Politicians Interviewed on Television News

Abstract

The power relationships and discursive strategies inherent in the interview as a mode of conversation, production and presentation are fundamental conditions for politics in the mediated public sphere. The journalistic interview sets the terms for politicians' public communication and appearances. This article is based on analyses of 124 broadcast news items which included interviews with Swedish politicians. The analyses are inspired by conversation analysis of news interviews. Discourse analysis, particularly the concepts of decontextualization and recontextualization, has also contributed to this study. The results show that it is a widespread practice in television news to divorce answers from the preceding question. In news stories, political interviews are presented in a fragmentary form. This article focuses on four discursive strategies in the recontextualization of interview answers, whereby the original question is removed and substituted by something else. The analyses show how the recontextualization influences the meaning of both the answers and the interviewee's actions and character.