News from the Interview Society Mats Ekström, Åsa Kroon & Mats Nylund (eds.) NORDICOM News from the Interview Society News from the Interview Society Mats Ekström, Åsa Kroon & Mats Nylund (eds.) NORDICOM News from the Interview Society Mats Ekström, Åsa Kroon & Mats Nylund (eds.) © Editorial matters and selections, the editors; articles, individual contributors (with two exceptions see p. 49 and p. 147); Nordicom ISBN 91-89471-37-7 Published by: Nordicom Göteborg University Box 713 SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG Sweden Cover by: Roger Palmqvist Printed by: Livréna AB, Kungälv, Sweden, 2006 Environmental certification according to ISO 14001 Contents Preface 7 Chapter 1 Mats Ekström, Åsa Kroon & Mats Nylund Introduction 9 I. Historical Shifts and the Role of the Journalistic Interview in Modern Media Chapter 2 Mats Ekström Interviewing, Quoting and the Development of Modern News Journalism. A Study of the Swedish Press 1915-1995 21 Chapter 3 Steven E. Clayman & John Heritage Questioning Presidents. Journalistic Deference and Adversarialness in the Press Conference of U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan 49 Chapter 4 Martin Eide Power on the Threshold of the Interview Society. Journalism, Politics, Popularization 79 II. The Interview as Institutional Practices and Interaction Chapter 5 Mie Femø Nielsen ‘Doing’ Interviewer Roles in TV Interviews 95 Chapter 6 Konstantin Economou & Christian Svensson Limsjö Hidden Camera Speaks Louder than Words 121 5 III. Quoting and Editing. Recontextualising the Interview Chapter 7 Mats Nylund Journalism’s Vitality. On the Narrative Functions of Quotes 147 Chapter 8 Åsa Kroon The Gendered Practice and Role of Pull Quoting in Political Newspaper Journalism 165 Chapter 9 Göran Eriksson Framing of Politicians’ Answers and the Mediazation of Politics. A Historical Comparative Study of the Discourse Practice of Framing in News Stories 185 Chapter 10 Mats Nylund Control and Collaboration. Interviewing and Editing in Television News Production 207 IV. The Interview as an Interdiscursive Phenomenon and Interaction on New Arenas Chapter 11 Ulla Moberg Broadcast Talk: The Interview and its Hybrids 225 Chapter 12 Steven E. Clayman Arenas of Interaction in the New Media Era 239 The Authors 265 6 Preface The basic argument in this book is this: If you want to understand journal- ism and its means of production, you have to pay attention to the news interview. We argue that the interview is essential in news production and intrinsically linked to the development of modern journalism. The interview can be seen as a ’machine’ that is used not only to gather information, but also to generate replies and statements from various news sources. While few would argue against the importance of the news interview, mainstream journalism research nevertheless has failed in analyzing interviewing prac- tices properly. The special ambition of this book is to provide analysis of the news interview that take into account the historical developments and analyze it in connection to other activities and material that make up the news stories. This book comes out of close cooperation and networking among Nordic media scholars. The authors come from four Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden. In addition to this, there are contributions from two American sociologists. John Heritage and Steven E. Clayman have been in the forefront in the analysis of the news interview for more than two decades. We believe that our book will be useful to both scholars and students in Media and Communication Studies, Journalism, Sociology, History and Linguistics. This is not a textbook on ’how to carry out a good news in- terview’, but we believe that also media professionals can gain from the analyses presented. Örebro and Helsinki in October 2006 Mats Ekström, Åsa Kroon & Mats Nylund 7 Chapter 1 Introduction Mats Ekström, Åsa Kroon & Mats Nylund During the 20th century, the interview has evolved in such a way that it has become the dominating form for talk and text production in the mass me- dia. To quote John Corner: “It is no exaggeration to say that the broadcast interview (...) is now one of the most widely used and extensively developed formats for public communication in the world.” There seems to be no doubt that the interview has been, and remains, one of the most vital methods or working forms in modern journalism (Schudson 1995). However, what makes the interview and its representations of it even more important is that the mass media are by no means the only institution that relies on interviewing. This has been pointed out by David Silverman (1993: 19) who introduced the concept of ‘an Interview Society’, in which the interview is “central to making sense of our lives.” For instance, as social researchers and citizens we should acknowledge that much of what we know about society and social groups is based on interview data, whether in the form of face-to-face interviews or survey research. Inspired by Silverman and the concept of the interview society, Gubrium and Holstein (2002) argue that the methods of interviewing are not only used by different institutions to gather information and produce knowledge. “The interview is part and parcel of our society and culture” (a. a. p 11). It generates ontological assumptions concerning the informing subjectiv- ity, and what is possible to learn by asking questions. It is essential to the construction of popular celebrities, public opinions and the communication in the media public sphere in general. Atkinson and Silverman (1997: 304) argue that the “collection and cele- bration of personal narratives has become a major occupation for many contemporary sociologists and others in the social and cultural disciplines”. This tendency, they argue, is intimately connected to “the rhetoric of inter- viewing in depth” which purports the qualitative interview as an “authentic gaze into the soul of another” (ibid. 305). The belief in the connection of interviewing and authenticity also remains central when it comes to news representation and, we believe, journalistic mythology. The editors and authors of this book build on Silverman’s concept of an Interview Society and choose to introduce it as a concept to understand the construction of news, the use of language, and the power of journal- 9 MATS EKSTRÖM, ÅSA KROON & MATS NYLUND ism in contemporary media society. The book focuses on the journalistic interview and the techniques for the representation of utterances, talk and conversation, and combines theories on the public sphere, journalism, and the interview as a form of interaction with theories on the design and pro- duction of (multimodal) media texts. It relates these discursive techniques on a micro-level to institutional and cultural conditions on a macro-level, with regard to journalism and the media public sphere, and takes a histori- cally comparative point of departure with the intention of pinning down important tendencies in the development of modern journalism during the 20th century. Although journalism research has been conducted extensively for many decades, we believe that surprisingly scant attention has been paid to the interview. A great deal has been written about news content, stories and discourses, as well as the organization and commercialization of news pro- duction, but the practice that has enabled many of these phenomena has been given less attention. F�����������������������������������������������ocusing on the interview in this book, we adopt an interactionist and dialogical approach to journalism. Through analyses of interaction and the conditions for interaction, we can reach detailed, generalized knowledge about the ways in which power is exercised and negotiated, how values and attitudes are reproduced, and how roles are established and changed in the public sphere of the media (see e.g. Thorn- borrow 2002, Clayman and Heritage 2002). The researchers who have contributed to this book come from five dif- ferent countries and have a broad theoretical competence and background in various disciplines: Political Science, Sociology, Journalism, Commu- nication, Media Studies and (Socio)Linguistics. We believe that the book will be useful to both scholars and students in Sociology, Media and Com- munication Studies, Journalism, History and Linguistics. It must be noted that this is not a handbook that will provide ‘the best way’ to carry out a journalistic interview, however we do hope practicing journalists may also find it worthwhile. Research on the interview When looking at journalism research from our dialogical point of view, it seems apparent that mainstream research has failed to recognize the ‘dia- logical turn’ in media output. Studies of news interviews and other forms of media interaction are still few in number and are usually performed on the outskirts of the field. Furthermore, journalism research tends to be somewhat slanted to the proclamation of normative conceptions of how things should be. The detailed analysis of practice, how journalism is actually carried out, seems to be of secondary importance. Having said this, important research on the news interview has certainly been conducted. 10 INTRODUCTION For example, studies on the news interview and broadcast talk have been carried out. Especially over the past ten years, a number of works on the news interview as a particular form of institutionalised conversa- tion have been published (Clayman 1992, Greatbatch 1992, Harris 1991, Heritage 1985, Heritage and Greatbatch 1991, Jucker 1986, Nylund