‘Doing Public Policy’ in the Political News Interview

This chapter demonstrates how both journalist and politician involve the public’ within the process of doing policy formation. The focus of this chapter is to interactionally examine how person reference terms are used within the political news interview. Politicians and journalists can also directly involve the audience in their presentation of public policy. The data under analysis comprises 16 political news interviews collected in 2004 during the lead up to the Australian federal election. Taking a linguistic perspective, the methodological framework for the current analysis will use principles from conversation analysis (CA), with emphasis on the analysis of language as social action, focusing on what it is that the talk is actually doing as participants interact in everyday institutional settings. References to the public, or sub-sets of the public, frequently occur within contentious adversarial environments. Journalists use person reference terms as a technique for legitimising unsourced assertions or contentious questions.