Åsa Kroon Lundell

THE COMPLEX VISUAL GENDERING OF POLITICAL WOMEN IN THE PRESS

In this article, we present an analysis of how gendering is “being done” in press visuals of women in politics. In short, we will argue that women professionals working within the area of politics are gendered and type-cast in more complex ways than previous research has yet shown. In a qualitative analysis of visuals from three different political scandals in Sweden involving prominent political women, we analyse the diversified ways of portraying women in visuals that do not simply reproduce the idea that the gendering of women uncritically correlates with concepts like sexualization, objectification, passivity and otherness. As on-lookers of a professional woman in politics caught in a pressing situation in a photograph, we will argue that at times we may be invited to see her both as an Other but also a person with whom we can identify. Or a woman may be positioned as an object with a focus on appearance, but not by emphasizing her femininity and sexuality but by doing exactly the reverse. We will also discuss the complexity that is related to the various contextual factors that come into play when press photographers and editors communicatively “work” at accomplishing specific gendered visual “preferred readings”.

BEYOND THE BROADCAST INTERVIEW: Specialized forms of interviewing in the making of television news

Based on a mixed-method approach, this article aims at exploring the specialized forms of interviewing that are used as resources in television broadcast news production. Interviews are analysed as functionally specialized forms of interaction (cf. Heritage, 1985) with various functions in different phases of the news production. We assume that interviews are organized and carried out as communicative activities oriented towards specific tasks, identities and contexts of interaction. In contrast to established definitions of the archetypical on-air news interview, we argue that broadcast interviewing is only partially produced for an “overhearing audience” (Heritage, 1985). Taking into account the entire process of producing and presenting news, journalism harbours a multitude of interviewing practices and activities which remain invisible if only the taped and transcribed broadcast talk is analysed. Our study clearly indicates that news interviews contain more diversified and hybrid activities of communication than have been described in previous research.

INTERVIEWS AS COMMUNICATIVE RESOURCES IN NEWS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS BROADCASTS

This study quantitatively establishes the centrality and importance of interviews in news and current affairs broadcasts. We show how segments of interviews (from soundbites to longer recorded, or live, question-and-answer interactions) are deployed as communicative resources in the construction and presentation of news in various ways. The data allow for a cross-national comparison between the United Kingdom and Sweden which points to differences in practice between the countries. We argue that our findings may be used critically to examine various conceptualisations of broadcast interviews in general and political interviews in particular. We also show how journalists outnumber politicians as interviewees in the news, a finding that is in need of further exploration from a range of perspectives. We also believe that our study provides solid ground on which to base future critical studies of the authority of journalism, dialogical and soundbite journalism, and the alleged fragmentisation of news.

The design and scripting of 'unscripted' talk : liveness versus control in a TV broadcast interview

By combining ethnographic methods with textual analysis, this article sets out to answer the question how a scripted event on live television is infused with a sense of ‘liveness’ in order to balan ...In this article, I argue that the struggle between professional standards versus the need to attract audiences is made visible in the communicative choices that media professionals make in the formatting, scripting and performing on-air of a live television broadcast. These choices display, on the one hand, an orientation to ‘liveness’ in the sense that they express a desire to please audiences by engaging them in a spontaneous, informal, unscripted ‘here and now’. On the other hand, the choices are equally oriented to scripted institutional control to meet with the demands of impartiality, objectivity, balance and versatility. Although the management of liveness and control is linked to public service television in this article, the communicative choices that will be discussed, and the tension between them, are by no means exclusive to this arena. I will suggest that the struggle to satisfy both the professional desire for control and the absent viewer’s alleged desire for ‘liveness’ in the production process results in at least two implications for media researchers. First, the ‘strictly business’ interview is not only becoming more and more rare in general (Tolson, 2006: 68), it is also appearing in forms where elements of the talk show interview are mixed with a more traditional form of questioning to attract viewers. The normative turn-taking system remains the basic structuring principle for the broadcast interview (Clayman and Heritage, 2002). However, if other (preferably multimodal) data than the broadcast talk is included in the analysis, there is evidence that the interview as an institutional interaction is gradually changing. Second, and more specifically, the interdiscursive political interview calls for a less rigid categorization of what constitutes scripted and unscripted talk

Dialogues between journalists on the news: the intraprofessional ‘interview’ as a communicative genre

Journalists engaged in dialogues between themselves on air have become a common feature on the news. The main purpose of this study is to identify the various ways that these ‘intraprofessional dia ...

Live co-produced news: emerging forms of news production and presentation on the web

New technologies offer new interactional possibilities for news journalism, but they also pose a challenge to broadcasters who are accustomed to the practices of ‘old’ television news. The web is one such arena where broadcasters are in the process of mastering a sense of sociability and ‘communicative ease’ in relation to audiences. They struggle to find ways to engage audiences in the roles of both viewers and users in line with the technological affordances of the web. Rather little attention has yet been paid to how the general sociability of broadcasting is influenced by the development of digital media. This article presents a case showing how broadcasters orient to their audience(s) in a so-called live news co-production on the web. The main point is to highlight both possibilities and dilemmas in the management of audience-oriented activities on a new technological platform with its different conditions for production and reception. We argue that broadcasters interested in producing web news both need to adhere to the professional principles and standards of ordinary broadcasting, and at the same time show that they are competent enough to also produce unpolished, layman-like material normally associated with unprofessionality.

The before and after of a political interview on TV: Observations of off-camera interactions between journalists and politicians

This article deals with the organization of off-camera interactions between journalists and politicians. What kinds of talk transpire between the participants before and after the broadcast interview? What functions do the before and after interview interaction appear to have? What social norms and conventions seem to influence the character of the pre-interview and post-interview discourse? How are their respective professional roles negotiated in these settings? The framing of the interview as an object of study in its production context aims to contribute to existing research on the news interview, specifically within Conversation Analysis (e.g. Clayman and Heritage, 2002), which has not studied processes of production, but has mostly restricted itself to analyses of that which is broadcast to the audience.

INTERPRETING THE NEWS: Swedish correspondents as expert sources, 1982–2012

This paper examines a news genre that is designed for the enactment of interpretive journalism: the live studio correspondent commentary on Swedish news. We trace how the role of expert commentator/interpreter of events has evolved during a 30-year period with a focus on the relation between interaction and surrounding context. How is the expert interpreter role multimodally achieved, and how do technologies enable or constrain the enactment of an expert identity in these dialogues? As we discuss our results, also basing our argument on other studies of the same interactional phenomena, we will propose that the existence of this particular news format can be related to an ongoing power struggle between journalists and politicians. We see these interactions as providing journalism with a perhaps yet underestimated powerful resource in the framing of news, and argue that they should not be written off as merely supplying lightweight, gossipy comments about politics in a glossy studio environment.

Talking politics in broadcast media : cross-cultural perspectives on political interviewing, journalism and accountability

Talking politics in broadcast media : cross-cultural perspectives on political interviewing, journalism and accountability