Dialogue and Dissemination in News Media Interviews

This article analyses the nature of the dialogue of broadcast news media interviews and their public dissemination and argues that political interviews are fundamentally contestable and indeterminate encounters. In contrast to theoretical and journalistic accounts that see conflict and disagreement in news media interviews as problems that need to be minimized and overcome, this article states that the dialogical account of language employed in the work of Bakhtin and Vološinov and agonistic political theory more accurately capture the communicative dynamics of news media interviews. It follows that the function of journalistic interviewers should be cast less in terms of producing consensus and mutual understanding and more in terms of keeping the political open.