Broadcast News Interviews Research Articles

The (ever)changing face of news, with broadcast interviews in focus

In this paper I intend to shed light on broadcast news interviews with a focus on the increasing role of video-mediated platforms. To do so, I first overview the rules of conduct journalists are required to follow, pondering on whether the shift to video-platforms has made substantial changes to what recommended in manuals and posited in scholarly studies. Then, I illustrate a corpus-based case study of news interviews carried out by professional journalists with Chinese and Russian diplomats. Similarities and differences between face-to-face and video-mediated interviews as well as between Chinese and Russian interviewees have been identified, with special reference to (a) the format of the questions posed by the journalists, (b) their degree of compliance to the traditional ground rules of conduct in the Q&A interface, (c) the role of the interviewees’ lingua-cultural background and (d) reference to the audience.

Interviewing Didier Raoult: The scientist who breaks the frame

This paper examines how normative roles of interaction in broadcast news interviews are disrupted during interviews with French expert immunologist and scientist Didier Raoult. The analysis is based on the organisation of the news interview as a particular form of institutional talk, and on the discursive features of expertise. There are three key aspects to the construction of Raoult as a central figure of the pandemic scene in France. The first is his prominent media presence online, the second is his regular appeal to historical events, in relation to France and to his family, and the third is his own status as director of a team of epidemiology experts at the IHU (Institut Hospitalier Universitaire) in Marseille. In the three interviews in the data set, these three aspects emerge as legitimate discursive grounding for his stance regarding the pandemic, and relevant treatment for the virus. The paper is organised as follows: the first part is a presentation of Didier Raoult and the mediated context from which the corpus of interviews is selected. In the second, the discussion focuses on the discourse of scientific expertise, and how Raoult constructs his expert status in the interviews. The final part will analyse how he puts this expert status to work as a discursive resource for disrupting the interactional norms that generally hold between journalists on the one hand, and interviewees on the other.

Going meta: Interaction at the normative boundaries of the news interview

In the modern hybrid media landscape, the relations between journalists and politicians in arenas such as the broadcast news interview can seem less stable. Politicians and their advisors seem increasingly confident in identifying when and how to engage with political interviewers while journalists, in response, feel under pressure to intensify their role as scrutineering tribunes of the people. In such an environment, the normative interactional boundaries of the news interview itself can come under pressure from both sides, and even be breached. This article discusses the phenomenon of ‘going meta’ – occasions in which participants break out of the interview’s interactionally managed frame, and render topical the very practices that, ordinarily, constitute and reproduce the rules of that frame. Going meta is a practice that simultaneously breaches the ‘rules’ of the interview, and invokes the same rules in the construction of complaints about the behaviour of a coparticipant. The analysis shows how interview participants use going meta to raise questions of objectivity, truth, and the interests of ‘the people’, often in moments of heightened conflict talk.

Question design and the construction of populist stances in political news interviews

This paper focuses on the relationship between journalism and right wing populist discourses in the context of broadcast news interviews. We analyse a specific feature of question design in which the public is invoked as a source of opinionated positions in adversarial interviewing. Analysing data from a range of socio-political contexts, we identify a shift in adversarial questioning along a scale of ‘soft’ populism, that is the attribution of views and concerns to a generic public ‘in crisis’, to ‘hard’ populism, where interviewers construct hypothetical scenarios in which populist positions are attributed to ‘some people’. We argue that the democratic role of journalists as public watchdogs, holding politicians and public figures accountable on behalf of the public, is challenged by this normalisation of populist moral order discourses in a routine journalistic practice, both drawing on and contributing to the propagation of populist agendas and anti-democratic populist rhetoric.

Other-language recalibration in bilingual broadcast news interviews in Rwanda: The directionality of a language choice practice

This article investigates a language choice practice, referred to as other-language recalibration, which I have observed in news interviews in Rwanda. A recalibration repair is a type of repair in which the trouble source and the repairer have the same referent. In news interviews in Rwanda, the trouble source and the repairer can come from two different languages. It was observed that going from the trouble source to the repairer, language alternation can take either of two directions. It can go from Kinyarwanda to French/English and it can proceed from French/English to Kinyarwanda. Therefore, the article investigates the question whether, in these interviews, language alternation in other-language recalibration is directional. Observation of the data shows that the direction Kinyarwanda – French/English serves the interactional function of word clarification while the direction French/English – Kinyarwanda serves the function of medium repair. In turn, this finding leads to a respecification of the notion of directionality. Traditionally, this concept has been viewed in terms of the social indexicality of the languages involved. The paper proposes that, from an organisational perspective, directionality can be understood in terms of the interactional tasks alternative patterns of language alternation allow participants to accomplish in talk-in-interaction.

Affiliative Other Initiated Repeats (AOIRs) in Arabic broadcast news interviews: The case of Aljazeera's “The Opposite Direction”

This paper investigates how the interviewer (IR) employs repeats of his interviewees' (IEs') prior turns to further their (IEs') agenda and stance in Aljazeera's al-itijaah al-mu'akis (‘The Opposite Direction’, hereafter). ‘The Opposite Direction’ is a weekly news interview program that broadcasts live in Arabic on Aljazeera. The show hosts two guests with opposing political views. Twenty, 50 min episodes were studied and transcribed following Conversation Analysis as my analytic method. This paper argues that the IR uses a specific questioning practice with those interviewees whom he favors, I refer to them as interviewees in the favorable position (IEFs), allowing them to further their agenda against the other's. The paper shows how the IR's actions of agenda furthering is achieved by repeating his IEFs' previous turns in a question format which allows IEFs an opportunity to confirm and highlight a previous turn for the overhearing audience. I refer to this IR practice as the Affiliative Other Initiated Repeats (AOIRs). This study has implications that are multidisciplinary for Conversation Analysis, Arabic linguistics, cross cultural studies, and Arabic media studies.

Interactional Alarms: Experts’ Framing of Health Risks in Live Broadcast News Interviews

ABSTRACTThis study examined how experts frame health risks in real-time interactions with journalists. Though there is evidence that experts influence media framing of health risks, the ways they respond to journalists’ agendas in real-time interactions have yet to be explored. This paper examines instances of risk assessment extracted from a corpus of news interviews to determine how expert assessments were requested and provided. The analysis reveals that experts rarely deliver their assessments neutrally but rather treat these exchanges as opportunities for framing or reframing the topic. Their framing is shown to be responsive to journalistic agendas and to those who experts understand to be accountable when their assessment is elicited. These findings suggest ways in which news interviews can be useful in health communication. The implications for experts, journalists, and public information officers who plan to use interviews for this purpose are discussed.

The Micropolitics of Legitimacy

When journalists elicit opinion and policy pronouncements from politicians, this engages a two-dimensional struggle over (1) where the politician stands on the issue in question and (2) the legitimacy of that position. Using data drawn from broadcast news interviews and news conferences, this paper anatomizes the key features of political positioning questions and their responses, and documents a tension surrounding relatively marginal or extreme views that tend to be treated cautiously by politicians but are pursued vigorously by journalists. The findings shed light on how politicians balance appeals to centrist and partisan viewers, how journalists police the boundaries of mainstream politics, and how both parties contribute to a process of legitimation that enacts and at times modifies the parameters of the sociopolitical mainstream.

On the relevance of gender in the analysis of discourse: A case study from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential bid in 2007–2008

This article presents an analysis of politicians’ laughter in broadcast news interviews and of mass media representations of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s laughter during her failed bid for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2007–2008. It examines spoken, interactional data and written, representational data, each requiring different theoretical and methodological apparatus. The first component of the analysis employs the methodological framework of Conversation Analysis to examine the interactional work accomplished by Clinton’s laughter and other politicians in situ (i.e. in the interviews themselves). The second component employs an indexical approach to analyze the post-hoc recontextualization of Clinton’s laughter by mainstream media as a gendered representation, namely, as a ‘cackle’. Analyzing Clinton’s laughter in talk-in-interaction and its subsequent representation in talk- out-of-interaction reveals how communicative behavior that is not gendered by original participants may nevertheless become gendered by other participants. This article thus makes a distinctive contribution to a central question in discourse studies – when exogenous categories such as gender should be invoked as an explanatory category.

The news interview: Interviewing children

Previous studies on broadcast news interviews have primarily described the accountability interview with public figures such as politicians as interviewees. Drawing on the framework of conversation analysis this article investigates a different type of news interview interaction, namely that of journalist-child interaction within the morning news interview programme Go’ morgen Danmark (Good morning Denmark). More specifically, the relevance of child identity in the news interview setting is discussed. It is argued that child identity is made relevant in the interviews not only by the explicitly ascription of categories such as “12-year-old”, “9th grader” and “student council president”, but also in several other ways. This can be observed when interviewers do not expect interviewees to be able to answer questions adequately, when interviewees are having difficulties doing so, and when interviewee identities that are not usually ascribed children, are oriented to as peculiar. Research literature on the news interview has characterized the interaction as a distinct type of institutional talk made up of questions and answers, and thus organised in accordance with a question-answer format. This paper argues that the format is not constitutive for the genre under investigation. The participants in the data under study frequently depart from the question-answer format, and they only rarely treat these practises as deviant.

Conversation analysis and the study of social institutions: methodological, socio-cultural and epistemic considerations

The objective of this study is to show how conversation analysis, a sociological discipline, approaches the study of social institutions. Social institutions are conceived as the crystallization of members’ communicative, interactional practices. Two institutional domains – psychiatric interviews and broadcast news interviews – and a specific interactional practice – ‘formulations’ – are examined in this study. The results show that (1) in psychiatric interviews the psychiatrist uses formulations to transform the patients’ avowals and establish a psychiatric problem. (2) In broadcast news interviews, formulations might help the interviewer to clarify or transform the statements of the interviewee, or challenge his assertions. The comparison of formulations in two different institutional settings serves the purpose of (1) demonstrating how communicative conduct is adapted in particular settings in ways that invoke and configure distinct social institutions and (2) inspect the knowledge, practices, logic, etc., mobilized by members of the epistemic communities of psychiatry and journalism.

Hypothetical Questions: A Comparative Analysis and Implications for “Applied” vs. “Basic” Conversation Analysis

Hypothetical questions (HQs) are a special class of conditional question that seek a response by proposing a “what-if” situation. It is not clear to what extent view testing HQs represent a generic conversational device that operates in a similar way across contexts. I conduct a comparative analysis of HQs across four different interactional settings: ordinary conversations, research interactions, broadcast news interviews, and doctor–patient consultations. I show that while the practice of using HQs to test recipients' views and commitments is generic, or context free, both the form and function of HQs and the precise way they run off in each case are attentive in their detail to the interactional demands and affordances of the setting. I suggest that in the future, both “applied” and “basic” conversation analysis (CA) might benefit from conducting comparative analyses.

Address terms in the service of other actions: The case of news interview talk

In broadcast news interviews, interviewees will occasionally address the interviewer by name. As a method of establishing the directionality of talk, address terms are redundant in this institutional context because the normative question/answer activity structure and associated participation framework make the direction of address transparent and knowable in advance. But address terms can be deployed in the service of a variety of actions beyond addressing per se. Some of these involve disaligning actions such as topic shifts, non-conforming responses, and disagreements. Others involve the presentation of views as particularly significant or sincere. Address terms are thus a resource for managing certain expressive properties of talk, as well as its disalignment from prior talk.

Special issue on personalization in the broadcast news interview

This special issue of Discourse & Communication brings together researchers working within different methodologies and theoretical paradigms - linguistic pragmatics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis - who share a common interest in the analysis of discourse produced by the broadcast media. The authors are all members of the Ross Priory Group for Research on Broadcast Talk, an international group of scholars distinguished by their interdisciplinary approach to the study of mediated communication; and their particular concern for this issue is with personalization in broadcast news.

Questioning Presidents: Journalistic Deference and Adversarialness in the Press Conferences of U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan

This paper develops a new system for analyzing the questions that journalists ask public figures in broadcast news interviews and press conferences. This system is then applied in a comparative study of the forms of questioning that characterized the press conferences of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. The comparison focuses on the phenomenon of adversarialness in question design. Ten features of question design are examined that serve as indicators of 4 basic dimensions of adversarialness: (a) initiative, (b) directness, (c) assertiveness, and (d) hostility. The results reveal substantial and significant differences for all indicators, all in the direction of increased adversarialness. This pattern suggests that journalists have become much less deferential and more aggressive in their treatment of the U.S. president. Possible factors contributing to this development, and its broader ramifications for the evolving relationship between journalism and government, are also discussed.

Questioning Presidents: Journalistic Deference and Adversarialness in the Press Conferences of U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan

This paper develops a new system for analyzing the questions that journalists ask public figures in broadcast news interviews and press conferences. This system is then applied in a comparative study of the forms of questioning that characterized the press conferences of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. The comparison focuses on the phenomenon of adversarialness in question design. Ten features of question design are examined that serve as indicators of 4 basic dimensions of adversarialness: (a) initiative, (b) directness, (c) assertiveness, and (d) hostility. The results reveal substantial and significant differences for all indicators, all in the direction of increased adversarialness. This pattern suggests that journalists have become much less deferential and more aggressive in their treatment of the U.S. president. Possible factors contributing to this development, and its broader ramifications for the evolving relationship between journalism and government, are also discussed.

Social epistemology in broadcast news interviews

This article investigates how participants in broadcast news interviews display their orientations to a social distribution of knowledge regarding newsworthy events and actors. Interviewers treat the nature, grounds, and limits of interviewees' knowledge as accountable matters. The article employs single-case and quantitative analyses to show that, in and through the design of their questions, interviewers distinguish between (i) interviewees as subject-actors who are responsible for direct, first-hand knowledge of their own conduct; and (ii) interviewees as commentators who, on the basis of indirect, second-hand knowledge, are entitled to opinions about third parties' conduct. This distinction serves as a basis for the production of interviewees' responses as talk that expresses either matters of fact or points of opinion. The article examines how these aspects of question design establish relevancies for interviewees' responses and, ultimately, shape news content.

Tribune of the people: maintaining the legitimacy of aggressive journalism

Public service is both an ideal that journalists aspire to, and a resource that they invoke strategically to maintain the legitimacy of their more aggressive conduct. Using a database of transcripts from broadcast news interviews in the USA, this article examines the circumstances under which journalist-interviewers present themselves as asking questions on behalf of the general public. Journalists deploy the practice selectively, most notably when engaged in aggressively probing or adversarial lines of questioning. This is because aligning with the public neutralizes and legitimates a question, and thereby increases the pressure on the interviewee to be forthcoming in response. This practice tends to be effective in inducing public figures to acquiesce to aggressive forms of questioning. Moreover, recurrent use of this practice affects the public image of journalism itself, giving it a distinctly populist cast.

Answers and evasions

This article provides an overview of the dynamics of answering and resisting or evading questions in broadcast news interviews. After a preliminary examination of the practices through which answers are recognizably constructed, the analysis turns to the practices through which interviewees manage responses that resist the agenda of an interviewer's question. When resisting overtly, interviewees engage in various forms of “damage control.” When resisting covertly, interviewees take steps to render the resistance less conspicuous. Both sets of practices facilitate resistant responses by reducing the negative consequences that might otherwise follow. Such practices demonstrate that, although interviewees have developed practices for resisting questions, the norm of answering remains a salient feature of the contemporary broadcast news interview.

Some Standard Uses of "What about"-Prefaced Interrogatives in the Broadcast News Interview

Interrogatives (as linguistic objects, described by their grammatical features) and questioning (as a social action, responsive to prior actions and consequential for subsequent ones) can both serve as vehicles for a range of social activities. This article reports on one distinctive form of interrogative, the "what about"-prefaced interrogative, with a particular focus on its uses in broadcast news interviews. We analyze the internal composition and sequential position of "what about"-prefaced interrogatives and identify four standard uses of them by interviewers: pursuing a prior interviewee's response, juxtaposing multiple interviewees' positions, invoking a prior agenda, and proposing membership in a category. On the basis of this analysis, we consider how the recurrent use of this particular interrogative form can serve as an interactional means of instantiating a particular broadcasting "style," thus contributing to distinctions among various public affairs programs.