Positioning in Media Dialogue: Negotiating Roles in the News Interview by Elda Weizman

Abstract

This book is a series of analyses of how interviewers and interviewees position themselves and each other in Israeli television news interviews, all based on interviews from the early evening current affairs show, ‘Erev Xadash’ in the early 1990s. There is a lot of convincing, not to mention enjoyable, close analysis of moments of verbal sparring in Israeli televised politics that will add to understanding of the news interview and of institutional talk in general. Weizman brings together insights from across the discourse analytic literature to tease out aspects of the relations between participants and the textual strategies through which those relations are negotiated. The chapters exploring the use of irony and terms of address in what Weizman terms the ‘challenge-saturated environments’ of Israeli news interviews make particularly interesting reading. It is here that the book’s conclusions are concentrated – for example, that interviewees rarely make ironic statements at the expense of the interviewer, and more often at the expense of third parties, while interviewers are more likely to target political figures they are interviewing, but rarely others.