Media Talk and Political Elections in Europe and America

A. Tolson, M. Ekstrom, A. Tolson, M. Ekstrom, Kenneth A. Loparo, Mats Ekström

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137273314
• eBook ISBN: 9781137273321
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Aspects in Computer Science
• Index: Social Sciences

This book makes an important contribution to the study of political communication. Its chapters analyse forms of media talk associated with contemporary political elections. Key topics include: changing forms of political interview, televised political debates, and the use of multimedia in promotional discourse.

1

‘We Change or We Sink’: Discursively Constructing the Voter’s Dilemma in a Pre-election Interview with the Greek Prime Minister

Marianna Patrona

Introduction

Since the advent of subscription TV in the early 1990s, a lot has been written about the interpenetration of information and entertainment in contemporary programming (Thussu, 2007), as well as the mixing of different discourse genres within programmes, programme segments and individual interactional exchanges (Livingstone and Lunt, 1994; Tolson, 2001, 2006; Wood, 2004; Hutchby, 2006; Talbot, 2007). Hybridity is present and is used strategically to achieve different interactional ends in all communication (see e.g. Roberts and Sarangi, 1999). In contemporary media, generic hybridity is a pervasive trend resulting in novel and dynamic forms of programming, including new, hybrid forms of political communication that balance the private and personal with the public and institutional (Lauerbach, 2004; Baym, 2007, Chapter 3 this volume; Ekström, 2011; Hutchby, 2011, Chapter 2 this volume; Patrona, 2011).

This chapter examines an interchannel interview with the prime minister, George A. Papandreou, that was broadcast live by all Greek national TV channels on 25 October 2010, a few days before the elections for local government of 7 November 2010, and only six months after the economic adjustment programme that entailed the first set of a series of draconian austerity measures for the Greek people.

By applying detailed discourse analysis of the premier’s introductory address to Greek citizens, and conversation analysis (CA) of the question–answer sequences pertaining to the interview, it will be argued that the interchannel interview is a hybrid format of broadcast interaction, located at the cross-section of the press conference and the political interview. More specifically, the chapter will address the following research questions:

• What are the interactional features of the pre-electoral interchannel interview?
• What rhetorical strategies does the prime minister employ and how does he mobilize them interactionally to enlist the support of viewers-voters?
• How does Papandreou tackle the task of addressing journalists’ questions?
• Is the pre-electoral interview conducive to accountability?
• How was it received by the public and the (new) media?

The analysis will show that by resorting to a set of discursive strategies, the prime minister constructs a ‘make-or-break’ dilemma for citizens-voters, to the effect that failure of the government to secure a clear majority in the local elections will lead to premature parliamentary elections, which will, in turn, threaten to trigger the country’s bankruptcy. These strategies are:

• modulating the use of personal pronouns;
• repeating key words and concepts;
• using abstract and metaphorical formulations;
• using different forms of evasiveness to circumvent the agenda of journalists’ questions (speechifying, agenda-shifting, not answering or delaying answering), and rehearsing a preplanned agenda of key points and messages.

In this context, the prime minister strategically deploys the discursive register of antipolitics (Campus, 2010), namely a style of populist language that consists in building an attack against the political establishment, on the grounds that it is manipulative and self-serving. While usually deployed by populist leaders to campaign against the government, Campus’s thesis is that the government itself (in particular charismatic leaders) sometimes cultivates antipolitical feelings among citizens in order to maintain its popularity, and/or secure popular consensus on projects of political reform or specific policy programmes.

The Greek prime minister draws on such antipolitical language as a means of winning a highly problematic wager: ensuring continued support from voters who have already faced painful austerity measures implemented as a condition for securing financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) in May 2010, in order to proceed with even more painful policy and institutional reforms.

The Greek crisis and the 2010 local elections

The Greek parliamentary elections of 2009 brought the centre-left government of PASOK back to power after five years of governance by the centre-right party of New Democracy. The newly elected government announced that the deficit and debt figures reported by the previous administration were inaccurate and required revision upwards. On 23 April 2010, Greek prime minister George A. Papandreou announced from the island of Kastelorizo that the country would seek assistance from the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF (the so-called ‘troika’).

At the time, the fiscal condition of the Greek economy was dire. From late 2009, fears of a sovereign debt crisis among investors caused a crisis of confidence. As the demand for Greek sovereign bonds plunged, prices declined sharply and their yields increased to levels that made borrowing from the international markets prohibitive; the threat of default was imminent. The fear that the Greek debt crisis could spread to other southern European countries led the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF to reach a deal with the Greek government on 2 May 2010. The country was to be provided with a €110 billion loan, conditional upon the implementation of harsh austerity measures listed in detail in the so-called ‘Memorandum I’. The agreement required the government to raise tax revenues, lower government expenditures, and proceed with structural reforms in the public sector and the labour market. These measures, along with those stipulated by the later agreement of 26 October 2011 (‘Memorandum II’), triggered demonstrations and extensive civil unrest in Greece. What is more, they ‘plunged the country into a recession of near-Great Depression dimensions’ (The New York Times, 27 June 2012).

It is against this backdrop that the 2010 local and regional poll in Greece, which would ordinarily have been a local affair, commanded the centre of attention for world markets and international leaders alike, after prime minister George Papandreou framed the elections as a ‘referendum on his economic policies’ (The Guardian, 7 November 2010).

Media discourse as the subject matter of political communication

Traditionally, focus on the organization of talk in political media formats has been the object of enquiry of linguistically based disciplines, such as discourse analysis and CA. In particular, within the field of discourse analysis, a significant strand of research has taken a critical perspective towards media practices (critical discourse analysis), viewing the media in modern societies in terms of ‘a powerful ideological apparatus’ (Fairclough, 1995a: 46). An important theme in this tradition is how changing practices of media discourse relate to wider processes of social and cultural change (see Fowler, 1991; Fairclough, 1995b, 1998). Other discourse-based approaches to broadcast practices have argued for a phenomenological approach to media talk with the aim of ‘investigating the connection between media, language and world’ (Scannell, 1998: 263; see also Scannell, 1991, 1996, 2012).

Similarly, CA, developed in the 1970s by the sociologists Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, has paid close attention to the ‘interactional accomplishment of particular social activities’ within different media formats (Drew and Heritage, 1992: 17), such as the news interview and the radio phone-in programme, and their distinctive forms of sequential organization and turn design. The interactional practices of interviewers and interviewees in news interviews (Heritage and Greatbatch, 1991; Clayman and Heritage, 2002a, b), such as topic-shifting procedures used by interviewees, and politicians’ evasiveness in answering questions (Greatbatch, 1986; Harris, 1991; Clayman, 1993; 2001), are major themes of this research.

Following the line of research exploring the connection between qualitative microanalysis of discourse, and broader trends in the media and politics (see chapters in Ekström and Patrona, 2011), this chapter is based on discourse and conversation analysis of talk in the interchannel interview. More specifically, discourse analysis has been undertaken for the prime minister’s introductory address to citizens. This has yielded significant findings with respect to the rhetorical strategies aimed at engaging citizens-voters and enlisting their support in the upcoming ballots. Subsequently, the prime minister’s responses to journalists’ questions¹ have been studied following the conversational analytic approach to political interviewing, in the framework of discourseoriented approaches to broadcast talk (Hutchby, 2006; Tolson, 2006; Montgomery, 2007; Lorenzo-Dus, 2009).

This chapter starts from the premise that a focus on political discourse in the media, in this case the prime minister’s pre-electoral address to citizens, can also make a positive – and much needed – contribution to the field of political communication. This is because political processes and tensions, the balance of powers and unique – perhaps unprecedented – political stakes of the 2010 electoral confrontation in Greece are enacted, displayed and negotiated in the premier’s mediated performance in the interchannel interview.

In this context, political communication is understood as encompassing ‘the construction, sending, receiving, and processing of messages that potentially have a significant direct or indirect impact on politics’ (Graber, 2005: 479). Although generally acknowledged as an interdisciplinary field allowing for – at least in theory – intellectual cross-fertilization among areas as diverse as political science, psychology and communication, political communication studies have been marked by a disproportionate reliance on the – mainly quantitative – methods of social sciences, such as content analysis, public opinion polls, surveys, focus groups, and experiments to examine the reception and interpretation of political messages by audience members (see Graber, 2005; see also Roberts, 1997; Little et al., 2000; Lomax, 2001; Stevens, 2001). Thus, although electoral politics is perhaps the most widely researched area in recent decades, coverage of this topic has also been marked by too narrow a focus on the cognitive effects of mass media – more specifically on how audiences process information in line with specific interpretive schemas that shape their perceptions (agenda setting, priming and framing). That said, the engagement of framing analysis with questions of narrative construction and modes of presentation does show an affinity with the concerns of discourse analysis, albeit from a different conceptual point of departure. In her extensive survey of the challenges faced by the field in the 21st century, Doris A. Graber calls for more attention to be paid to the rhetoric of political leaders and interactional confrontation (‘verbal battles’, ibid.: 497).

This case study of the Greek prime minister’s 2010 pre-electoral interview will show that the political interview is a continuously evolving broadcast genre, whose conventions are fluid, intergeneric (or hybrid) and adapting to the contextual (political, social, economic and ideological) contingencies at hand in a mutually informing relationship. The question is as follows. To what extent is this form of political interview an effective medium for ‘doing’ accountability, a prerequisite for political journalism in recent decades (Patrona, 2011: 157), enabling the interviewers to substantively probe into a political leader’s track record and policy commitments? This will be addressed in the analytical sections that follow.

The interchannel interview as a hybrid form of broadcast interaction

The election campaign interview, part and parcel of mediated political communication during the campaign season in the US and the UK, is a variant of what Montgomery (2007) calls the accountability interview. In other words, it is a terrain where the journalist’s watchdog role is particularly salient, as journalists are expected to critically scrutinize candidates for public office, particularly those who appear most likely to win (Clayman and Romaniuk, 2011). Thus the journalistic mission in this type of interview is not simply to convey information to the public about the candidate but also to actively vet the frontrunners on behalf of the public (ibid.).

The prime-ministerial interview, broadcast simultaneously by all Greek national channels, is a rather uncommon media format in the Greek pre-election period². Its unique political import for influencing public opinion in favour of or against the government on the eve of the 2010 local elections was captured in subsequent media coverage by TV news commentary, Internet blogs and viewer opinion polls, where it received various reactions and assessments.

The two-hour interview is in fact only nominally an interview. In essence, it is a hybrid between a political press conference and an interview, sharing some of the more ritualized (fixed) provisions of the turn-taking mechanism pertaining to press conferences (e.g. the one-turn-per-journalist norm, Clayman and Heritage, 2002b) as well as basic traits of the political interview, especially with regard to journalists’ question design (see Montgomery, 2007; Clayman and Romaniuk, 2011) and the premier’s strategies for agenda-shifting (Greatbatch, 1986; Clayman, 1993, 2001).

In the last two decades, generic conventions in media formats have been characterized by fluidity and transience. Hybridity, conceptualized as the interpenetration of different genres within current media formats, has been well documented as a cardinal feature of contemporary broadcasting (see papers in Ekström and Patrona, 2011; Baym, Chapter 3 this volume; Sanz Sabido, Chapter 4 this volume). The interchange between personal story-telling and expert talk in the talk-show genre is particularly characteristic of this effect (Livingstone and Lunt, 1994).

With regard to political interviewing, research has documented a number of generic variants of the (archetypical) news interview as a result of the generic evolution of this trademark form of mediated political communication. Lauerbach (2004) shows that political interviewing on commercial and public TV channels is distinguished on the basis of interviewer style, from issue-oriented confrontation (on the BBC) to emotionalized talk oriented towards the person (on ITV). Hutchby (2011, Chapter 2 this volume) argues for a new form of broadcast discourse on non-mainstream news shows, the ‘hybrid political interview’, located somewhere between ‘interview’ and ‘argument’. Ekström (2011) demonstrates how the host in a hybrid radio talk show manipulates sequential frame shifts, from humorous small talk to serious accountability interviewing, as a resource to exert pressure on the political leader and put him in an interactionally uncomfortable situation. Finally, Patrona (2011) shows that the news interview on prime-time commercial Greek news is mostly performed as a talk-show debate, where journalists engage in highly opinionated and aggressive discourse, previously associated mainly with talk radio.

According to Clayman and Heritage (2002b), one parameter of journalistic initiative (initiative being an aspect of adversarial questioning) in presidential press conferences is the prevalence of follow-up questions. These signal initiative by exceeding the norm of one-turn-per-journalist and, also, often, by not accepting as satisfactory the response offered by the president (ibid.: 758). In US press conferences, the success in delivering follow-up questions largely depends on the president, who can choose to acknowledge the journalist as a next speaker, or forestall a follow-up question by calling upon another journalist.

By contrast, in the interchannel interview, the occurrence and frequency of follow-up questions is an in-built component of the preallocated turn-taking system, as laid out by the government spokesperson at the outset of the event. Here the premier responds to questions by a panel of seven prestigious journalists, each of whom represents a different TV channel (six commercial and one public). A government spokesman acts as a moderator, whose role is to ensure smooth transition of the floor to each journalist in accordance with a pre-arranged sequence of questioners. The government spokesperson introduces the interview and lays down the norms governing the journalists’ contributions and floor-holding rights.

Thus he makes it clear that journalists’ contributions will be limited to two questions, plus another two follow-up questions on the same topic. The interview begins with the prime minister’s introductory speech (appeal to citizens), and it unfolds with each journalist asking a question followed by a second question, which mostly builds on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Transcription Symbols
• Media Talk and Political Elections in Europe and America
• 1. ‘We Change or We Sink’: Discursively Constructing the Voter’s Dilemma in a Pre-election Interview with the Greek Prime Minister
• 2. Obama in the No Spin Zone
• 3. Transformations in Hybrid TV Talk: Extended Interviews on The Daily Show (.com)
• 4. ‘I Have a Question for You’: Mediatized Democracy, Citizen Participation and Elections in Catalonia
• 5. More than Cleggmania? The Celebrity Politician, Presidentialization and the UK 2010 Televised Leader Debates
• 6. The Telegenic Politician? Communication Strategies in the UK Election 2010 Party Leader Debates
• 7. Rhetoric and Responses: Electioneering on YouTube
• 8. Citizen Participation in Journalist Discourse: Multiplatform Political Interviews in the Swedish Election Campaign 2010
• 9. Mediatization, Right-Wing Populism and Political Campaigning: The Case of the Austrian Freedom Party
• 10. Get Involved! Communication and Engagement in the 2008 Obama Presidential E-Campaign
• Index