Aspects of Topical Organization in News Interviews: The Use of Agenda-Shifting Procedures by Interviewees

Aggressiveness and deference in Arabic broadcast interviews

“…The system of presidential press conferences, however, differs from other institutional interactions such as interviews, courtrooms, police interrogations and medical examinations, in which the questioner's role is more powerful than that of the respondent (Thornborrow, 2002). Interviewers have control over the interview, as they can move to a new topic, select who is going to speak next, and even have the potential to determine the Interviewee's response (Clayman and Heritage, 2002a;Greatbatch, 1986). Due to the fact that 'Multiple Questions' can raise more than one issue, it could be considered to be more hostile to split the questions into multiple turns in order to more narrowly focus each answer, which can eventually place more pressure on the interviewee.…”

“…In fact, McGuire (1967) analyzed a number of question strategies observed in presidential press conferences, and he used only the aspect of follow-up questions as an indictor of oppositional strategies. Follow-up questions are defined by Greatbatch (1986) as questions that are produced after a response to a previous question, addressed to the answerer and built on the response that precedes them. So as Eriksson (2011) emphasized, follow-up questions have to be related to something said in the prior answer as a response to the first question, not just two turns in a row.…”

“…For example, IRs might treat the answer given as inadequate, and produce a follow-up question to seek elaboration or clarification (Clayman and Heritage, 2002a;Greatbatch, 1986;Smith, 1990;Eriksson, 2011). Although Banning and Billingsley (2007) claimed that follow-up questions are produced in adversarial contexts, Eriksson (2011) has shown this is not always the case.…”

Hybridisation, personalisation and tribuneship in the political interview

“…From this perspective, a wide variety of aspects of news interview conduct have previously been described, ranging from the basic ways in which the turntaking format is managed (Greatbatch, 1988); to the means by which interviewees seek to shift the agendas pursued in interviewers' questions (Greatbatch, 1986); to the crucial processes of 'neutralism' -the ways in which interviewers challenge interviewees without adopting positions in their own right (Clayman, 1988(Clayman, , 1992; see also Clayman, 1989;Clayman and Heritage, 2002;Clayman and Whalen, 1988/9;Greatbatch, 1986;Heritage, 1985;Pomerantz, 1988/89;Rendle-Short, 2007;Schegloff, 1988/89). In terms of understanding different news formats, the basic standpoint of CA studies is that 'the interactional structures through which broadcast news is conveyed must necessarily contribute to the content and appearance of news messages' (Heritage et al, 1980: 80).…”

Manipulative uses of pragmatic markers in political discourse

“…The majority of CDAinformed micro-analyses tend to focus on the manipulative potential of the choice of content words, that is, conceptual items (for example, Wodak, 1989;van Dijk, 1993) and morpho-syntactic choices such as activation / passivation (van Leeuwen, 1996;Tranchese and Zollo, 2013), nominalization (Fowler et al, 1979;Billig, 2008), the use of pronouns (Bramley, 2001;Irimiea, 2010;Ho, 2013), and the ergative (Stubbs, 1996). As for the study of pragmalinguistic and socio-pragmatic phenomena, there has been an increasing interest in CDA in face management (Armasu, 2013), the realisation of particular speech acts (for example, Hill, 1999;Fetzer, 2007), as well as conversational strategies and topical organization (for example, Greatbatch, 1986;Becker, 2007).…”