Neutralism and adversarial challenges in the political news interview

This article aims to examine journalists’ adversarial challenges within the Australian political news interview. Within the Australian context, journalists tend to challenge interviewees: (1) by challenging the content of the prior turn, (2) by ‘interrupting’ the prior turn, and (3) by initially presenting their challenge as a freestanding assertion, not attributed to a third party. As a result, journalists could be interpreted as expressing their own perspective on the topic at hand, rather than maintaining a neutralistic stance. Although the challenging nature of journalistic questions has been previously noted within the Australian context (e.g. Adkins, 1992), there have been few analyses of such challenges. Using the framework of conversation analysis, the aim of the following article is to examine adversarial challenges in more detail. In particular, the article will focus on how interviewers (IR) and interviewees (IE) collaboratively produce the political news interview in such a way as to avoid accusations of bias or non-neutrality. First, the article will focus on the challenging nature of the IR's turn, by examining the various techniques used by journalists to ensure that they maintain a neutralistic stance. Second, it will examine the way in which IEs respond to such adversarial challenges. It will show how although politicians do not overtly accuse IRs of bias or impartiality, they clearly orient to the challenging nature of the journalists’ turn.