The study “‘Softballs’ for ‘Hardballs’: The congenial political interview on right-wing partisan TV news outlets” by Marianna Patrona from Hellenic Army Academy used a conversation-analytic approach to analyze political interviewing of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon in right-wing media.
According to the author, the public watchdog role of the media is played out especially in the context of political news interviewing. Most of the research on the topic has focused on adversarial interviewing, where politicians are held accountable by the media taking the role of an inquisitor.
Collaborative and deferential interviewing has been explored less, and this article seeks to fill that gap in the research. The context here is the surge of right-wing populism and the increasingly legitimated political and discursive bias in news channels.
The data for the analysis comes from four political interviews in Fox News and GB News, from the U.S. and Great Britain, respectively. GB News has been considered the counterpart of Fox and the interviews were hosted by Nigel Farage.
According to the analysis, the interviews in GB took the form of a friendly chat, as demonstrated by numerous agreements in speech, both in extended form and through interjections of agreement like “yeah/yes” and demonstrations of active listening “hmm, mm”. Farage also allows Trump to talk about his golf course and other topics of his liking without interruption, even if they were not asked about.
Similarly, Farage allows Bannon to have lengthy monologues on the supposed corruption of the British mainstream media. There is a marked lack of disagreement and adversarialness, which may stem from the role of the host as both an interviewer and a right-wing political whose politics are in line with the subjects.
The Trump interview on Fox News similarly was friendly in tone – although the interviewer Sean Hannity did sometimes interrupt or steer the conversation, but only to face-saving topics for the interviewee, where he was allowed to address claims against him and explain them in detail. Here, the style can be characterized as “softball questioning for image repair”.
In conclusion, the analysis has shown congenial interviewing strategies on allied news channels. The marked lack of adversarial questioning replicated conversational dynamics of friendly conversation. The changes present evidence for a paradigm shift from adversarial questioning and from the task of accountability in journalism.
The article “‘Softballs’ for ‘Hardballs’: The congenial political interview on right-wing partisan TV news outlets” by Marianna Patrona is in Journalism. (free abstract).
Picture: Untitled by Michal Czyz.
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