Chapter 2. The accountability interview, politics and change in UK public service broadcasting

Montgomery, Martin

doi:10.1075/dapsac.42.06mon

Cited by 40 publications

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“…There is yet more to explore with regard to the diversity and ongoing transformations of journalistic identities that are perhaps more clearly displayed in other types of broadcast news settings. A contribution in this direction is the current research focusing on an argumentative journalism in which questions and answers have been partly replaced by assertions and counter-assertions, and where journalists explicitly depart from the formal neutral position observed in previous research (Patrona 2011;Hutchby 2011;Montgomery 2011). The present study of expert dialogues between journalists is yet another attempt to explore the multiplicity of journalistic identities in news broadcasting.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

The joint construction of a journalistic expert identity in studio interactions between journalists on TV news

Ekström

Lundell

2011

Text &Amp; Talk - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse &Amp; Communication Studies

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The overall aim of this study is to examine how journalistic expert identities are constructed and displayed in the context of intraprofessional journalist-tojournalist interviews on live television news. Previous research has, in detail, explored how journalists orient to the identity of a critical and impartial interrogator, especially in political news interviews. By focusing on journalistic expert identities, this article contributes to a wider perspective on the multiple and changing identities performed in contemporary journalism. The overall argument is that the expert identity is enabled and promoted in collaborative activities on different levels of discourse such as: (i) the media format, (ii) the question-answer based organization of the interaction, (iii) the orientation to liveness, and (iv) how knowledgeability and epistemic stance are constructed and displayed in the actual design of questions and answers. The data consist of interviews from the prime-time news program Aktuellt, broadcast on Swedish public service television in 2008 and 2009.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

The joint construction of a journalistic expert identity in studio interactions between journalists on TV news

Ekström

Lundell

2011

Text &Amp; Talk - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse &Amp; Communication Studies

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“…Questioning practice in news interviews has long been a central interest of linguists and other social scientists exploring the role of journalists in performing and maintaining journalistic ethical norms. In particular, neutralism and adversarialism as the twin journalistic codes have been widely researched in studies of news interviews (Clayman 1988, 1992, 1993, 2002, Clayman & Heritage 2002a, 2002b, Eströma 2009, Heritage 1985, Montgomery 2007, 2008, 2011, Rendle-Short 2007 and the focus of such research is the collaboration of question-answer turn-taking. On the one hand, the primary requirement for a journalist is to maintain his or her neutral posture in professional practice, and the basic issues are usually initiated and realized through question-answer H Z T C 6 activities; on the other hand, news interview questioning is not -and cannot be -strictly neutral.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As noted in Clayman and Heritage (2002a), both in America and Britain, although diff erences and similarities exist when comparing their trajectories of development, the style of news interviews has generally changed from being deferential to being adversarial. As to the generic evolution of the news interview, Montgomery (2011) maintained that the news interview in Britain is also shifting towards 'argument.' These assertions are drawn in principle on the examination of interviewer-interviewee interactions in news interview programs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross Cultural Variation of Questioning in News Interviews – A Case of Post-Question Elaboration in Chinese News Interviews

Hua¹,

Chen²

2016

D&I

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Questioning practice in news interviews has long been a central concern in the current studies of media discourse analysis in terms of its role in maintaining journalistic neutralism. Questions are usually structured into two forms: simple and complex one. In western news interviews, prefatory statements in complex questions are suffi ciently examined in previous studies. Drawing on Conversation Analysis as methodology, this paper examines the questioning practice of English news interviews (i.e., Dialogue) aired in Chinese context and captures the post-question elaboration as a noticeable variant particularity in questioning practice in Chinese news interviews. Post-question elaborations are recognized in terms of the formal features in question design and their functions in the interviewer-interviewee interaction and further categorized into three types: fi rst, post-question elaboration being evaded; second, post-question elaboration being answered along with the question; third, post-question elaboration being answered with question itself being evaded. This analysis reveals that post-question elaborations appear mostly to be associated with the informational contents negatively implicated in the question design and serve not only to contextualize the question itself but also to justify the act of questioning on the part of the interviewer.

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“…They are characterised by a lack of neutrality and 'interview-like talk that is recursively in breach of that primary norm' (ibid). According to Hutchby, the HPI shares many features of the adversarial 'accountability interview' (Montgomery 2011) but can be characterised as 'hybrid' not only by its interdiscursivity, 'shifting between speech exchange systems otherwise associated with non-interview settings' (Hutchby 2011: 116), but also by the interviewer's licence to personalise arguments. HPIs are also characterised by the interviewer tending to 'foreground his or her agency as a spokesperson 'for' certain political stances or social forces' and finally, by the interviewer taking licence 'to engage in belligerent and emotionally heightened episodes of direct confrontation with the interviewee' (Ibid).…”

Section: The Newsnight Interviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Celebrity capital in the political field: Russell Brand’s migration from stand-up comedy to Newsnight

Arthurs

Shaw

2016

Media, Culture & Society

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The socio-political conditions that enable celebrities to migrate from the entertainment to the political field are specific to their national and historical contexts (Ribke 2015). A significant feature of contemporary politics in the UK is a decline in support for the established political parties (Keen 2015) alongside a pervasive sense of disillusion with parliamentary politicians (Jennings et al 2015). While the professional political class are seen as increasingly indistinguishable as they argue over the bureaucratic minutiae of managing the post-crash budget deficit, charismatic individuals have emerged aligned with new social movements and captured the popular imagination. We have chosen to focus our attention on one such figure, celebrity entertainer and comedian Russell Brand whose turn to political activism has attracted widespread media attention. He has been described in an influential current affairs magazine, as:'the spiritual leader of Britain's disaffected anti-capitalist youth…dismissed by his opponents as a clownish opportunist and even a hypocrite due to his own wealth, he is nevertheless the most charismatic figure on Britain's populist Left' (Prospect 2015). Our research aims to discover how Brand used and adapted his persona and performances to gain legitimacy in the political field while maintaining the authenticity and popularity of his celebrity brand. In order to demonstrate how this worked in practice, we have selected two contrasting performances to show how Brand used his cultural capital as a comedic performer to challenge the political status quo. Our textual analyses of his stand-up show which a celebrity first comes to prominence were found by Ribke (2015) to affect the degree to which media attention could be transformed into political power. We identify the particular challenges and opportunities arising from Brand's origins in stand-up comedy, such as the use of his comedic skills to counteract media hostility and his embracing of his outsider status in opposition to the political establishment to lay claim to be a spokesperson for 'the people'.

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Chapter 2. The accountability interview, politics and change in UK public service broadcasting

Cited by 40 publications

References 0 publications

The joint construction of a journalistic expert identity in studio interactions between journalists on TV news

The joint construction of a journalistic expert identity in studio interactions between journalists on TV news

Cross Cultural Variation of Questioning in News Interviews – A Case of Post-Question Elaboration in Chinese News Interviews

Celebrity capital in the political field: Russell Brand’s migration from stand-up comedy to Newsnight

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