This article investigates the announced refusal to answer as a form of dispreferred and challenging response in broadcast political interviews. The aim is to study how the rightness and wrongness of conduct is dealt with in situations of announced refusal. More specifically, the paper focuses on: announced refusal as a particular type of conduct; the orientation to norms and accountability in situations of announced refusal; how the legitimacy of politics and journalism is negotiated in broadcast interviews. The data consist of (...) 23 cases from Swedish election campaigns, and the analysis is based on Conversation Analysis, focusing on how the participants treat themselves and others as normatively accountable. The study indicates that the politicians understand themselves as accountable and avoid hostile actions in the interviews. Their refusals are designed mainly to be understood as appropriate distancing actions without explicitly complaining about the interviewers’ conduct. (shrink)

In broadcast news interviews, interviewees will occasionally address the interviewer by name. As a method of establishing the directionality of talk, address terms are redundant in this institutional context because the normative question/answer activity structure and associated participation framework make the direction of address transparent and knowable in advance. But address terms can be deployed in the service of a variety of actions beyond addressing per se. Some of these involve disaligning actions such as topic shifts, non-conforming responses, and disagreements. (...) Others involve the presentation of views as particularly significant or sincere. Address terms are thus a resource for managing certain expressive properties of talk, as well as its disalignment from prior talk. (shrink)