This article explores the discursive behaviour of professional male team sports players in post-match interviews from a social identity construction perspective. Drawing on a data set of 160 televised post-match interviews from two different team sports and two different regions of the world, this article identifies stances players orient to when presenting themselves in these media interviews. A supplementary data set of ethnographic semi-structured interviews with professional team sports players is also used to develop insider perspectives on the discursive behaviour (...) of professional team sports players when speaking to the media. What is argued is that the acts and stances employed by team sports players can be interpreted as indexing a media self, or media identity, one that professional team sports players construct in order to strategically negotiate a public version of self that presents them positively to their audience and maintains their relationships with other members of their team. (shrink)

This article examines how Italian commercial broadcast news on Mediaset’s three terrestrial channels has covered the transition to digital terrestrial television. Mediaset is the largest commercial broadcaster in the country and is owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. By drawing on critical discourse analysis of broadcast news, it is argued that linguistic elements such as pronouns, choice of words, and metaphors, together with tendentious editing and framing of interviews, were part of a strategy of positive representation of the broadcaster’s (...) interests in the transition and negative representation of media policies opposing such interests. In particular, the analysis brings to the surface the ideological usage of interviews. Interviews in this case did not function as an act of control over the powerful, but as a way to illuminate the broadcaster’s strategic interests while obfuscating the reasons behind attempts to regulate the transition to digital television and open the market to competition. The data attest that the way in which news programs covered the digital transition exposes the connections between media content, media ownership, and governmental institutions. Indeed, all three news programs, TG5, TG4, and Studio Aperto, despite their different target audience and the reputation of one of them as the most objective and authoritative newscast on Italian commercial television, echoed each other in unified support of the sort of interests and media legislation that best fitted the corporation, especially at times when those interests were threatened. The corpus consists of 13 newscasts grouped in two clusters aired in 2006 and 2009. The main participants in the story were Mediaset’s president, often interviewed as the ‘expert’ on the TV industry, the communications minister for the center-left Prodi government, and the communications undersecretary for the center-right Berlusconi government. Citizens and consumer groups were never given the opportunity to voice their positions or be an active part of the narration. (shrink)

This article explores the nature of argumentative interaction in the hybrid political interview: a broadcast news genre whose discourse positions the journalist not just as investigator but as socio-political advocate. Such interviews offer explicit challenges to the traditionally conceived ‘neutral’ role of the broadcast news journalist. Interviewer ‘non-neutrality’ is examined in contexts where the speech exchange system shifts into the unmitigated and aggravated opposition characteristic of argument. Drawing on a sample of interviews involving different hosts, I analyse the structural features (...) of both interviewer and interviewee turns that occur in these environments. I do this in relation both to sequential matters — that is, the types of turns taken and their relations with other turns in their immediate environment — and to matters of the substantive content of utterances — that is, what speakers are saying and/or the way they are saying it. (shrink)

While previous studies highlight the dynamic nature of identity co-construction, how and especially why speakers construct and shift their own multiple identities still remains understudied. The present study argues that identity is part of speaker communicative resources as evidenced by radio program hosts’ strategic employment and shift among their different identities to facilitate their interactional purposes. Based on data drawn from radio medical consultations, this article attempts to reveal the dynamic adaptability of hosts’ identity construction. It is found that in (...) general, hosts of medical consultation programs construct three identities for themselves, namely an authoritative expert identity, a caring friend identity and a sales representative identity; the three identities constructed are respectively adaptable to power relationships, solidarity and role relationships between hosts and callers in conversation; the three identities shift in conversations to facilitate callers’ purchasing acts. (shrink)

Drawing on insights from conversation analysis, discursive psychology and social psychology, this article describes some interactional features of two celebrity TV confessionals and the resources used by the TV interviewers and celebrity guests to attribute, accept or deny responsibility for their transgressions. The analytic interest lies in how confessions are locally and interactionally managed, that is, how ‘doing confessing’ is achieved in the television interview context. We show how the host’s opening turn constrains the celebrity guest’s contribution and secures overt (...) admission of guilt, while simultaneously inviting the celebrity guest to tell their side of the story. We also show how celebrity guests produce descriptions which minimize the extent and severity of their transgressions, reduce agency and transform the character of their transgression. In doing so, we argue that celebrity interviewees can convey mitigations and extenuations which diminish the extent of their responsibility – calling into question the very nature of their confession. We propose that our findings demonstrate the hybrid nature of interviewing in the celebrity TV confessional and contribute to our understanding of how ‘doing confessing’ in the public eye is discursively and interactionally negotiated. (shrink)