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The Political Interview

Broadcast Talk in the Interactional Combat Zone

Ian Hutchby author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Lexington Books

Published:22nd Aug '23

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The Political Interview cover

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.

"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."

-- Martina Temmerman, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

“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.”

-- Gonen Dori-Hacohen, University of Massachusetts Amh

ISBN: 9781793640116

Dimensions: 231mm x 154mm x 15mm

Weight: 308g

196 pages