The Visible Politics of Intersubjectivity: Constructing Knowledge as Shared to Manage Resistance in News Interviews

Abstract

This paper describes one practice of “resistance” to challenging interviewees in television news interviews. Interviewers use turn medial tags when working with field reporters to display shared knowledge to an overhearing audience. In contrast, analysis focuses on examples in which tag questions are issued midturn, e.g., “You put your finger on the button didn’t you.=when you said …”. In this practice knowledge and understanding are built as shared in the face of resistance from high-status and highly experienced interviewees. The syntactic reorganization of different elements within individual turns, combined with the possibility of manipulating the sequential positioning of an utterance, allow intersubjectivity to be invasively and coercively re/built through displays of mis/alignment across turns and sequences of talk. We explore the implications of this for how resistance can be understood. Our analysis also contributes to a politics of intersubjectivity and, more specifically, interknowledgeability.

What Does “Resistance” Actually Look Like? The Respecification of Resistance as an Interactional Accomplishment

“…They show that resistance manifests in different ways and for different aims—from the smallest features of talk to larger sequences of action. The contributions cut across a range of environments, from healthcare encounters (Benwell & Rhys, 2023/this issue), crisis negotiations (Sikveland & Stokoe, 2023/this issue), “cold” calls (Humă & Stokoe, 2023/this issue), child–parent encounters (Flint & Rhys, 2023/this issue), police encounters (Raymond et al, 2023/this issue), undergraduate supervision meetings (West, 2023/this issue), to news interviews (Hepburn et al, 2023/this issue). Finally, Antaki's (2023/this issue) discussion highlights a “gradient of imposition” that underlies initiating actions which end up being resisted.…”

“…Working on news interviews, Hepburn, Potter, and Caldwell (2023/this issue) investigate interviewers’ use of turn-medial tag questions as a method for dealing with resistance from their interviewees. These tags are commonly used in news settings to help viewers by contextualizing interviewee answers and building a shared epistemic landscape between interlocutors.…”