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  • The news interview: Journalists and public figures on the air by Steven Clayman, John Heritage
  • David Deterding
The news interview: Journalists and public figures on the air. By Steven Clayman and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 372. ISBN 0521011914. $24.

This book focuses on formal interviews between television journalists and their eminent guests in Britain and the US, analyzing how the interviews are structured and the participants behave. A brief history of television interviews is followed by analysis and detailed discussion of their various facets, including the underlying ground rules, the methods adopted by journalists to maintain neutrality while asking probing questions, and the tricks adopted by some politicians to evade questions while pretending to answer them. Finally, there is a consideration of the panel interview.

This analysis of how the presentation of news programs is manipulated by various parties is fascinating. It is perhaps a pity that the discussion is restricted to Anglo-Saxon cultures as a cross-cultural comparison might provide valuable insights about how things can be done differently. However, the material here is presented exceptionally clearly, with detailed examples of a wide range of interviews, so the absence of any cross-cultural comparison is a minor shortcoming.

The transcripts of the interviews are well presented, with the key moments clearly highlighted. One might note that there is only minimal prosodic information, with underlining of stressed words, question marks to indicate rising pitch, and periods to indicate falling pitch. But in reality, more detailed transcription of intonation might interfere with the clarity of the exposition, so maybe the level of detail is about right.

Furthermore, even if intonation were included, we would still miss some very important things, such as the shake of the head by an interviewer that forced Dan Quayle to retreat from his prepared answer and actually answer the question (291), and the selective smiling that reinforced the distinct bias of an interviewer who was conducting a panel debate on genetic engineering (330). It is hoped that, one day, books such as this will be accompanied by CD-ROM-based video clips, but in the meantime this volume does provide us with a wide range of carefully presented material, and the transcripts are quite adequate to illustrate the points clearly.

Inevitably with such a fascinating topic, one is left wishing that even more examples could be provided. We are told that Mrs. Thatcher deliberately took breaths in the middle of sentences to forestall interruption at sentence breaks (114), but no illustration of this is provided; we learn that panel interviews are designed to encourage debate to such an extent that any agreement between panelists can take the interviewer aback (309), and again an example would be illuminating. But in reality, the range and relevance of the transcripts provided is exceptionally good, and in many ways it is a tribute to the quality of the presentation that it leaves one always wanting to know more.

This book should provide valuable material both for linguists interested in discourse and for students of journalism. One hopes that this kind of analysis can help educate not just specialists in the field, but also the general public, so that we become more aware of the ways that the news we see is packaged and manipulated.

David Deterding
National Institute of Education, Singapore
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