| This study examines the social organization of talk-in-interaction in the broadcast news interview, with a special focus on questioning as an interactional activity that, in large part, constitutes the broadcast news interview as a social institution. Through questioning, interviewers elicit information and opinion from interviewees for the benefit of an overhearing audience, while maintaining a "neutralistic" position vis-a-vis those interviewees. The present study examines questioning as an activity through which interviewers (i) depict interviewees' public personae, including especially their alignments as actors, whose own conduct is newsworthy, or as commentators, whose accounts of third parties' conduct are newsworthy; and (ii) solicit explanations of newsworthy action, which involve interviewers in formulating descriptions of actions that attribute, imply, or deny agency, intentionality, and responsibility. The study shows how the design of interviewers' questions can depict the bases of interviewees' access to, and the reliability of their knowledge about, the newsworthy actions in question; and how variations in aspects of question design entail distinct modes of participation for interviewees and, in particular, different kinds of interviewee accountability. This study contributes to the cumulative specification, in the field of Conversation Analysis, of the institutional assumptions and relevances that news interview participants demonstrably rely on as grounds for inference and action in that setting; and to previous research in the field of news media studies on the relationship between news sources (i.e., the persons that journalists rely on for information and opinion) and news content. Through examination of the relationships among the design of news interview participants' turns at talk, the constitution of their social identities, and their orientations to the accountability of social action, this study shows that an adequate understanding of news content depends on identification and analysis of the interactional practices by which participants produce news messages. |
