Debate Moderators' Discursive Practices
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SECTION: JOURNALISM LDMD I PROFESSIONAL CULTURE OF TELEVISION JOURNALISTS (DEBATE MODERATORS’ DISCURSIVE PRACTICES) Ruxandra BOICU, Associate Professor, PhD, University of Bucharest Abstract: In this paper we refer to the fundamental values that underlie the missions, roles and functions of the TV journalists that “conduct” presidential debates. We focused our research interest on the institutional discourse of the television journalists who moderated the 2012 presidential debate between François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, broadcast in France, on the 3rd of May. The journalistic practices that are analyzed consist in the three main control functions that devolve on the debate moderators, that is, topic control, turn control and time control. In terms of research methods, we relied on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the journalists’ verbal interventions, during the televised presidential debate. These verbal interventions were treated as directive speech acts and, according to their illocutionary purpose, we divided them into categories corresponding to the control functions (topic, turn and time) performed by the 2012 debate moderators, Laurence Ferrari and David Pujadas. Likewise, we attempted at making the hierarchy of the speech acts in our research corpus, in keeping with some recent theories on linguistic politeness in journalistic discourse (in press interviews, talk shows and televised debates). Keywords: TVdebate moderators, professional roles, control functions, speech acts, (im)politeness Introduction There is a rather recent tradition of organizing televised electoral debates in Romania, although, during the last twenty years, some news channels have proposed various debate formats. These electoral confrontations were hosted by one or two moderators of national prestige, either as print press journalists or as TV news presenters. In spite of the attempts at introducing format innovations and in spite of a great number of electoral shows presenting face-to-face meetings between the candidates participating in the local, national or presidential elections, we are not in a position of delineating a clear tradition, relying on a recognizable national format. At the beginning of the 90s, due to their novelty, political talk shows and debates would be watched by large audiences; nowadays, in Romania, as well as in France (according to Delporte 2001) their popularity is ever lower. Televised electoral debates have often proved to be efficient political instruments that could encourage the citizens’ participation in voting in favour of one of the political competitors, especially in the United States and in France where there are long and respected traditions in turning the electoral/ presidential confrontations into popular TV shows, designed both to inform and to entertain the public. This may explain the growing research interest of specialists in politics, sociology, media studies, etc. that has led to the emergence of electoral debate studies, a heterogeneous, interdisciplinary theoretical approach of the issues concerning the production, the consumption and the effects of televised political shows, in general, and of electoral debates, in particular. In democratic countries, during electoral campaigns, national media is committed to the effort of vulgarizing political communication, on behalf of the political forces supporting 37 SECTION: JOURNALISM LDMD I the candidates. Within national media systems, television plays the main part in the political game, since, in Europe, for instance, two thirds of the EU media consumers watch TV, at the expense of radio, print or online journalism. That is why, the TV networks compete in devising the most adequate formulas for covering electoral campaigns. TV news, reports, interviews, talk shows provide information about the candidates’ political programmes, meetings, private lives, verbal attacks aimed at their adversaries, etc. Within this context, the televised electoral debates between the finalists are scheduled towards the end of the campaign, a day or two before the final ballot. Being the most propitious opportunity for the politicians to be seen and heard by audiences of millions of TV viewers in their countries, the specialized literature is unanimous in considering the televised electoral debate to be the climax of an electoral campaign, all the more so when the guests are presidential candidates. After the 1960 debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, Jeffery Auer (1962: 19) apud Trent and Friedenberg (2004: 267) declared that “[o]f all the changes in political campaigning that television has wrought, the face-to-face televised debate between candidates may prove to be the most significant”. Contrary to the American debate, the first French presidential confrontation did not influence the vote of the audience. Nevertheless, in 1974, the verbal duel between Mitterrand and Giscard imposed the presidential debate genre as a media event: “il a constitué le sommet médiatique de la campagne de 1974. Comment, désormais, un quelconque face-à-face pourrait-il rivaliser avec lui [le débat télévisé] en intensité dramatique, ou simplement en intérêt?” (Delporte 2001: 83). From that date on, the presidential debates have been watched by millions of French TV viewers. Generally speaking, the French are more mobilized to vote for the President of the Republic than for any other elected political function. Pauleau, under the supervision of Gerstlé (2012) shows that, at the most recent elections, in 2012, 80.35% of the French electorate voted in the second round, either for François Hollande or for Nicolas Sarkozy, while at the local and legislative elections, the participation percentage did not exceed 65.20. This considerable interest of the electorate in the presidential election is the essential reason to study the televised debate in France (Pauleau 2012: 8), as well as in the USA or in Romania. Leaving aside the rich available literature about televised electoral debates in the USA, we noticed that French specialized literature has mainly provided insights into the history of political talk shows, both on radio and on television, in France. Among the most notorious works of this kind, Ockrent (1988), Nel (1990) and Thoveron (1996) are worth mentioning; when dealing with the presidential confrontations, these theorists laid emphasis on famous verbal clashes between the politicians during the debates. On the other hand, Ghiglione and Bromberg (1998) analyzed the growing interest of the public in the presidential candidates’ personalities, and the decreasing importance attached to the ideological differences separating the parties to which these politicians belong. Gerstlé (1992) approached the debate as a vehicle for political communication, Larrue and Trognon (1993) proposed a conversation analysis of the debate interaction, making a distinction between “débat de société” and “institutional debates”; the latter category of televised shows includes the genre of televised political debates that, unlike society debates, has to observe much stricter rules of functioning, especially referring to the dividing of time between the candidates. 38 SECTION: JOURNALISM LDMD I The 2007 televised debate between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy marked a turning point in the proliferation of literature devoted to presidential debates in the terms of communication studies, discourse analysis, gender studies, etc. From among the studies devoted to the 2007 debate, we mention the two issues of the scientific journal Mots. Les langages du politique, namely, issue 2/90 (2009), and issue 89 (“2007. Débats pour l’Élysée”) for which Cabasino (2009: 11–23). In other scientific journals, Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2010) and Frachiolla (2011) tackled linguistic politeness in the verbal interaction between Royal and Sarkozy. We have to remark that these articles, as well as many others, were focused on comparisons of the candidates’ discourse strategies and of their political or communicative or interactional competences. In exchange, journalistic discourse has been understudied. As to the Romanian researchers interested in the television coverage of the presidential debate, most of them dealt with the Romanian experiments in this field; for instance, it is the case of Beciu (2000), where a televised debate was analyzed in terms of political communication and discourse, of Haineş (2002) or Roșca (2007) that approached the candidates’ verbal exchanges both ideologically and linguistically. Few Romanian authors wrote books about televised electoral debates in other countries. Among them, Scurtulescu (2006) referred to the pragmatics of political discourse in the G. W. Bush – Al Gore confrontation and Boicu (2012) undertook a discourse analysis of the Royal – Sarkozy debate. [We appologize if we leave out other scientific contributions on the televised presidential debate, in this brief enumeration]. Like in American and French literature on this topic, in Romanian literature, the authors generally approached the politicians’ verbal or nonverbal communication, while the missions and the roles of the debate moderators were treated only collaterally. Missions of debate journalists In the theoretical framework of this study we included classic theories on the missions of the TV journalists that “conduct” presidential debates. During these shows, they are expected to explicitly fulfill their professional mission of serving the public as responsibly and ethically as Habermas (1985) thought