Broadcast Talk

This paper considers the role of co-participatory storytelling within the framework of community radio, radio talk and transgender media. It considers this by examining storytelling by participants on an Australian radio program, TRANS*Positions, which is broadcast on JOY FM, a successful and well-known Australian community radio station. The paper reveals the ways co-participatory conversational storytelling, a dominant form of talk on this program designed for a transgender audience, informs listeners and fosters a sense of community. It analyses the very localised form of interactions between hosts, guests, and callers and reveals the way in which participants make relevant topics that are considered potentially controversial if spoken by a non-transgender audience. The interactions demonstrate the way in which co-participants in localised talk for an overhearing audience represent " ourselves to ourselves ". While it is an Australian case-study, there are implications ...

This paper considers the role of co-participatory storytelling within the framework of community radio, radio talk and transgender media. It considers this by examining storytelling by participants on an Australian radio program, TRANS*Positions, which is broadcast on JOY FM, a successful and well-known Australian community radio station. The paper reveals the ways co-participatory conversational storytelling, a dominant form of talk on this program designed for a transgender audience, informs listeners and fosters a sense of community. It analyses the very localised form of interactions between hosts, guests, and callers and reveals the way in which participants make relevant topics that are considered potentially controversial if spoken by a non-transgender audience. The interactions demonstrate the way in which co-participants in localised talk for an overhearing audience represent " ourselves to ourselves ". While it is an Australian case-study, there are implications more broadly for broadcasters wishing to create space for very localised, community-oriented talk.

This thesis uncovers and analyses the relationship between forms of talk on British television between 1970-1990, and the uneven transformations in gender politics that occurred in this period, which encompasses both the second wave feminist movement and the rise of neoliberal politics. It presents five historical case studies of talk-based television programmes from across this time period: No Man’s Land (Associated Television/ITV, 1973), Good Afternoon! (Thames Television/ITV, 1971-1984), Pictures of Women: Sexuality (Channel 4, 1984), Watch the Woman (Channel 4, 1985), and Question Time (BBC One, 1979-present). These case studies offer a deliberate selection of television texts that differ according to their institutional contexts; their position in the schedules; their status in existing broadcasting histories; their discursive arrangements; and their modes of address. The thesis seeks to consider how the communicative ethos of television talk has been gendered in three key ways: at the level of production - in the sense of when, how, and why television spaces have been opened up for gendered forms of talk in relationship to wider shifts in gender politics; at the level of the text - in terms of how the discursive arrangements of talk-based programmes have worked to include, exclude, legitimise or disavow women’s voices; and at the level of critical reception - in the sense of how television talk has been evaluated in profoundly gendered terms. The thesis is methodologically innovative because it theorises gendered forms of television talk in relationship to histories of television production, as well as to broader political, cultural and gender histories. It carries out important empirical ‘recovery work’ of hidden women’s television histories through the presentation of original archival research. It also presents theoretical work, which re-evaluates the distinctive communicative ethos of television – or its “sociability” in light of feminist theories of language, gender and power. Moreover, it sheds some historical light on why the institutional parameters of television still delimit the available spaces for women's speech.

This study shows how a media professional identity is constructed in (the production of) Flemish political television discourse and identifies how this construction is related to the dynamic operation of power. More concretely, it is the study’s prime spur to identify the constitutive cornerstones of the performance of a media professional identity in political television talk. Therefore, it turns attention to the discursive mechanisms – i.e. the practices and processes – that underlie, support and facilitate the journalist-presenters’ performance of a professional identity in political television talk. At a theoretical level, the study builds upon an integrated discursive and performative approach to account for the dynamism and reflexivity with which identity and power tend to occur in institutional contexts. At a methodological level, the study proposes a combination of conversation analysis and ethnography to concretise the dialectic and situated nature of identity and power. At an empirical level, the study turns to iterative analyses of on-air and off-air practices of media professionals and politicians in the frontstage and backstage settings of political television broadcasting to get a grip on the complexity of identity construction in political television broadcasting. It therefore builds upon a twofold corpus of (1) transcripts of 29 political television broadcasts of De Zevende Dag (The Seventh Day, Eén) and the series of VRT pre-election programmes in 2009 (Vlaanderen 09 (Flanders 09, one-off broadcast, Eén), Europa 09 (Europe 09, one-off broadcast, Eén), Het Groot Debat 09 (The Great Debate 09, one-off broadcast, Eén), TerZake 09 (To the Point 09, a series of 15 broadcasts, Canvas), and Kopstukkendebat (Leading Figures Debate, one-off broadcast, Eén), and (2) fieldnotes from 6 weeks (3 x 2 weeks) of ethnographic observations in the backstage settings of the political television programme Terzake (Canvas).
This study brings to light that the journalist-presenters’ construction of a media professional identity in (the production of) political television discourse is contingent upon the articulation of four central aspects: (1) interactional resources; (2) formats; (3) production standards; and (4) team collaborations. The repetitive and performative articulation of interactional resources and format components in the on-air context of political television talk, and of production standards and team collaborations in the off-air context of political television production, show to be the crucial constitutive cornerstones of a media professional identity in this context, both in enabling and disabling ways. Overall, the study arrives at a holistic, kaleidoscopic look that embraces the complexity, dynamism and contingency with which media professional identity tends to be performed in political television discourse.

This article investigates spontaneous humour-related phenomena in TV documentary, arguing that their presence helps to overcome the scripted nature of the genre. Focusing on the diegetic level of interaction between the presenter and other individuals present in the scene, the analysis traces how the interlocutors achieve mutual in-tune-ness that is necessary for setting up the play frame. It pays attention to several humour-related phenomena, including non-humorous laughter, joint joking and physical pranks. The findings indicate that while laughter can alleviate tension associated with face-threat or personal failure, other forms of humour emerge in the diegetic frame as part of the programme producers’ design to divert from the transactional mode of factual television to a more entertaining hybrid format based on a significant experiential component. As a result, TV viewers do not simply receive information but derive pleasure from the playful spontaneity performed for their benefit by the presenter and other interlocutors.

This article presents an analysis of politicians' laughter in broadcast news interviews and of mass media representations of Hillary Rodham Clinton's laughter during her failed bid for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2007–2008. It examines spoken, interactional data and written, representational data, each requiring different theoretical and methodological apparatus. The first component of the analysis employs the methodological framework of Conversation Analysis to examine the interactional work accomplished by Clinton's laughter and other politicians in situ (i.e. in the interviews themselves). The second component employs an indexical approach to analyze the post-hoc recontextualization of Clinton's laughter by mainstream media as a gendered representation, namely, as a 'cackle'. Analyzing Clinton's laughter in talk-in-interaction and its subsequent representation in talk-out-of-interaction reveals how communicative behavior that is not gendered by original participants may nevertheless become gendered by other participants. This article thus makes a distinctive contribution to a central question in discourse studies – when exogenous categories such as gender should be invoked as an explanatory category.

The recent spread of populist ideologies and rhetoric has resulted in growing scholarly attention to the phenomenon, and in ‘populism’ becoming a salient keyword in contemporary political discourse. However, while there are diversified academic conceptualizations of the term, its vernacular and public uses were hardly studied. The present study aims at addressing this lacuna, by exploring the inductive meanings and functions of ‘populism’ in Israeli mediated political discourse. To this end, we combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of the reference and linguistic context of a sample of 500 occurrences of ‘populism’, ‘populist’ and their inflections in major news outlets during 2012–2017; and detailed discourse analysis of their uses as a meta-discursive resource for positioning in mediated political talk during 2016–2017. Our findings suggest that political actors add a moral-evaluative layer to former conceptualizations of ‘populism’, and associate it with cynicism and inauthenticity – thus reversing and problematizing populist discourse. We found that ‘populism’ is a highly flexible and multi-functional positioning resource. It is used in all modes of self-, other-, present and non-present positioning, and strategically employed to challenge antagonists, defend oneself against challenges, manage political images, control the topical agenda of interviews or ensure quotability and news and entertainment values. Such uses reflect the dialogicity and self-reflexivity of contemporary political face management, and tensions between conflicting journalistic normative frameworks and professional practices.

A body of scholarship has begun to chart the influence of “chat” modes of news delivery on discourse quality as part of what is termed the internal fragmentation of news: the shift from monological to dialogical modes of news delivery (Ben-Porath, 2007). This article investigates the democratic costs and benefits of political discourse contained in these “political talk” news formats. It focuses on four New Zealand programmes and is structured in terms of market (commercial) and non-market (public service) performance. Discourse quality is measured quantitatively by content analysis; the results identify some important democratic trade-offs that market and non-market modes of political talk make. This paper adds to international scholarship by contributing empirical data to research investigating the democratic values of public service and commercial news content; it also enables critical engagement with the issue of the internal fragmentation of news formats by providing a more nuanced account of political talk than previous criticisms.

This article explores the six-part television debate series No Man's Land, which was broadcast on ITV in Britain in 1973. It argues that the program is a historically significant example of the public orientation of the women's liberation movement and its engagement with, rather than straightforward hostility toward, the mass media. The program was produced by women who were active in the women's liberation movement; it was presented by the feminist Juliet Mitchell; and its studio audience was populated by, among others, many women who were aligned with the movement. The format of No Man's Land mixed short documentary films that were explicitly concerned with the structural oppression of women and discussion with a studio audience in response to the themes of these films. The article reflects on how television texts such as No Man's Land tend to be absent from existing popular and academic histories; it suggests that dominant understandings of the relationship between the mass media and the women's liberation movement as mutually antagonistic frequently function to close off the spaces where such texts might be considered. Through close analysis of the program and its reviews in print media, it considers the problems and possibilities of and constraints on early second-wave feminists who appropriated and operated within mass-media—and specifically televised—forms. It also points to the importance of socialist feminism as a discursive context for British television in the early 1970s.

This paper deals with the phenomenon of the ‘microphone gaffe’ in the context of sports broadcast talk. This peculiar communicative event is characterized by the public mediation of live talk to media audiences without the speakers being aware that they are actually on air. Adopting a general pragmatic perspective, this paper analyses the microphone gaffe in terms of its specific participation framework and discusses its humorous potential. It is argued that the key element underlying these communicative situations consists of the momentary non-acknowledgement of the media audiences by the speakers. The audience, repositioned as non-participants, actually find themselves in the role of the ‘eavesdropper’ on a private conversation. On the production side of the communicative scheme, the mistaken belief in enjoying this momentary ‘private’ speech event is accompanied by a shift of footing, where the commentators’ institutional identities become replaced with their non-public personas, evidenced by forms of backstage talk that contrasts with their frontstage performance. This paper proposes that in case of microphone gaffes, humorous effect arises from the various incongruities between the actual and the presumed footings, as well as from the subsequent recontextualizations that enclose the original communicative act within an additional communicative level. The aim of the paper is to propose and elaborate a general theoretical framework for the analysis of unintended humour in media discourse.

This paper considers a little-remembered British television programme from 1973 entitled No Man’s Land. It argues that this one-off, six-part studio debate series is an important but largely forgotten text in the history of mediated second wave feminism. No Man’s Land had a strongly socialist-feminist premise: it explicitly critiqued the subordinate position of women in society; it was presented by Juliet Mitchell, while key members of its production team were feminist women; and its studio audience was populated with prominent activists from the women’s liberation movement. Significantly, it was broadcast on ITV on Saturday evenings. In this paper, I explore print media reviews of the programme, in which its politicised mode of talk was conceived as a form of ‘nagging’, unwelcome on the small screen in the spatio-temporal context of the family home. I consider this in relation to what Paddy Scannell calls the “distinctive communicative ethos” of broadcast talk, whereby audiences must not be made to feel as though they are being “got at” in their homes. In this sense, television’s “sociability”, Scannell suggests, constitutes a form of talk that is “democratic”. The paper will present examples of the ‘unsociable’ and ‘nagging’ gendered talk of No Man’s Land, and will also use feminist linguistic theory, to rethink what kinds of talk we might count as being ‘democratic’ on television.

In this paper, I analyse how expertise is discursively negotiated in TV documentary programmes. While previous research has explored the relationship between the ‘lay’ and the ‘expert’ dimensions in various public participation programmes, this paper focuses on a TV programme format that is based on the cooperative interaction between professionals who differ in the extent of their knowledge and experience. The paper notes that while expertise is unevenly distributed between the voiceover, the presenter and the expert, these parties complement each other in explaining complex phenomena for the benefit of the audience. Using data from the documentary series How Britain Worked, I argue that as long as the presenter possesses some technical expertise, he may be positioned as a semi-expert between the true expert and the lay audience, even when he simultaneously acts in other contexts as a novice acquiring the specialized expertise needed for his quest. Thus, rather than demonstrating his own knowledge and skills, the presenter mediates expertise for the benefit of the audience. The mediating role is attested by the presenter׳s frequent shifts of footing in and out of the conversational interaction with the true expert, who may end up assuming a background role of expert support.

This paper presents hegemonic masculinity as it is achieved during interactions between television host Jim Cramer and his callers in the “Lightening Round” segment on the CNBC television show “Mad Money”. Cramer's persona and interactions adhere to a hegemonic masculinity dominant in American culture, and they create a sphere in which it is the only normative identity possible. This hegemonic masculinity is created by the use of specific phrases (e.g. the “booyah” salutation), actions (e.g. compliments to the host), by the insertion of sports as a topic of discussion, and by Cramer's dominant positioning as an expert. After presenting these features we demonstrate how this arena creates problems for the very few female callers participating in it. We therefore conclude that the “Lightening Round” helps to construct and reproduce masculinist authority in this mass-mediated window into the world of finance.

This chapter discusses a specific type of interactional ritual in ethno-political interviews, one that hinders their conciliatory potential. The ritual is performed by two types of participants: Jewish-Israeli interviewers demanding the condemnation of transgressions committed by others, and the respective response by Arab-Israeli political representatives in the role of interviewees. Negotiation over condemnations is examined, as this speech act is considered crucial to setting up models for civic behavior. The chapter demonstrates how interviewers' efforts to exercise interactional and social power through pushing their interviewees to adopt a consensual stance are rejected by resorting to indirect answer designs. It concludes by discussing the extent to which "do you condemn" questions may be perceived as a legitimate professional journalistic practice.

The news media form major sources of information to the general public in matters of science and health. And yet journalists and experts differ in what they consider as newsworthy and relevant. This article analyses in detail a current affair interview with a health expert reporting on a new research on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Applying Bamberg’s three-level model for positioning analysis, the interview is searched for the stories that speakers introduce, attend to their embedding in the design of questions and answers and examine how their tellers are positioned therein as knowledgeable regarding ADHD. The narratives identified are shown to enable the adopting and shifting between various expert positions including that of the scientific researcher, the advice-giving expert and the more specific identity of the public health clinician. Shifts between these positions are shown to reflect the claims and counter-claims that the interviewee and interviewers are making and backing. These findings are discussed for their implications regarding the use of narratives in presenting science to media audiences.

In this chapter I analyse the BBC programme Question Time to consider how the gendered talk of televised political debate - regulated by notions of public service, balance and impartiality – has permitted, legitimised, excluded, or marginalised women’s voices. I consider how the particular, ostensibly gender-neutral forms of sociability of Question Time are, in fact, deeply gendered, and what the implications of this surreptitious, undeclared gendering might be.

The article examines emerging practices of personalization in political talk shows on Romanian television. Our interest lies in the reconfiguration of the role of critical journalist, as performed by talk show hosts on private TV channels, in the context of increasing commercialization and instrumentalization of the Romanian media in postcommunism. This development consists of the strategic use of personalization, achieved through the talk show dispositive, for the enactment of positions of journalistic interpretation, adversarialness, and intervention on behalf of the citizens. The findings indicate shifts in the symmetry/asymmetry relationships between journalists, guests, politicians, and publics, as well as new ways of constructing and understanding public issues. Two main patterns of personalization have been identified: the journalist as a fully engaged voice, effectively substituting itself for the public opinion, and the journalist as an ordinary person, who has the capacity...

This article examines the issue of evasion in mediatized political interviews in the context of right-wing populist politics. As public figures, politicians are held accountable not only for their actions but also for their prior statements. Such ‘metalingual accountability’ applies to public contexts as well as utterances made in more private situations. Based on a case-study analysis of leaked conversations with a local populist politician and a subsequent follow-up media interview, the article identifies several metapragmatic strategies that are available to interviewees aiming to evade and deny utterances originally made in the backstage region. The findings indicate that equivocation and evasiveness arise from the politicians’ need to mitigate the degree of face threat. This need is particularly acute where backstage honesty can lead to frontstage scandal, as in racist comments against certain ethnic groups, whereby the speaker’s status as a publically acceptable politician is in danger.

Article highlights
• Politicians’ backstage talk often leads to frontstage scandal
• When accounting for prior scandal talk, politicians protect their face by means of various strategies of evasiveness
• Politicians invoke different standards of accountability in different contexts
• In cases of leaked talk, politicians apply the ‘inadmissibility strategy’ by excluding backstage talk from public accountability
• Populist politicians avoid metalingual accountability by claiming victim status

Cet article se penche sur un épisode radiophonique durant lequel deux animateurs effectuent un coming out hétérosexuel à l’occasion de la journée internationale du coming out (11 octobre). Dans une perspective issue de l’analyse conversationnelle d’inspiration ethnométhodologique, il étudie une collection d’occurrences de coming out, permettant non seulement d’identifier un format séquentiel récurrent et la manière dont il contribue à l’efficacité de la pratique, mais aussi de réfléchir à la façon dont il peut être utilisé dans différents contextes sociaux, notamment médiatisés et médiatiques. En particulier, l’article montre comment la pratique est au service d’une émission radiophonique sur le coming out et prépare la transition vers le traitement de l’homosexualité à la radio. Grâce à un enregistrement vidéo du travail des animateurs dans le studio de radio, l’article décrit la façon dont le thème de la journée internationale du coming out est fabriqué et orchestré dans les coulisses de la radio et sur les ondes. Ce faisant, il montre la contribution d’une analyse conversationnelle à l’approche du coming out dans les études de genre – où la pratique est largement discutée mais sans être analysée sur la base d’occurrences documentées. L’article revient ainsi sur l’épistémologie du closet chère à Eve Sedgwick, en proposant une anatomie du coming out en contexte médiatisé, qui en éclaire les enjeux non seulement épistémiques mais aussi de normativisation, publicisation et spectacularisation.

This article studies an excerpt taken from a radio show during which two presenters do a heterosexual coming out on the occasion of the international coming out day (October 11). Within the framework of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the study discusses the sequential format of the coming out episode, along with other instances gathered from other media settings. Although the coming out has been largely discussed within gender studies, up to now it has not been analysed in its interactional details on the basis of documented occurrences. The paper further shows how this occurrence of coming out is at the service of a radio show on precisely this issue, and how the presenters then collectively prepare and put into practice their broadcasted show. Thanks to a video recording of the work in the studio, we will describe how the topic of the international coming out day is produced and orchestrated backstage. This aims at contributing, from an interactional sequential perspective, to gender studies, elaborating on the epistemology of the closet dear to Eve Sedgwick, by offering an anatomy of coming out that shows epistemic as well as other issues, related to hetero- and homo-normativity, publicization and spectacularisation.

In this article we argue that an important landmark in the revival of spoken Hebrew has been overlooked by historians, linguists, and culture scholars: the launching of Kol Yerushalayim, the Hebrew Service of British Mandatory Radio, on 30 March 1936. Between 1936 and 1948 the Hebrew Hour became the shared public space in which spoken Hebrew – dynamic, updated, meticulously pronounced – was realized. The important role of the Hebrew radio in the Yishuv can be attributed to five factors that were responsible for the spread of spoken Hebrew among both veterans and newcomers: (1) its ability to reach into listeners' homes, which served as a metonym for the yet-absent Zionist sovereignty, creating a shared, exclusive Hebrew space; (2) its contribution to the standardization of Hebrew by adopting the Sephardic accent; (3) its enrichment and updating of the language by inventing and suggesting vital neologisms; (4) its institutionalization of regular time-slots for teaching the language; (5) its innovative ways of addressing audiences, who were simultaneously far away and very close, in accordance with the characteristics of the new medium.

This article looks at the development of broadcast talk in those reality TV genres associated with shopping and negotiation, focusing on Antiques Road Trip. In a context in which reality TV has become associated with judgement and rancour, we are concerned with the balance between expertise and ordinariness, and exploring the place of conversational and interactional styles we have come to associate with " sociability " and the maintenance of " face " , both in terms of pleasure and spectacle and providing a tactical basis for on-screen negotiation. We argue that these performances differ from conventional discourses of expertise as arbiters of specialist insight and market value, and offer new performances of expertise, based on a tactical mix of professional capital and sociability.

Recent work by Atkinson (2011) delineates three competing performance templates in television news: P1 ethical, P2 commercial, and P3 theatrical. This paper seeks to extend Atkinson’s work by defining and proposing measurable conceptions of ethical and theatrical journalism in political talk shows. The resulting framework allows researchers to more productively investigate how ethical and aesthetic performance elements interact by using a hybrid news form – political talk – as a testable site of P1-P3 tensions. Preliminary research on this matter points to much aesthetics being compatible with ethical indicators, whilst a subset – simplification, derision, and attraction – appears to detract from or sit awkwardly alongside P1 functioning. Further, emerging evidence in the effects literature suggests that certain aesthetic forms distract viewers from processing political content. Together, these findings highlight problematic areas of P1-P3 congruence both within political talk news discourse, and on the receiver end.