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Talk Shows

Article · December 2006

DOI: 10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/00357-6

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Cornelia Ilie

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Ilie C (2006), Talk Shows. In: Keith Brown, (Editor-in-Chief) Encyclopedia of

Language & Linguistics, Second Edition, volume 12, pp. 489-494. Oxford: Elsevier.

Talk Shows 489

Talk Shows

C Ilie, Orebro University, Orebro, Sweden

all-news radio programs, which were intended as services to the listening community rather than stations in the traditional sense. Since the listeners were potential customers, controversial and sensationalized talk soon developed to attract them. ‘Confrontalk’ (Hutchby, 1996) became a syndicated television talk genre in the 1960s.
Phil Donahue was the first to adapt the audience participation talk show (also termed ‘‘audience discussion program’’ and ‘‘studio debate program’’) from radio to television in 1967. His show initiated what is known today as daytime talk show or tabloid talk show. This format was consolidated by Oprah Winfrey from 1984 as a sort of modern update of women’s service magazines in the late 19th century in that it often tackles women’s issues and targets mainly an audience of housewives. American talk

shows such as Oprah Winfrey, Ricki Lake, and

Montel Williams have been gradually exported to the U.K., to several European countries, and to most countries in South America. As a result of an increasing decentralization of the media, a transition from debate programs to talk shows occurred in Europe in the 1980s.

Introduction

The talk show is a highly confrontational discursive genre, a widely influential media phenomenon, as well as a politically and morally controversial form of entertainment. Few discursive practices of popular broadcast culture have been more contentious and subject to cultural and scholarly examination in recent years than the talk show, particularly the television talk show.
The very notion of talk show raises issues concerning the boundaries between talk (prototypically dialogical) and show (prototypically monological), between public and private, between collective and personal experience, between expertise and experience, between interpersonal and mass communication, between information and entertainment, between discrete and overlapping identities (‘me,’ ‘you,’ ‘us,’ ‘them’). According to Munson (1993), the term ‘talk show’ combines two different, often contradictory, rhetorical paradigms by associating interpersonal conversation (belonging to the pre-modern oral tradition) with the mass-mediated spectacle (emerging in modernity). As a result, a public-colloquial language (Leech, 1966) has developed, which is modeled in varying ways upon the practices of conversational speech, through a process of ‘conversationalization’ of public discourse (Fairclough, 1995).

Defining Talk Shows

There are three main reasons why it is a very challenging task to define talk shows: they represent rapidly changing hybrid media phenomena, they display intertextuality through overlaps with other mediatized forms of talk, and they endlessly reconstruct themselves by violating and transgressing their own discursive conventions. The talk show displays a hybrid broadcast discourse in which patterns of communicative and social behavior can be associated with more than one discourse type, through overlaps with other mediatized forms of talk, such as interviews, debates, sitcoms, game shows, and quiz shows. To capture its distinctive features it is essential to explore the sociocultural environment and the contextual factors that generated it and that continue to shape it. The latter are principally the television show format, setting, time frame, and goal; the show host’s personal profile, agenda, and general orientation; the participants’ backgrounds, goals, and their relations.

Brief Historical Survey

The talk show is a modern Anglo-Saxon institution that may be seen to echo certain pre-modern sociocultural practices of purposeful conversation. According to Burke (1993: 114–115) 16th century Italy had the academy, a discussion group for intellectuals, with fixed membership and fixed days for meetings. The 17th century saw the emergence of its French counterpart, the salon, a semi-formal social occasion organized by a hostess, normally once a week, for a mixture of ladies and men of letters. In England, the equivalent social institutions flourished in the 18th century in the form of the more informal coffee-house, the assembly, and the club.
In talk shows the interpersonal talk is geared to public debate using partly conversational, partly institutional discursive conventions and strategies, which involves blurring the boundaries between traditional dichotomies, such as public vs. private, collective vs. personal experience, expertise vs. experience. This is why the talk show discourse was
The origin of talk shows was tracked down by
Munson as early as the 1930s when interactive talk radio started to emerge in the United States and listeners were invited to phone in. Two particular formats developed in the 1960s, namely all-talk and

Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2006), vol. 12, pp. 489–494

490 Talk Shows

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