In Talking politics in broadcast media Mats Ekström & Marianna Patrona bring together a collection of studies that address the evolving nature of broadcast politics through the study of talk-in-interaction in the political media sphere. The contributions to this volume are framed around the challenges posed by evolving formats, functions, and resources involved in interaction in the politician-journalist media space. Talking politics in broadcast media furthers the research agenda for investigators in discourse, talk-in-interaction, and politics in the media sphere by using close analysis of talk to describe participants' work in producing the evolving news genre.
Ch. 1, by Steven E. Clayman & Tanya Romaniuk, describes the evolving organization of question design during election campaigns as a function of journalists'—rather than solely candidates'—work, to paint a “public portrait of the candidate” (30). Martin Montgomery follows, in Ch. 2, with analysis of the role of “micro-arguments” in the evolution of adverserialism in the (political) “accountability [news] interview.” Andrew Tolson's contribution in Ch. 3 considers changes in journalists' discourses on trust in politicians through analysis of data from news bulletins regarding the UK government's budget releases from 1984, 2005, and 2009. Tolson suggests that structural changes in the BBC account for the differences in editorial comments observed over this time. Eva De Smedt & Kristel Vandebrande extend the description of journalists' enactment of interactional roles beyond the well-worn description of “adverserial interviewer” in their illustration of shifts in frame which occasion “producer,” “interactional manager,” and “political journalist” roles used to enact political debates on Flemish television. In Ch. 5, Johanna Rendle-Short examines the way in which politicians employ turn-initial address terms in prefacing nonstraightforward answers in Australian political news interviews.
In Ch. 6 Ian Hutchby tackles the “hybrid political interview,” an emerging form of political media that is part interview and part argument, while Mats Ekström highlights a different form of hybridity in Ch. 7—the talk-show/political interview. Ekström's analysis illustrates the challenges politicians face as interviewers shift between hybridized frames in these new media spaces. In Ch. 8, Marianna Patrona contrasts Greek “accountability interviews” of politicians on news television with received literature on neutralism in the political news interview. She highlights marked differences in interactive norms visible in Greek political news interviews. Using data from Israeli news interviews, Zohar Kampf & Efrat Daskal argue in Ch. 9 that shifts in journalistic norms now allow increased incidence of face-threatening acts in modern political interview. In Ch. 10, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus further unpacks the practice of accountability interviews in the Spanish context of citizen interviewers on a moderated news forum. She illustrates citizen interviewers' resources as they employ “impoliteness strategies” to challenge politicians. Finally, in Ch. 11, Francis L. F. Lee & Angel M. Y. Lin describe face threats enacted by citizens during journalist-moderated accountability interviews on Hong Kong news radio.
