The Political Interview: Broadcast Talk in the Interactional Combat Zone

The landscape of broadcast news media is constantly changing, partly under the influence of changing technology but also due to changes in the social role of television journalism. The Political Interview: Broadcast Talk in the Interactional Combat Zone takes a sociological and linguistic approach to examining these changes, focusing on the discourse practices that are associated with them. Tracing contemporary developments in the ways that interviews with politicians are conducted in a range of televised formats, Ian Hutchby analyzes increasing tendencies toward conflictual interactions that may fundamentally impact the nature of political communication and the role of news interviews in the democratic process. Training the sharp analytical lens of conversation analysis on the actual discourse of live broadcast news, Hutchby’s book is both timely—addressing academic and populist concerns about infotainment, dumbing down, and political mistrust among the electorate—and relevant to a range of specialists in sociolinguistics, communication studies, political studies, journalism and media studies, and sociology.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Chapter 1: The Political Interview in Context Chapter 2: Analyzing Interviews as Arenas of Language Use Chapter 3: Total Mediatization: A Media Ecology of the Political Interview Chapter 4: Rules of Engagement: The Conventional Political Interview Chapter 5: “It’s a Simple Question”: The Adversarial Political Interview Chapter 6: “So My Position Is…”: Explanatory Answers and Agenda Contests Chapter 7: Opinion, Emotion and Personalization in the Hybrid Political Interview Chapter 8: Tribuneship, Objectivity and the Public Interest Chapter 9: The Political Interview in an Opinionated World: Concluding Reflections Appendix: Transcription Conventions References Index About the Author

About the Author :
Ian Hutchby is honorary professor of sociology at the University of York.

Review :
This book gives a comprehensive overview of the contemporary developments in broadcast political interviews from a conversation analytical point of view. Ian Hutchby is a keen observer of interactional techniques that often go unnoticed in the communication between journalists and politicians. He describes and explains them in a fine-grained and systematic way, thereby adding a valuable contribution to both the study fields of political communication and media discourse. “Hutchby, a pioneer in the study of broadcast talk, presents a much-needed updated view on the political interview, its practices, its structures, and especially its development. Hutchby uses key concepts such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘mediatization’ to move from the traditional interviews to newer genres in what is a central resource for all discourse analysis research of the media.”