Martin Montgomery

Speaking sincerely: public reactions to the death of Diana

This article explores some aspects of public speaking in the mediated public sphere by examining the verbal tributes offered by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, by the Queen and by Earl Spencer in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. It considers some of the linguistic properties of these three public utterances, but focuses mainly on the ways in which they were assessed by members of ‘the public’, in order to explore possible changes to the discursive character of the public sphere.1

THE DISCOURSE OF THE BROADCAST NEWS INTERVIEW

In previous work on the news interview, considerable attention has been devoted to its role as an instrument for holding politicians to account, leading to studies of evasion, of challenges to questions by interviewees, of how neutrality is performed, and of how issues are pursued by interviewers. Apart from Clayman (1992) and Ekstrøm (2001), however, few accounts of the news interview examine the other roles that it can serve and its place within the overall economy of news discourse. This article sets out to explore the range of types of news interviews and suggests that it is a mistake to regard the accountability interview with a public figure as the principal or defining type, despite their public salience and despite the way which broadcasters themselves routinely regard them as the cornerstone of their public-service remit.

The discourse of war after 9/11

The article traces the emergence of war as the dominant term for responding to the events of 9/11. It does so by focusing on speeches, interviews and newspaper headlines in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in their discursive-pragmatic contexts. In order to account for the salience and circulation of an expression such as war, it proposes for the public sphere a principle of discursive amplification. The article also highlights, however, the unevenness of the adoption of the term war by showing how differently it was inflected at different moments and in different sections of the public sphere. In addition, other modes of expression could have been adopted. The article provides some discursive reasons why war prevailed.

Broadcast news, the live 'two-way' and the case of Andrew Gilligan

This article examines the role of the live two-way exchange in broadcast news. It sets out to demonstrate that there are marked differences between the discourse of the unscripted live two-way interchange between correspondent and studio presenter and other scripted sections of the news. In particular, it is maintained that linguistic selections in the live two-way (particularly choices in linguistic modality) project a different approach to the truth conditions of its discourse, with less emphasis on precise veracity than is found generally in the news. The implications of this variation within the discourses of the news are then examined by considering the unscripted contribution by Andrew Gilligan to the BBC’s Today programme that became the focus of much attention before, during and after the Hutton enquiry.

The uses of authenticity: 'Speaking from experience' in a U.K. election broadcast

Authentic talk is treated as displaying features of spontaneous, unrehearsed discourse close in character to Goffman ‘s (1981) description of “fresh talk.” In the broadcast context it has become associated with eye‐witness accounts and the rendering of firsthand experiences (see Scannell, 2001): the evident lack of a script provides a guarantee of authenticity. This article examines how features of authentic talk can be deployed in political broadcasting by analysing a Party Election broadcast from the U.K. Conservative Party where the message is conveyed as if through the experience of ordinary people.

Belligerent broadcasting and makeover television : professional incivility in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares

This article looks at the significance of the practices of ‘belligerent broadcasting’ in the popular ‘trouble-shooting’ business television programme Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, USA. Belligerent broadcasting is a broadcast style that offers as spectacle expressions of anger or impatience, or the exercise of intimidation, against an on-screen interlocutor. Focusing on the performances of Gordon Ramsay, the article analyses the management of on-screen confrontation between participants occupying asymmetrical positions of power and perceived expertise. The article looks at how the face-threatening component of belligerent talk is ameliorated by strategies of authenticity and its representation as a productive force within the narrative of the programme. Finally, we assess the relevance of arguments that this broadcasting style might be seen as part of a ‘new incivility’ across media discourses.

The discourse of the broadcast news interview : a typology

In previous work on the news interview, considerable attention has been devoted to its role as an instrument for holding politicians to account, leading to studies of evasion, of challenges to questions by interviewees, of how neutrality is performed, and of how issues are pursued by interviewers. Apart from Clayman (1992) and Ekstrøm (2001), however, few accounts of the news interview examine the other roles that it can serve and its place within the overall economy of news discourse. This article sets out to explore the range of types of news interviews and suggests that it is a mistake to regard the accountability interview with a public figure as the principal or defining type, despite their public salience and despite the way which broadcasters themselves routinely regard them as the cornerstone of their public-service remit.

Rituals of personal experience in television news interviews

Interviewing as part of broadcast news includes a wide range of practices that go beyond calling public figures to account in ways that have received so much attention and analysis in the research literature. This article examines a major strand of news interviewing which it identifies as ‘experiential’ and argues, on the basis of close discourse analysis of interviews drawn from coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2005 London bombings, that the focus on personal experience and emotion in them is managed in ways quite distinct from accountability interviewing. Indeed, the apparently formulaic quality of the verbal performance in these interviews gives shape to experience in a fashion close to ritual but demands a quite different kind of alignment from the audience than that implicated by accountability interviewing.

Semantic Asymmetries and the ‘War on Terror’

Political violence, of course, is not new. Nor is terrorism new. Depending on how the latter is defined, its history can be traced back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century (Burleigh 2007). What is new since September 2001 are changes in the discursive disposition of the terms adopted in the public sphere to describe terrorism and political violence. This chapter shows how the discursive lineaments of the present public reactions to terrorism have evolved since 9/11. Its purpose is not only to display the distinctiveness of the current discursive disposition but by doing so to suggest how the discursive arrangements might have been and could still be different. In this way the chapter might be seen as a form of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1993, 2003;Wodak and Meyer 2001;Widdowson 2004): its focus is on the present and the immediate past but its intention is to act — in Bauman’s phrase — ‘as a knife with the edge pressed against the future’2 (Bauman 1976;Bauman and Tester 2001).

THE DISCOURSE OF THE BROADCAST NEWS INTERVIEW: A typology11. The data on which this article is based receive a more extended treatment, especially with regard to “witnessing”, in Montgomery (2007). Earlier drafts of this article were much improved by detailed commentary from John E. Richardson and Michael Hamo. Its faults, of course, remain my own.View all notes

In previous work on the news interview, considerable attention has been devoted to its role as an instrument for holding politicians to account, leading to studies of evasion, of challenges to questions by interviewees, of how neutrality is performed, and of how issues are pursued by interviewers. Apart from Clayman (1992) and Ekstrøm (2001), however, few accounts of the news interview examine the other roles that it can serve and its place within the overall economy of news discourse. This article sets out to explore the range of types of news interviews and suggests that it is a mistake to regard the accountability interview with a public figure as the principal or defining type, despite their public salience and despite the way which broadcasters themselves routinely regard them as the cornerstone of their public-service remit.