Abstract
This book examines recent cases of media coverage of political elections in various Western countries. Situating itself within the field of political communication studies, this book has the twin goals of understanding contemporary developments in the conduct of mediated political talk, debate, and deliberation through the application of discourse-analytic methods and techniques and of exploring the cultural diversity of electoral politics in an international context.
Broadly speaking, the analyses in this book take four distinct approaches: (1) examining variations of the structure of news interviews from a conversation-analytic perspective, (2) examining speaker footings and the complexity of interactional alignments from Goffman’s microsociological theory of the participation framework, (3) studying the various forms of rhetoric in political speeches and communication, and (4) CDA. Of these perspectives, the first three are the most strongly articulated in many of the book’s chapters, which do not simply show their relevance for the study of political talk, but offer ways of extending them.
While the table of contents simply lists an introduction followed by 10 distinct chapters, the book is, in effect, structured into three main parts, the first of which (Chapters 1–4) considers variations and hybridizations of the standard political interview. In Chapter 1, Patrona examines a press conference with Greece’s prime minister addressing the country’s financial crisis, as well as later news commentary assessing both his performance and the multiple-interviewer format of the press conference. Patrona points out the inherent limits that this format has for both interviewers and interviewee. However, both Hutchby (in his examination of US President Barack Obama’s appearance in a decidedly non-neutral ‘hybrid political interview’ on Fox News) and Baym (examining interviews on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show) explore how less conventional interview formats work, showing how humor and emotion can be brought into an interaction and perhaps used strategically by either host or interviewee. In Chapter 4, Sanz Sabido takes a Catalonian example to look at the citizen interview format, offering examples of both sympathetic and confrontational exchanges, as well as showing what happens when spontaneous breaks in format occur. Thus, the four chapters offer a solid portrayal of contemporary types of interview formats, analyzing each type as a series of turn-taking interactions between political officials and various interviewers and audiences, with hybrid formats going well beyond the neutralistic Q&A format of standard news interviews.
The second section of this book focuses on the party leader debates of 2010 in the United Kingdom, finding much in the televised responses to questions by candidates Brown, Cameron, and Clegg to help illustrate such analytical points as forms of address (including forms of audience address) and speaker footings within political speakers’ responses. In Chapter 5, Washburne discusses the phenomenon of the ‘presidentialization’ of parliamentary leaders, showing how Liberal Democratic candidate Nick Clegg managed to interactionally separate himself from his Labor and Conservative competitors, such as via a greater use of direct address to the studio audience, as well as by strategically undercutting his competitors’ supposed positions of strength as candidates. Chapter 6, by Tolson, also focuses on these debates, highlighting this time Clegg’s relative strengths in connecting with the audience, as well as on the non-verbal formatting of the debate program and its affects at conveying varying levels of audience approval. Tolson makes extensive use of Goffman’s analytic approach and shows the multiple footings at play in the speaker’s responses to questions.
This book’s final chapters (7–10) examine political communication and new media, such as email communications and online discussion forums. In Chapter 7, Sparkes-Vian offers two distinct examples of political communication from YouTube and its online comments page: an Obama speech during the 2008 presidential primary season and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2010 TED conference talk. Sparkes-Vian highlights contrasts between Obama’s more narrative speech and Cameron’s more dryly analytic discourse. Both examples also consider variations in direct audience responses, as well as the more indirect response of forum audience participants. Chapter 8, by Ekström and Eriksson, focuses on citizen participation in ‘multiplatform’ electoral campaign interviews during the 2010 Swedish election, offering a useful demonstration of how conventional broadcasting has been supplemented by new media. Forchtner, Krzyżanowski, and Wodak devote Chapter 9 to examining mediatization in the campaign of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party, demonstrating the multifaceted nature of conventional and contemporary discourse around this campaign. Finally, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich discursively examine the use of email by the Obama campaign as a means of communicating with and motivating followers.
A key strength here is the focus on televisuality, with this book helping to make the argument that modern democracy has been transformed into something of a ‘media democracy’ in which citizens engage in political action primarily through media consumption, and political leaders learn to be savvy mass media communicators. However, while there is little doubt of the global scope of such phenomena, this book is restricted in its coverage, with more than half of the contributions focusing primarily on the US and UK contexts. Whether this reflects a greater empirical attention to these countries’ politics or the global prominence of their political personalities, a broader focus would be desirable. Nevertheless, this volume is a useful guide to the application of discourse analysis and conversation analysis models to political discourse, providing clear and detailed arguments based on strong empirical evidence.