The Political Interview

This book presents a thorough quantitative and qualitative, corpus-assisted investigation of the language employed in a specialized communicative activity type: namely, the political interview aired on British and American Sunday morning talk shows. More specifically, interviewers’ and interviewees’ turns are analyzed here so as to unveil the stratification of discourses characterizing their speech, which inevitably favours the proliferation of a mixture of different lexico-grammatical traits and pragmatic functions. Previous studies in this field mainly adopt a conversation analysis approach, thus focusing on turn allocation and organization. This book adds a different perspective by resorting to a combination of corpus-driven and corpus-based techniques in the study of a specifically designed corpus of contemporary TV political interviews, the result being a comprehensive investigation of the genre. The analysis tackles both specialized language aspects and variation between spoken and written English in the genre at stake. Throughout the study, linguistic forms are associated, when relevant, with their pragmatic functions in context, bringing to the fore, for example, differences between the ways in which interviewers and interviewees interact with each other and with the audience. Particular emphasis is also placed on salient distinguishing traits characterizing American and British interviews.

Interviews are a frequent and important part of empirical research in political science, but graduate programs rarely offer discipline-specific training in selecting interviewees, conducting interviews, and using the data thus collected. Interview Research in Political Science addresses this vital need, offering hard-won advice for both graduate students and faculty members. The contributors to this book have worked in a variety of field locations and settings and have interviewed a wide array of informants, from government officials to members of rebel movements and victims of wartime violence, from lobbyists and corporate executives to workers and trade unionists. The authors encourage scholars from all subfields of political science to use interviews in their research, and they provide a set of lessons and tools for doing so. The book addresses how to construct a sample of interviewees; how to collect and report interview data; and how to address ethical considerations and the Institutional Review Board process. Other chapters discuss how to link interview-based evidence with causal claims; how to use proxy interviews or an interpreter to improve access; and how to structure interview questions. A useful appendix contains examples of consent documents, semistructured interview prompts, and interview protocols.

In Argumentation in Political Interviews Corina Andone uses the pragma-dialectical concept of strategic maneuvering to gain a better understanding of political interviews as argumentative practices. She analyzes and evaluates the way in which politicians react in political interviews to the accusation that the position they currently hold is inconsistent with a position they advanced before. The politicians’ responses to such charges are examined for their strategic function by concentrating on a number of concrete cases and explaining how the arguers try to enhance their chances of winning the discussion. In addition, the soundness criteria are formulated for judging properly when the politicians’ responses are indeed reasonable.This book is important to argumentation theorists, discourse analysts, communication scholars and all other researchers and students interested in the way in which language is used for the purpose of persuasion in a political context. Corina Andone is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

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.

Academic Paper from the year 2017 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, , language: English, abstract: The study deals with four interviews including four important politicians, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Through verifying this data, the study has come out with fruitful results about the question types and how they play an important role in political interviews. The specific question type influences broadcasting interaction in political interviews regarding the way of discussing current issues about the world or inner matters. End to this, questions appear different among political interviews, although some question types are higher than others.

The story of tobacco’s fortunes seems simple: science triumphed over addiction and profit. Yet the reality is more complicated—and more political. Historically it was not just bad habits but also the state that lifted the tobacco industry. What brought about change was not medical advice but organized pressure: a movement for nonsmoker’s rights.

Ken Clarke needs no introduction. One of the genuine 'Big Beasts' of the political scene, during his forty-six years as the Member of Parliament for Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire he has been at the very heart of government under three prime ministers. He is a political obsessive with a personal hinterland, as well known as a Tory Wet with Europhile views as for his love of cricket, Nottingham Forest Football Club and jazz. In Kind of Blue, Clarke charts his remarkable progress from working-class scholarship boy in Nottinghamshire to high political office and the upper echelons of both his party and of government. But Clarke is not a straightforward Conservative politician. His position on the left of the party often led Margaret Thatcher to question his true blue credentials and his passionate commitment to the European project has led many fellow Conservatives to regard him with suspicion – and cost him the leadership on no less than three occasions. Clarke has had a ringside seat in British politics for four decades and his trenchant observations and candid account of life both in and out of government will enthral readers of all political persuasions. Vivid, witty and forthright, and taking its title not only from his politics but from his beloved Miles Davis, Kind of Blue is political memoir at its very best.

For decades veteran journalist Tom Plate, the author of the ‘Giants of Asia’ series, has been engineering headline-making interviews with presidents to prime ministers to mob figures. Some were easy to deal with; others were complicated challenges. In this revealing book — part manual, part memoir — Plate offers a candid and comprehensive view of how to conduct the VIP interview. Is the Banderilla approach wise? What’s a ‘Viagra question’? Is there an interview etiquette? Detailed tips provide an insider’s perspective on what happens when the doors close, the interview pad comes out, and the political conversation begins. An important, revealing and entertaining book – half manual, half memoir and all true.