Journalism

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Dialogue and dissemination in news media interviews

Geoffrey Craig
Journalism 2010 11: 75
DOI: 10.1177/1464884909349582

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Article
Journalism
11(1) 75–90
Dialogue and dissemination in © The Author(s) 2010
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news media interviews sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermission.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1464884909349582
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Geoffrey Craig
University of Otago, New Zealand

Abstract
This article analyses the nature of the dialogue of broadcast news media interviews
and their public dissemination and argues that political interviews are fundamentally
contestable and indeterminate encounters. In contrast to theoretical and journalistic
accounts that see conflict and disagreement in news media interviews as problems that
need to be minimized and overcome, this article states that the dialogical account of
language employed in the work of Bakhtin and Vološinov and agonistic political theory
more accurately capture the communicative dynamics of news media interviews.
It follows that the function of journalistic interviewers should be cast less in terms
of producing consensus and mutual understanding and more in terms of keeping the
political open.

Keywords
agonistic, dialogic, dialogue, dissemination, interviews, journalism, news media

Introduction
The interview has been said to be ‘the fundamental act’ of contemporary journalism
(Schudson, 1994: 565; see also Gans, 1979: 138). More generally, interviews occur
across a range of institutional contexts and are integral to knowledge production, moving
some to argue that we live in an ‘interview society’ (Atkinson and Silverman, 1997).
Equally, it has been declared that we are living in ‘The Age of Interview’: ‘a carnival of
chat, chatter, conversation, confession, spin, sharing, and selling’ (Rosenstiel, 1995: 23).
Elsewhere, journalism’s primary role has been attributed to its ‘conversational’ status: its
ability ‘to stimulate public dialogue on issues of common concern to a democratic public’
(Anderson et al., 1994: xx). Interviews are a staple of journalistic and media output more
generally, because they are cheap to produce and the foregrounding of individuals works
to ‘embody’ issues and generally facilitate performative and dramatic effect, as well as

Corresponding author:
Geoffrey Craig, University of Otago, New Zealand
Email: geoff.craig@stonebow.otago.ac.nz

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76 Journalism 11(1)

enhance newsworthiness. The ‘live’ and ‘spontaneous’ appearance of interviews also

highlights their essentially unpredictable status, however highly conventionalized the
encounter may be. The interrogative and personal communicative form of interviews can
seem to elevate their truth status over and above other forms of communication, such as
a political speech or a print article. Interviews are often the basis for reportage: fragments
of personal interviews and news media conferences are re-presented as quotations,
reported speech and sound-bites in print and broadcast journalism. The focus here is on
broadcast news media political interviews where the interview itself is presented as a text
in some form of extended duration. It is through such textual presentation that the status
of news media interviews as dialogue and dissemination can be assessed.1
The news media interview is a complicated communicative encounter. The study of
news media interviews unsettle ‘many cherished dichotomies in social science and media
studies: the split between interpersonal and mass communication, between news content
and production processes, and between public and private spheres of social life’ (Clayman
and Heritage, 2002: 12). The apparent simplicity of an interpersonal discussion belies the
generic strictures of the interview format and the crucial impact of a third party, the audi-
ence, on the dynamics of the conversation between interviewer and interviewee. The
news media interview is characterized by a set of generic markers that determine both the
roles of interviewers and interviewees – the modes of address, the proxemics of the inter-
view, the structure of questions and answers – and the limits within which each of the
participants can negotiate the constraints of those roles. This generic complexity extends
to what Paddy Scannell (1991: 1) has referred to as the ‘double articulation’ of broadcast
talk whereby interpersonal interactions are also oriented to the general public. It is some-
thing of a misnomer to suggest that the recipients of news media interviews are the
absent public because their presence fundamentally informs the structure and content of
the interview. Similarly, the register of interview talk is informed by its public orienta-
tion: a political current affairs interview, for example, negotiates the respective registers
of political and everyday discourse. An important feature of news media interviews is the
‘conversationalization’ (Fairclough, 1995) of public discussion, whereby the elite voices
associated with the formal, institutional talk of the media seek alignment with the col-
loquial, everyday discourse of ‘the people’.
It has been noted recently that broadcast media have become ‘increasingly dialogic
and conversation oriented, rather than monologic’ (Ekström, 2007: 970) and there has
been a corresponding interest in the specific analysis of media interviews (Montgomery,
2008) and the roles of language in journalism more broadly (Ekström, 2007; Richardson,
2008; Zelizer, 2004). Within dialogue research in communication studies there has also
been an emerging interest in the news media, contrasting with earlier trends that ‘often
treated the mass media as an iconic Other, the very embodiment of the impersonal social
relations that undermine mutuality’ (Pauly, 2004: 243). In order to understand the roles
of language in journalism, researchers have recently drawn on the fields of conversation
analysis (Ekström, 2007; Richardson, 2008) and critical discourse analysis (Carvalho,
2008). In specific studies of talk shows and interviews there has been ‘dialogue’ across
the fields of conversation analysis, discourse analysis and argumentation theory
(Lauerbach and Aijmer, 2007; Van Rees, 2007).2 An important issue arising out of such

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Craig 77

research is the evaluation of the role of power in journalistic discourse and news media
interviews. While the microanalysis of conversation analysis highlights the nature of
interview participant interactions, it has tended to be ‘agnostic’ on the issue of power
(Hutchby, 1996: 114; see also Fairclough, 1995: 12). Similarly, the ‘relationship between
dialogue and power remains relatively unexplored’ in dialogue theory although this has
been addressed more recently (Hammond et al., 2003; Pauly, 2004). Critical discourse
analysis, which extends its focus to the institutional and cultural contexts of texts, has
alternatively placed issues of power more centrally at the heart of its analyses (Carvalho,
2008; Fairclough, 1995; Fowler, 1991).3
I argue here that the dialogical account of language employed in the work of the so-
called Bakhtin Circle of theorists,4 together with agonistic political theory, can be
deployed to capture the communicative dynamics of news media interviews and that
they have the potential to throw new light on journalism and the nature of contemporary
public life. The Bakhtinian understanding of language5 and the agonistic political theory
of Chantal Mouffe (1993, 2000) emphasize the necessary play of power in communica-
tive exchanges and the perpetual struggle that informs the diversity and contingency of
public life. The potential that the Bakhtin Circle can offer in the articulation of new per-
spectives on the public sphere has been recently noted by Nick Crossley and John
Michael Roberts, who observe that the theory of language that informs the work of
Bakhtin and Vološinov lends a particular ‘sensibility towards the democratic value of
diverse voices being heard in the public sphere’ (2004: 18). Similarly, the work captured
under the heading of ‘agonistic’ theory is now beginning to be applied to an understand-
ing of journalism (Carpentier, 2005; Carpentier and Cammaerts, 2006; Craig, 2000).
Such an account provides the means to arrive at an understanding about pluralism and
conflict in democratic contexts that has powerful ramifications for journalism. As Nico
Carpentier and Bart Cammaerts noted in their interview with Chantal Mouffe, the ago-
nistic model ‘implies a plea for journalistic representations that respect the diversity and
contingency of the social and the political, and does not unnecessarily foreclose them’
(2006: 972). As such, these theoretical approaches are variously informed by an impulse
that runs counter to many communication theories and models of journalism that attempt
to ‘resolve’ or ‘pin down’ democratic communication: whether it be the desire for the
resolution of conflict that motivates the theory of communicative action (Habermas,
1984, 1987) or the desire for more active and rational civic participation in public jour-
nalism. I suggest that such endeavours insufficiently acknowledge the agonistic basis of
language use, public communication and modern democratic life.
Journalists are of course aware that in practice news media interviews are informed
by conflict and the negotiation of power relations and that despite the interrogative
rigour of interviews they often remain open-ended and indeterminate communicative
encounters. Journalism texts often provide a balanced discussion about interviewing
that highlights both the ideals of journalistic interviews and the difficulties that are
always encountered. The purpose of interviews is said to be to ‘elicit information’
(Masterton and Patching, 1986: 125) and that while an ‘assertive approach’ might be
adopted by an interviewer it should ‘secure information the public should have’ and ‘not
be motivated by point scoring or personality conflict’ (Conley and Lamble, 2006: 185).

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78 Journalism 11(1)

Advice on interviewing is also offered that highlights practices which will enhance the
quality of the interaction such as prior research, a professional demeanour, empathy and
listening skills (Conley and Lamble, 2006; Masterton and Patching, 1986; Sedorkin and
McGregor, 2002). Equally, however, such texts also highlight the consequences of
unequal social standing between journalists and their interview subjects, and the reluc-
tant or confrontational approach of interviewees which impacts on the quality of the
information generated by the interview. The reality of the often-flawed nature of the
interview exchange is frankly acknowledged:

Interviewees and interviewers trade subtle verbal punishments and rewards, which influence
both questions and the responses. Often people will feel under no obligation to provide information
to the media, especially when they have something to hide. At other times they are genuinely and
understandably fearful of the public spotlight. Misunderstandings can easily occur. People lie,
withhold the truth or tell only a portion of truth. (Conley and Lamble, 2006: 183)

For some, this kind of portrayal of news media interviews confirms its irredeemable
status as a communicative form that is able to yield quality dialogue: speakers may not
be willing participants and the motives of speakers may not be expressed transparently;
interview subjects may not be open and responsive to different and unexpected points of
view; and they may be indifferent to an ultimate goal of mutual understanding and con-
sensus. While the desire for genuine and comprehensive political dialogue is understand-
able and laudable, we also need to recognize that political interviews are always sites of
contestation over meanings and values and we should expect the discourse of partici-
pants to be disciplined and tightly controlled.
I argue here, then, through a consideration of both the interpersonal dialogue of news
media interviews and their public dissemination, that political interviews are fundamen-
tally contestable and indeterminate encounters. I propose that the ongoing struggle over
meaning that occurs in news media interviews is a product of the dialogic nature of lan-
guage and, as such, that the purpose of political interviews is to facilitate expressions of
difference. This account of news media interviews is further supported by the under-
standing that the public orientation of news media interviews is an integral feature of the
communicative act and that the interview is informed by, and in turn informs, the broader
speech community in which it occurs. This outline of the communicative nature of news
media interviews also has ramifications for our understandings of the practice of journal-
ism, shifting the emphasis for the interviewer from the requirement to facilitate the dis-
covery of the truth of the subject of discussion to a more open-ended interrogation of
different points of view. I am not arguing that journalism should not be involved in the
critical evaluations of politicians and other public figures who are the subjects of politi-
cal interviews and that greater understanding of different opinions is not desirable.
Rather, I want to stress that such journalistic processes of inquiry and subsequent evalu-
ations will always necessarily be informed by the power relations that inform the com-
municative exchanges, and that, while interviews will provide information and elucidate
the opinions of others, the goal of political interviews should not be the formulation of a
consensus or ‘end-position’ on the debate.

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Craig 79

Dialogue in news media interviews

The merit of the interpersonal interactions that occur in news media interviews often
derives from understandings about the nature of the dialogue that occurs. News media
interviews are a form of institutional dialogue, and, as such, distinguished against ordi-
nary conversation or informal talk. Conversation is defined by a range of features (how-
ever problematic they may be) such as a greater sense of equal status between participants,
equal rights to speak, greater degrees of reciprocity and assumptions about equal contri-
butions to the conversation. Institutional dialogue is more explicitly goal oriented, there
are obvious status differentials between participants with unequal access to information
and knowledge, and unequal degrees of participation (Drew and Heritage, 1992: 49).
Part of the problem about assessing the nature of dialogue that occurs in news media
interviews is that despite the complexity of the concept of dialogue – its different forms
(Walton, 1989),6 its different meanings in English and its differences across languages
and cultures (Wierzbicka, 2006) – the term itself is often deployed with a sense of inher-
ent positive value: it ‘embodies a certain social ideal’ (Wierzbicka, 2006: 693). As John
Durham Peters (1999: 33) has noted, dialogue in contemporary communicative contexts
has ‘attained something of a holy status’. This ideal, often captured in Jürgen Habermas’s
(1984, 1987) concept of ‘communicative action’ or the ‘ideal speech situation’, is subse-
quently applied to the particular communicative dynamics of the institutional dialogue of
news media interviews, which are more accurately captured in Habermas’s category of
‘strategic discourse’.
While the gap between the ideals of dialogue and the realities of the news media
interview genre may be readily apparent, news media interviews nonetheless attract
interest because of their potential to produce rational discourse: the extended process of
inquiry and defence of ideas, the immediacy and transparency of the discussion, and the
relative performative restraint of the interview participants, cumulatively represent a
communicative act which, while not characterized by a belief in an ultimate position of
unanimity, is informed by a desire to understand the other’s point of view. In the age of
the sound-bite, the sustained news media interview can be represented as the nearest
journalistic approximation to the ideals of dialogue. Despite the obvious differences
between forms of institutional dialogue and more informal conversations, news media
interviews have been criticized for their poor quality of dialogue and characterized as
‘performance masquerading as conversation’ (Nichols, cited in Rosenstiel, 1995: 26), a
‘kind of ceremonial ritual that only resembles the real thing...’ (Rosenstiel, 1995: 26).
More generally, journalism is centrally implicated in what Deborah Tannen (1998) has
described as ‘the argument culture’. This kind of frustration, often targeting the intran-
sigence of politicians, is also frequently manifested in public and journalistic opinions
about the value of news media dialogues. In the last Australian election, for example,
there was an often-stated dissatisfaction with the obfuscation of politicians and their
refusal to engage in real dialogue as they persisted in ‘staying on message’ (Craig,
2008). The Sunrise early morning television programme’s website, for example,
expressed frustration after one of its own debates, stating that what bothers ‘the Sunrise
office about this election campaign’ is:

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80 Journalism 11(1)

the way nearly all politicians are unable to answer questions directly. This was obvious and
infuriating in the Sunrise Health Debate. It is a political tactic that takes the people for fools and
avoids taking real responsibility for issues. (Sunrise, 2007)

I argue that rather than imposing such a framework on news media interviews, which
only produces a perpetual lament about journalistic practice and political discourse, we
can employ an alternative account that highlights the dialogic character of news media
interviews and draws on the work of the so-called Bakhtin Circle of theorists – most nota-
bly Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin and Valentin Nikolaevich Vološinov. In contrast to an
‘individualistic subjectivism’ (Vološinov, 1973: 84) where utterances are considered as
complete and finished entities, the product of that individual consciousness independent
of intended recipients, Bakhtin declares that ‘utterances are not indifferent to one another,
and are not self-sufficient’, and, as such, ‘Each utterance is filled with echoes and rever-
berations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of
speech communication’ (Bakhtin, 1986: 91). For Bakhtin and Vološinov, it is not only
face-to-face communication that is so structured: all texts are informed by this dialogic
orientation and they argue that ‘verbal interaction is the basic reality of language’
(Vološinov, 1973: 94). This fundamental feature of language – its orientation toward an
addressee – extends to the level of the word: as Bakhtin evocatively stated, ‘the word in
language is half someone else’s’ (1981: 293). News media interviews are sites where the
essentially dialogical nature of utterances is rendered evident. However much a politician
may stubbornly assert an argument, the unitary status of the argument and the monological
form of its utterance are denied by the very context of the interview genre.
This diachronic feature of language – responding to something in the past, anticipating
future responses – highlights that language must be understood in the social contexts of its
deployment; it underlines the historical character of language, and highlights the political
struggle inherent in language use. In contrast to Habermas, who tries to construct a formal
set of communicative principles, abstracted from specific social contexts, Bakhtin and
Vološinov focus on the ‘immediate social situation’ (Vološinov, 1973: 85) of utterances.
This extends to an acknowledgment of the centrality of the specific embodiments of com-
municative acts: in contrast to the Habermasian subject who has been criticized for its lack
of materiality (Alway, 1999; Crossley, 1997; Gardiner, 2004), the Bakhtinian subject is
profoundly embodied (Bakhtin, 1984). For the Bakhtin Circle of theorists, language is
always the product of ideological struggle, ‘refracting the contradictory nature of the
world’ (Roberts, 2004: 68), and a speaker cannot achieve control over the discourses they
employ because words always have ‘a history that carries more than the intent of the
speaker’ (Garvey, 2000: 378). This is not to deny, of course, that words and discourses
over time and as a result of ideological dominance, assume more fixed meanings, but it is
to assert that such meanings can always be contested. That is, the force of centralization is
indispensable to the life of language in ‘guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual under-
standing’ (Morris, 1994: 74), but nonetheless every utterance is a site where processes of
centralization and decentralization occur. Habermas also implements an understanding of
communicative rationality that is grounded in intersubjective relations, but he seeks to
establish a transparent communicative context that involves the bracketing of power rela-
tions. By contrast, Bakhtin and Vološinov argue that any attempt to establish a neutral

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Craig 81

communicative process involves the privileging of the ideological values that necessarily
inform the discourse and context of such acts of communication.
The understanding of language use that I am advocating here, then, highlights the
contestability, or the agonistic7 quality of communicative encounters such as news media
interviews, in contrast to theoretical accounts that see such contestation and conflict as
communicative problems that need to be overcome in order to obtain synthesis, knowl-
edge and truth. It could be argued that raising the goal of consensus makes too much of
the position of an ultimate agreement in a communicative encounter. As has been argued
elsewhere, dialogue can also be portrayed as a ‘relatively modest ideal’ that simply
‘implies that each party makes a step in the direction of the other’ (Wierzbicka, 2006:
692). In response, it can be noted that the Bakhtinian position can also be overdrawn. As
I have previously noted (Craig, 2007: 31), dialogue for Bakhtin does not preclude the
possibility of agreement nor can Bakhtin be cast as ‘anti-rational’. He agrees that ‘we
must be “answerably rational” creatures [b]ut for Bakhtin this is a practical rationality’
(Gardiner, 2004: 33, author’s italics) grounded in the contexts of the everyday, particular
communicative contexts, and always informed by individual affective dispositions. An
agonistic position on news media interviews does not posit an unrelational and incom-
mensurate articulation of views and it does not preclude the possibility that two speakers
may gain greater insight into each other’s position and acknowledge the merits of alter-
native arguments. An agonistic position argues against theoretical accounts that privilege
an ultimate position of consensus and unity because communicative and democratic
struggles are always informed by the specificity of local circumstances and the exigen-
cies of political contestation, and the constitution of any form of communicative or social
unity involves the erasure of difference. As Chantal Mouffe (1993: 8) has written:

For a radical and plural democracy, the belief that a final resolution of conflicts is eventually
possible, even if envisaged as an asymptotic approach to the regulative ideal of a free and
unconstrained communication, as in Habermas, far from providing the necessary horizon of the
democratic project, is something that puts it at risk.

To argue for the agonistic nature of news media interviews can be seen to run counter
to adjudications about journalistic and political performance in contemporary media
interviews. The impetus for Tannen’s work is a condemnation of the ‘debate culture’ and
she explicitly evokes an agonistic position, which she describes as ‘a kind of programmed
contentiousness’ (1998: 8), in her quest to have more creative and constructive dialogue
in public life. The advocacy of an agonistic understanding of news media interviews can
also seem to run counter to concerns about their declining quality, caused by the increas-
ing aggressiveness and cynicism of political interviewers, embodied in the idea of ‘attack
dog journalism’ (Sabato, 1991), and to concerns about the increased proficiency of
politicians and public figures to successfully negotiate the questions of interviewers and
to exploit media interview conventions in order to avoid scrutiny. Such developments
foster both a pre-existing attitude to interviews by interview participants, and an orienta-
tion to the dynamics of the interview process itself, which together work against the
possibility of an interesting exchange of ideas, an openness to others, and any idea of
quality dialogue. It is not denied that these recent developments in media and political

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82 Journalism 11(1)

relations do have deleterious effects on the quality of public discourse, and an agonistic
understanding of news media interviews, and media discourse more generally, does not
advocate such developments. To argue that language use is always the product of ideo-
logical struggle, and that democratic public life more generally is always heterogeneous
and indeterminate, is not to support journalistic cynicism or disingenuous politicians. I
simply make the point here that such concerns about journalistic professionalism, the
strategies of politicians, and the mechanics of news media interviews, should not be
informed by an ultimate belief that a resolution of such problems would realize a com-
municative process that would lead to expressions of consensus and unity.
An agonistic understanding of the dialogue of news media interviews, then, offers an
alternative to the oscillation that occurs between critical observations about the pragmatic
reality of the ‘politics’ of news media interviews that undermine quality dialogue and the
expressed desire to implement a communicative process that, in effect, eliminates the
‘politics’ in order to produce rational political discourse. An agonistic politics offers this
alternative because it acknowledges the necessary play of power in communicative
exchanges but attempts to locate those expressions of power in contexts that are in accord
with the democratic process. As Mouffe states: ‘if we accept that relations of power are
constitutive of the social, then the main question for democratic politics is not how to
eliminate power but how to constitute forms of power more compatible with democratic
values’ (2000: 100). There is understandable frustration that news media interviews some-
times seem to be primarily forms of ‘debate’ without much ‘dialogue’, moving Tannen to
bemoan ‘the ubiquity, the knee-jerk nature, of approaching almost any issue, problem, or
public person in an adversarial way’ (1998: 8).8 A response to this situation nonetheless
needs to articulate a positive conceptualization of news media interviews as legitimate
spaces of disagreement where expressions of difference can be articulated. Here, Mouffe’s
distinction between ‘agonism’ and ‘antagonism’ (2000: 102–3) is helpful. Antagonism is
the struggle that occurs between enemies who do not share the same symbolic space and
have a commitment to the destruction of the other, whereas agonism is the struggle
between adversaries, who are, in effect, ‘legitimate enemies’ (2000: 102), and who have
a shared commitment to pluralist democracy but disagree about the values involved in its
constitution. It is on the basis of this distinction that we can defend news media interviews
as an ‘adversarial genre’ (Bell and Van Leeuwen, 1994), as sites where expressions of
power are displayed and scrutinized.
News media interviews and interview participants, in this sense, should not be criti-
cized for failing to implement an interrogative rigour that produces consensus or an ‘end-
position’ on a particular issue. Rather, I suggest that the point of the dialogue of news
media interviews is to map the terrain of opinion on a particular issue, and to highlight
and interrogate differences. Such a conclusion offers no panacea for declining journalis-
tic standards nor a particular mechanism to enforce honest and straightforward political
disclosure nor genuine openness to opposing arguments. It does help us, however, to
focus on the nature of the interactions in political interviews and the status of the ‘implied’
and ‘produced’ truths that circulate in discussion. Sometimes news media interviews
proceed on the basis of an implicit, pre-existing truth that is denied by the interviewee; for
example, in political news interviews this may take the form of a denial that a leadership
challenge is imminent from a contender, or that rapid economic growth may presage an

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Craig 83

environment of interest rate rises for an embattled prime minister. In such circumstances,
an implicit truth is proffered by a skeptical interviewer and the possibility of a consensus
of opinion is represented as stymied by the self-interests of the interviewee. Alternatively,
news media interviews sometimes proceed on the basis that they are an exposition of
competing viewpoints – as we see when the opinions and values of an interviewee are
contrasted against his/her political opponent. In such circumstances, while the interview-
ee’s opinions are tested through questioning, there is not the same kind of pre-existing,
implied ‘truth’ and the interview dialogue is more open ended.
While the interview format exerts a tremendous pull on an interviewee to participate
in the interview, to respond to the framing of an issue by the interviewer, and to answer
comprehensively – in a sense to enter into a dialogue – it is also the case that it is difficult
to evaluate answers:

there is no primary indicator or marker of ‘answering’ (unlike questioning, which typically is

marked by interrogative syntax). How then do interviewees indicate that they are indeed being
responsive to the question at hand? In other words, how do they accomplish or do ‘answering’?
(Clayman and Heritage, 2002: 243, authors’ italics)

Non-supportive answers may follow different trajectories: for example, a ‘round-

about trajectory’, which does not initially seem to respond to a question; a ‘minimal
answer plus elaboration’, where there is an initial response to the question followed by
subsequent talk that clarifies or undermines the basis of the question; and, of course,
interviewees may also decline to answer the question at all, citing a direct challenge to
the question, articulating external circumstances that prevent answering, or declaring
that an answer would be inappropriate in the context of the interview (Clayman and
Heritage, 2002: 243–69). As Clayman and Heritage (2002: 241) note, ‘evasiveness is an
elusive phenomenon’ and ‘curiously difficult to pin down’. It is, of course, worthwhile
and valuable to analyse the particular strategies that interviewees may implement in
order to avoid answering questions and entering into dialogue, but I believe we should
also not overlook that such ‘answering’ is indicative of a political discourse that is inher-
ently contestable and always oriented to a plurality of recipients.9

The public dissemination of news media interviews

This account of language use and the nature of interpersonal dialogue can be supple-
mented with an account of the status of news media interviews as texts of public
dissemination. That is, the focus on the dialogue that occurs in news media interviews
should not overshadow the fact that political interviews are also complex media events
and their public orientation and uptake is integral to their structure and meaning. News
media interviews have a necessarily open-ended nature because of their orientation to a
mass public who variously evaluate the interview. It is the nature of public discourse that,
while it should be critical and interrogative, it is also fundamentally indeterminate and
always informed by difference. As Peters (1999: 62) has noted, ‘dialogue still reigns
supreme in the imagination of many as to what good communication might be’ but,
particularly in the contexts of contemporary mediated society, we need to acknowledge

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84 Journalism 11(1)

and appreciate that ‘Dissemination is not wreckage; it is our lot’. The dissemination of
news media interviews is not an ancillary feature of an already completed dialogue but
instead is an integral feature of the communicative act.
It is to some extent difficult to foreground the centrality of the public dissemination of
the news media interview given that the communicative format lends itself to a seemingly
natural focus on its interpersonal dynamics. And yet, the primary function of the public
dissemination of the news media interview is signalled in the interview format where an
introductory direct address to viewers and listeners precedes and contextualizes the
ensuing conversation. More generally, the focus on the ‘simplicity’ of the interpersonal
dialogue and its daily, even mundane, production in news and current affairs programs can
distract us from recognizing its status as a media event, where performance and presenta-
tion are carefully tailored with public dissemination in mind. Such ‘trappings’ are not
superficial elements over and above the produced verbal political discourse, but rather
they inform the very genre of the news media interview. A focus on the public dissemina-
tion of news media interviews highlights the extent to which the dialogue between inter-
viewer and interviewee cannot be understood in isolation from the broader ‘speech
community’ in which it occurs. News media interviews in this sense have a fundamental
‘porous’ nature and they inform, and are informed by, public and political forces. The
viewing and listening public is not a passive recipient of such texts; it plays an active role
in having their interests shape the interview discourse, and, equally, the polysemic nature
of the interviews feeds into the flow of public and political life.
The open-ended nature of news media interviews and the extent to which they are struc-
tured through their orientation to a diffuse public are highlighted through an examination
of the role of the journalistic interviewer and also through the nature of the interactions that
occur in news media interviews. Political interviews embody the journalistic problematic
where interviewers have to assert themselves in an adversarial manner in such a way that
their neutrality or impartiality is not called into question. This occurs by a variety of means:
as already noted, journalists can invoke the comments and opinions of specified others; at
other times journalists will refer to an unspecified other or others as in ‘it is said’ or ‘some
say’. Journalists can also assume the role of the ‘honest broker’ of opinion (Kumar, 1977)
where the interviewer assumes the status of the representative of the public (see also Bell
and Van Leeuwen, 1994; Craig, 2004). As Bell and Van Leeuwen (1994: 134, authors’
emphasis) note: ‘“honest brokers” remain neutral in that they allow equal access to the
plurality of views that exist in modern society, but they are partial in that they take the side
of the viewers’. While such an observation about journalists as ‘honest brokers’ has often
been noted in order to problematize professional ideologies and to observe that the invoked
public is often portrayed as a unified and depoliticized entity (Craig, 2004: 102), I raise the
point to emphasize the status of interviewers as ‘animators’, to use Goffman’s (1981) term
(see also Bell, 1991). Journalistic interviewers, in this sense, are often not primarily the
author (the person who composed the words) or the principal (the person whose ideas are
being expressed) but rather they serve to provoke public discourse. This provocation is
motivated by the need to problematize the issue at hand and, in turn, to initiate public
debate. Of course, sometimes the provocation occurs for negative purposes – the journalist
engenders conflict purely to dramatize the interview – but such occurrences should not
distract us from an understanding of this fundamental journalistic function.

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Craig 85

This function of interviewers is tacitly understood by interviewees, who do not generally

react in a hostile or aggressive manner to journalists when they initiate charges or cast
doubts on statements or opinions. The interviewee understands that the question is not
technically the personal opinion of the interviewer and it is more of a heuristic device
allowing the interviewee to elaborate on, and justify, the reasons for their opinion. More
particularly, the open-ended nature of news media interviews, informed by its public dis-
semination, is manifested in the degree of reciprocity in the interactions between the
interview participants. Interviewers, and more particularly interviewees, ‘produce rela-
tively large blocks of talk without any form of acknowledgment from the other’, much
more so than a conventional conversational exchange. This feature of news media inter-
views is informed by the recognition that interview talk is ‘targeted at an overhearing
audience’ (Clayman and Heritage, 2002: 125).
An exclusive focus on the interpersonal interaction between interviewer and interviewee
can also overshadow the substance of the political communication and interactions that are
the primary subject of the interview discussion. That is, the substance of interview discus-
sion is often about the dialogue, conversations, rumours, silences, and expressions of out-
rage that occur between political allies and foes, as well as about the reports of the actions,
responsibilities and roles that constitute political behaviour. Of course, the interview is the
site where an interviewer has the opportunity to interrogate an interviewee about such
political communication and actions. However, the point to be emphasized here is that,
more so than everyday conversations, the subject of the interaction is not usually or primar-
ily the relationship between the conversation participants but a public discourse that is
necessarily characterized by a plurality of other viewpoints. The interview discussion, then,
is always only part of an ongoing public conversation. To make such a point is not merely
to acknowledge the broader political contexts of news media interviews, it is also to high-
light the temporality of political discourse: the extent to which dialogue in news media
interviews attempts to call to account past actions and comments and attempts to delineate
the nature of promises about future actions and commitments.

Conclusion
An emphasis on the open-ended nature of news media interviews, informed by a consid-
eration of both the nature of the dialogue of such encounters and their public dissemination,
carries with it particular implications for understanding journalistic professionalism and
the broader political and social functions of journalism. It follows from the dialogical
account of language use outlined here that the primary task of the journalist shifts from
the discovery of truth to facilitating the interrogation of different points of view.
Journalists cannot disavow their involvement in the ideological struggle that always
occurs in language use, but they can be also conceptualized more as the means to
perpetually assert the contestable character and provisional status of political discourse.
We need to recognize that such assertions occur not only because of the need to generate
‘dramatic’ texts but more fundamentally because the task of the journalist is, in effect, to
keep the political open. Such a perspective, then, relieves journalists of the heavy burden
of adjudication, but it also emphasizes the importance of the public reception of news
media texts. The journalist’s task in serving the public then shifts from a position of ‘telling

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86 Journalism 11(1)

people what they need to know’ to ‘amplifying conversations society has with itself’
(Deuze, 2005: 455).
Locating journalism within such contexts does not render it impotent, complicit in a
perpetually open-ended process of debate, rather it offers a renewed basis for the con-
solidation of some of journalism’s traditional democratic functions. The idea of indeter-
minacy highlighted in an agonistic model of democracy stems from an understanding of
the temporal basis of democracy, which can be characterized as ‘a play between anticipa-
tory authorization and retrospective accountability’ (Barnett, 2003: 28). The exercise of
political power occurs within the context of the future orientation of democracy, whereby
rulers are authorized as a result of political promises and regulated in the present by pro-
jected future occasions where accountability will be adjudicated. This highlights the
importance of public mechanisms, such as journalism, that can scrutinize the unfolding
of that democratic process. Journalism, then, has a fundamental role in the establishment
of relations of trust. As Barnett (2003: 31) writes:

Trust is a concept intimately related to the dynamics of representation and accountability, and
as a recurrent theme in political theory it testifies to the irreducibility of mediation in actually
existing democracies. The issue of trust also underscores the … distinctive temporal register of
democratic communication. It is a modality of action that is concerned with two factors: the
freedom of other actors to act, and the uncertainty of actions and outcomes over time.

It has been noted that ‘much thinking about the mass media today assumes that face-
to-face conversation is a superior form of human interaction for which mass communica-
tion is a forever flawed substitute’ (Schudson, 1997: 305). This fact gives news media
interviews both their promise and their frustration. In critiquing Habermas’s valorization
of conversation, Schudson observes that it is not the inherent democratic potential of
conversation that we need to focus on – democracy does not ‘bubble up’ from conversa-
tion (1997: 305) – rather it is the fact that ‘democratic political norms and institutions
instruct and shape conversations to begin with’ (1997: 305). What distinguishes demo-
cratic conversation is not equality but its very publicness (1997: 299). This shift in
emphasis takes us away from a quest to isolate the nature of interpersonal communica-
tive dynamics that in turn yield reason and mutual understanding, and towards a quest to
better understand the generic structures of news media interviews that facilitate a public
talk that is civil but also diverse, open ended, and, ultimately, self and socially reflexive.
I argue that it is indeed the public status of journalists and news media interviews
that is fundamental to realizing the democratic process. The task of the journalist in
provoking and animating political discourse is facilitated through a dialogical com-
municative act that is nonetheless structured and informed by its indeterminate out-
wards orientation. News media interviews are of course characterized by particular
interrogations but it is the agonistic character of public life that dictates that the adju-
dications of such interrogations can never be ‘closed down’, they can only instead be
contributions to the ongoing flow of public discourse. The critique of Habermas’s val-
orization of conversation, however, should not divert us from acknowledging how
principles of democracy are, in fact, embedded in the very language and language acts
of news media conversations. Those principles of democracy, however, do not reside in

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Craig 87

the ability of language to transparently represent the ‘self-contained’ will of individuals

and to objectively and rationally evaluate those expressions in order to realize mutual
understanding and the formation of the common good. Instead, democratic principles
are embedded in the language and language acts of news media interviews through
their fundamental dialogical character, which dictates that expressions of consensus
will always ultimately be the product of ideological struggle and always subject to
potential contestation.

Notes
1 Montgomery’s (2008) observation that the range of types of news interviews in broadcast
journalism requires greater attention is acknowledged. It is also acknowledged that the
conventional political interview discussed here can take different forms with varying
degrees of dialogue and debate. A political interview conducted between an interviewer
and a single interviewee will have a different dynamic from an interview with two oppos-
ing politicians. The focus on political interviews also precludes a broader consideration of
a range of media interview formats, including celebrity and entertainment interviews,
which mobilize a variety of interview subjectivities and different manifestations of per-
sonal interaction and dialogue. For a discussion of the talk show genre, see Livingstone
and Lunt (1994), and for the specific characteristics of the news interview genre, see
Clayman and Heritage (2002: 7).
2 See also the other articles included in the themed edition of the Journal of Pragmatics 39.
3 In turn, the understanding of ‘discourse’ in critical discourse analysis can be contrasted with
other theoretical positions, such as the discourse analysis of Laclau and Mouffe and discursive
psychology (Phillips and Jørgensen, 2002).
4 The Bakhtin Circle refers to a group of Russian theorists who emerged shortly after the
Bolsheviks took power and they included Bakhtin, the linguist V. N. Vološinov and the literary
theorist P. N. Medvedev. Debates have occurred over the disputed authorship of some texts:
see, for example, Holquist, 1990: 8; Roberts and Crossley, 2004: 18.
5 Bakhtin’s work has been previously used in mass communication theory (Newcomb, 1984),
literary and social semiotic theory (Fairclough, 2003; Hodge and Kress, 1988; Kristeva, 1986;
Threadgold, 1986) and dialogue theory (Anderson et al., 2004; Baxter, 2004).
6 Walton (1989), for example, identifies different types or contexts of dialogue, such as the quar-
rel, the debate, the critical discussion, inquiry and negotiation.
7 In invoking the agonistic character of news media interviews it is suggested that the account
of language use outlined here has relevance to broader debates about the public sphere and
democratic process. A range of political theorists, such as Hannah Arendt (1958), Chantal
Mouffe (1993 and 2000), and William Connolly (1991) variously investigate the agonistic
nature of politics. While mindful of the differences across such work, the term agonistic is
simply used here in a general sense to emphasize the openness and perpetual struggle that
informs communicative acts and political activity.
8 It is acknowledged that Tannen’s call for more constructive forms of public expression does
not preclude disagreement or negativity (1998: 26).
9 It should be acknowledged here that Clayman and Heritage observe that the difficulty of ‘eva-
siveness’ is often derived from the analyst’s perspective and they treat the participants’ per-
spectives as the main focus of their analysis (2002: 241).

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88 Journalism 11(1)

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Biographical notes
Geoffrey Craig is a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Otago, New
Zealand. He is the author of The Media, Politics and Public Life (Allen & Unwin, 2004) and the
co-author of Slow Living (Berg & UNSW Press, 2006).
Address: Department of Politics, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand.
[email: geoff.craig@stonebow.otago.ac.nz]

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