Media Dialogue: Negotiating roles in the news

This book presents an investigation of interactional discourse features of news interviews in Israeli (Hebrew) television media, focussing on the way interviewers and interviewees are discursively positioned with respect to each other. The study is based on two sets of data, comprising a 24-hour corpus of news interviews from the “New Evening ” (Erev Xadash) program on Israeli national television, and a corpus of meta-comments from leading Israeli media figures. The author first presents an overview of research on news interviews (chapter 1), and introduces the notions of positioning (chapter 2) and ‘challenging ’ in this context (chapter 3). She then focuses on three particular discourse patterns relevant to the news interviews in her corpus: discourse norms and expectations surrounding interactional roles (chapter 4); irony (chapter 5); and the use of terms of address to frame challenges (chapter 6). Three case studies from the corpus, which exemplify those discourse patterns, are discussed, after which Weizmann delivers her conclusions on the methodological approach and the insights gained from the study. The study takes an “integrated pragmatic approach ” (pp.7-8), which in this instance means that perspectives and methods from pragmatics and other traditions (including th