context, an analysis was conducted of televised political interviews broadcast during the 1997 and 2001 British general elections and just before the war with Iraq in 2003. Question-response sequences were identified in which politicians made use of pronominal shifts as a form of equivocation. These sequences were analyzed in the context of Bavelas et al.s (1990) theory of equivocation and Goffmans (1981) concept of footing. The polyvalent function of pronominal shifts, their potential perlocutionary effects and strategic advantages are discussed.

'They saw a terrorist'--Responses of Jewish-Israeli viewers to an interview with a Palestinian terrorist.

This study examines the responses of Jewish-Israeli viewers to an interview broadcast on Israel's national public TV network with a female Palestinian terrorist, caught by Israeli security services on her way to perform a suicide bombing in Israel. Viewers' (N = 47) written accounts of the viewing experience were qualitatively analyzed and found to reflect two conflicting representations of the terrorist in the interview. Some of the viewers' accounts corresponded to the hegemonic animosity frame, through which the terrorist was perceived as malicious, immoral, murderous, and as arousing anger, hate, and contempt. Still, other accounts corresponded with a more humanizing frame, through which the terrorist was seen as fragile, suffering, and sympathetic. Maybe the most striking result of this study is that the personalized portrayal of the Palestinian terrorist elicited—in 60% of the viewers—positive emotions toward her. This finding leads to the elaboration, in the Discussion section, of the possible effe...

LANGUAGE AND JOURNALISM

1. Language and Journalism: An expanding research agenda John E. Richardson 2. Media(ted) Discourse and Society: Rethinking the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis Anabela Carvalho 3. Upscale Audiences and the Transformation of Labour Christopher R. Martin 4. Language Development, Knowledge and Use Among Journalists of European Minority Language Media Inaki Zabaleta, Nicolas Xamardo, Arantza Gutierrez, Santi Urrutia, and Itxaso Fernandez 5. Objectivity and Hard News Reporting Across Cultures: Comparing the news report in English, French, Japanese and Indonesian journalism Elizabeth A. Thomson, Peter R. R. White, and Philip Kitley 6. Unnamed Sources as Rhetorical Constructs in Agency Reports Maija Stenvall 7. Branding Newspapers: Visual texts as social practice David Machin and Sarah Niblock 8. The Discourse of the Broadcast Interview: A typology Martin Montgomery 9. The BBC's Discursive Strategy and Practices vis-a-vis the Palestinian Conflict Leon Barkho

Vraagontwijking Van Manlijke en Vrouwelijke Politici en Niet-politici

News interviews play an important role in the way the formation of opinions. The details of this type of interaction have been studied quite recently by a number of scholars. In this study observational categories for evasive conversational behaviour, as proposed by these researchers, are applied to interviewees differing in gender and political activity. Its main question is: do interviewees of different gender and political commitment differ in their evasive reactions to questions? The data consist of 32 10-minute clips from interviews broadcast on Dutch TV or radio in 2003, 2004 and 2005. In the analysis, four different types of evasion were distinguished: 1 Evasion by changing the discourse roles. Interviewees can avoid answering questions by adopting behaviour typical of the interviewer role, such as posing counter questions, listening actively instead of speaking, or changing the agenda of the interview. 2 Evasion by playing with the rules for turn taking, for example, by interrupting the interviewer. 3 Evasion by couching the answer in avoiding terms or by being polite and indirect. 4 Evasion by questioning the question (its relevance, appropriateness or formulation), questioning a presupposition or giving a non-answer. Not surprisingly, the results show that politicians are more evasive than non-politicians. Less predictably, however, they also show that males are more evasive than females. The effect of gender is not as strong as that of political activity. When comparing male and female politicians, it turns out that both groups are often evasive, but make use of different means. Female non-politicians use evasions remarkably infrequently.

Gestion de la complexité des interactions médiatiques

This paper deals with the complexity of the organization of celebrities interviews on television. Within the framework of social interactionism in the field of discourse analysis, I first define the normative expectations of interviews as a genre. Then, I analyze the discursive dimension of six recent excerpts of interviews to identify typical strategies by the participants. As a matter of fact, broadcast interviews represent a rather paradoxical form of communication. Indeed, the guest and the interviewer are supposed to engage in familiar discourse, but they also have at the same time to remain aware of the television viewers, that is the ultimate collective and anonymous addressee of the interview. Focusing on the discursive dimension of interviews helps to define the presumably shared expectations. It also allows to observe how the complexity of interviews is managed in confronting "good" and "bad" discursive performances.

RESPONSE TO RICHARD B. MILLER'S CHILDREN, ETHICS, AND MODERN MEDICINE

ABSTRACTIn this essay, Paul Lauritzen examines Richard B. Miller's liberal account of pediatric ethics by asking if the duty to promote a child's basic interests is substantial enough to secure the well‐being of children. This question is raised in light of two case studies: daytime TV talk shows that broadcast interviews with sexually active children, and a medical study conducted to test the effect of growth hormone treatment on adult height in peripubertal children. In both cases, Lauritzen argues, children are subjected to potential harms that are not easily explained, and therefore not easily prevented, by appeals to basic interests.

Who are we and who are you? The strategic use of forms of address in political interviews

In the discourse of political interviews, references to coparticipants can be expressed explicitly by proper nouns and forms of address, and they can be expressed implicitly by personal pronouns and other indexical expressions. The meaning of personal pronouns is context dependent and retrievable only by inference, and therefore is less determinate. Furthermore, it can shift as the status of the participants shifts in interaction. This may occur both in terms of social roles and in terms of roles in talk and footing. In this context, an analysis was conducted of televised political interviews broadcast during the 1997 and 2001 British general elections and just before the war with Iraq in 2003. Question-response sequences were identified in which politicians made use of pronominal shifts as a form of equivocation. These sequences were analyzed in the context of Bavelas et al.'s (1990) theory of equivocation and Goffman's (1981) concept of footing. In all but one of the questions, the interviewers sought to establish the politicians' authorship, whereas the politician typically responds in terms of the principal; in the other instance, the questioner sought to establish the position of the principal and the politician responds in terms of his own authorship. Possible strategic advantages of these forms of equivocation are discussed.

Prosody and turn-taking in Malay broadcast interviews

The paper aims to examine the role that prosody plays in constructing the context in which utterances become interpretable. The realisations of some prosodic features at particular loci of occurrence can serve as signalling cues in the management of conversational interaction and in the interpretation of different activity types in conversation. The concern here is to find out exactly how prosody and what prosodic features contribute to this process of contextualisation. In order to identify the contextual function of prosody, we examined the realisations of prosody at turn transitions and within certain types of speaker activity such as turn-holding or turn-yielding and turn-competitive incomings. Examination of the data shows that the completion of turn-constructional units is usually associated with a drop in pitch, and non-completion with rising or sustained pitch. The prosodic features involved in signalling the status of the speaker's overlap as competitive or non-competitive are pitch height and loudness. The giving away of turn is marked by decreased pitch height and diminuendo loudness, gradually reaching the point of unintelligibility; a return competition is signalled by a step-up in pitch and increased loudness, and at times tempo speed-up which usually occurs around the beginning of the return competition.

Constructing objects of discourse in the broadcast political interview

In this article, my aim is to study how objects of discourse are co-constructed in the political broadcast interview from two perspectives: the dialogical that is how the other-orientation emerges in the interview, and the sociopragmatic. Objects of discourse emerge in discursive practices in a sociocultural context. They are taken up and transformed in different social contexts. In this article, they consist of issues or topics in political, social or media life which are constantly reproduced in different media texts. In the interview, the objects of discourse are recontextualized by the interviewer and it is the politician who is invited to state an opinion, offer an evaluation, give a piece of information, etc. regarding them. Their construction is regulated by the different goals of the speakers in this genre in mediating political or social information to the public.