The News Interview as Contest: Constraint, Evasion and Persistence A Diachronic Study

Abstract

Over several decades the broadcast news interview has become an essential site of democratic discourse where public figures present and defend policies and action. This thesis establishes that the quotidian political news interview has become markedly more contestative over time, and that this indexes the increasing accountability of public figures. Whilst increasing contestation in the news interview has been a common lay perception, supported by practitioners and, in limited ways by research, there appear to have been no systematic diachronic studies of the quotidian news interview which empirically test it. This study does so by examining changes in the practices in one longrunning public radio breakfast news programme. Morning Report has broadcast in New Zealand every weekday since 1975, and is the site where the chief issues affecting the polis are canvassed in an often uneasy symbiosis between public figures and journalists. The Morning Report genre is common throughout public radio in Western democracies; accordingly, there is a reasonable presumption that, with burgeoning information technology, there exists an international “professional commons” where practices are normalised. It is proposed that this thesis may serve as a template for investigation into like domains. The study is both qualitative and quantitative. Using conversation analysis it describes question design to constrain answers; concomitantly it demonstrates how interviewees resist these constraints, and how this impels interviewer persistence. This CA grounding informs a new approach to the quantitative analysis of interviews. A large sample from the four-decade span of Morning Report has been coded and analysed for cumulative quotients of constraint, evasion and persistence—that is, contestation—within interviews. Highly significant intensification in contestation in interviews is reported. In important senses, these changes index the mounting public accountability of politicians, and of corporate and institutional leaders, over the period.