Most radio and television programming encompasses talk in some form, but the term broadcast talk is usually understood as a specific category of programming in contrast to both fictional entertainment and traditional news. It refers to various programming genres that are broadly informational, to some extent nonscripted, and organized around processes of interaction. Although some are ad hoc events produced independently (e.g., campaign debates, town meetings), most are regularly scheduled programs produced by broadcasters themselves (e.g., news interviews, celebrity talk shows, radio call-in shows). Each genre involves some combination of public figures, media professionals, and ordinary people as interactional participants.
Broadcast talk programming has grown substantially in recent decades, especially in the medium of television. A variety of forces have contributed to this development, with technological and legal changes leading the way as enabling factors. In the US, and to a lesser extent in England, the number of television channels and news outlets has increased in part because of the advent of cable television. At the same time, satellite feeds and more portable news gathering equipment have facilitated live encounters with newsmakers virtually anywhere in the world. And in the US, the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 (a Federal Communications Commission [FCC] regulation mandating that broadcasters offer a range of views on controversial issues of public importance) has reduced inhibitions stemming from government oversight of program content. These changes have have expanded opportunities for the development of new interaction-based forms of informational programming.
At the same time, economic conditions have encouraged broadcasters to exploit the opportunities. This has been an era of tremendous volatility in the media marketplace on both sides of the Atlantic, with existing broadcast networks facing a succession of new competitors, starting with cable and the VCR and culminating in the personal computer and the Internet. In the 1980s, the three major commercial television networks in the US – ABC, NBC, and CBS, which had long been stable corporate entities devoted primarily to communications – were each bought out by conglomerates which assumed substantial debt and were much less willing to allow their news divisions to remain insulated from the pressures of the bottom line. All of this has made broadcasters much more concerned about production costs and audience ratings and more willing to experiment with new formats for informational programming.
Moreover, such experimentation has taken place in an occupational culture which places a high value on programming attributes that favor broadcast talk. There is the well-known preference for “live” programming – the presentation of raw events that are, or appear to be, unfolding “in the present tense” (Timberg 2002, 4) – as the distinctive province of broadcasting. As one network news executive put it, “the highest power of television journalism is not in the transmission of information, but in the transmission of experience” (quoted in Epstein 1973, 39). Coupled with the preference for events-asthey-happen is a parallel preference for discourse that is informal and conversational in style, thereby addressing the audience in a familiar and inclusive way. Audience members, it is believed, want to feel that they are being “talked with” rather than “lectured at.” In this evolving context, formats based on spoken interaction have been particularly attractive. Such formats are inexpensive to produce, and embody qualities of “liveness” and “informality” which are regarded as both intrinsically televisual and popular with audiences.
As broadcast talk has grown more prominent, it has become a focus of scholarly research from conversation analytic, discourse analytic, and other perspectives. This research suggests that while the number and variety of talk programs is truly vast, most can be grouped into a few readily recognizable genres based on characteristic constellations of participants, subject matter, and most importantly the form of interaction through which they are conducted. These interactional forms vary in the degree to which they differ from “casual” or ordinary conversation. At the conversational end of the continuum are modes of broadcast talk that are freewheeling and informal, with opportunities for participation relatively unconstrained (e.g., celebrity talk shows, radio call-in shows). At the other end of the continuum are modes that are more formal in character, with dimensions of participation such as the order of speakership and the length and content of contributions to some extent determined in advance (e.g., formal debates, news interviews). Any given form of broadcast talk reflects the communicative objectives of program or event producers, as well as professional norms and other institutional constraints. Notwithstanding the existence of fuzzy generic boundaries and marginal cases, the following genres may be distinguished.
Interviews involve a program host who elicits talk from a public figure. Most interviews are organized primarily around questions and answers, although the degree to which a question–answer framework is maintained varies substantially across programs and marks a variety of interview sub-genres. News interviews, which typically involve a professional journalist as interviewer and a politician or other newsworthy person as interviewee (e.g., Meet the Press and Nightline in the US, Newsnight in England), adhere closely to the question–answer framework. This is consistent with the journalist’s professional obligation to maintain a formally neutral posture. Journalist-interviewers systematically restrict themselves to the activity of questioning, so much so that they generally avoid producing declarative assertions except as prefaces to questions or as attributed to third parties. Correspondingly, journalist-interviewers also avoid producing even brief receipt tokens (e.g., “uh huh,” “oh,” “okay,” etc.) that might be interpreted as indicating support for what the interviewee has just said.
Other interview sub-genres adhere more loosely to a question–answer framework. Partisan interviews, conducted by political commentators or activists rather than journalists, may involve more nonquestioning and overtly opinionated contributions by interviewers. Celebrity interviews, involving those from the entertainment industry and a live studio audience, are conducted in a less formal style which allows for conversational forms of feedback. And panel interviews, involving multiple interviewees from diverse perspectives, often combine episodes of interviewer-driven question–answer exchanges with episodes of direct interchange between interviewees. This sub-genre straddles the boundary between the interview and other genres such as the panel discussion and the debate (see below).
Panel discussions involve a host in interaction with multiple participants offering a variety of perspectives on a common theme. Although participants have traditionally been drawn from the ranks of political insiders and other experts (e.g., Washington Week in Review, The McLaughlin Group), some variants involve celebrity entertainers and are conducted in a less “serious” mode (e.g., Real Time with Bill Maher).
Debates involve a clash between participants representing opposing points of view. As a genre of broadcast talk, the debate form encompasses both ad hoc and relatively formal events held during election campaigns, as well as regularly scheduled programs that are less formal but essentially confrontational (e.g., Crossfire, Hannity and Colmes). Among campaign debates, there has been considerable experimentation with different formats, ranging from the traditional debate format of presentation and rebuttal, to formats in which the candidates respond in turn to questions from a panel of journalists or from ordinary people. In the latter arrangements, the campaign debate incorporates elements from other interactional genres, namely the presidential news conference and the town meeting.
Audience participation formats involve interactions between program hosts and members of the audience, who may be co-present in the studio (as in daytime TV talk shows such as Kilroy in England or Oprah in the US) or phoning in from home (as in radio call-in shows). Since many programs that feature audience participation also involve politicians, experts, or ordinary people as program guests, the resulting tripartite interactions combine audience participation with elements from other interactional genres, e.g., host–guest exchanges characteristic of interviews, guest–guest confrontations characteristic of debates. Ordinary people, who lack both the authority of certified experts and the legitimacy of professional journalists, face distinct challenges when making contributions to such discussions. On the other hand, many audience participation programs are organized in ways that favor common sense knowledge over professional expertise.
Implications For Communication Scholarship
The rise of broadcast talk poses both challenges and opportunities for communication scholarship. Such talk transcends many fundamental dichotomies that have long been taken for granted in social science and media studies, most notably the split between interpersonal and mass communication, between public and private spheres, and between media and society. Broadcast talk is a vehicle for communicating to a mass audience, but it is at the same time comprised of interpersonal communication processes. It is an important component of the public sphere, but is constituted through practices of talk-in-interaction that have been adapted from ordinary conversation and are thus rooted in the private sphere. And unlike traditional news, its significance lies not only in the stories it tells about the world at large, but also in that its interactional conventions and practices embody forms of sociality that are an intrinsic and constitutive part of that world.
Therein lies the promise of research in this area. Since broadcast interactions involve public encounters between associates of diverse institutions – journalists and other media professionals, government officials and other elites, and ordinary people from diverse backgrounds – the manner in which these encounters unfold is shaped by, and in turn contributes to, a multiplicity of institutions and their interrelations. Correspondingly, their study provides a unique window into these societal arrangements. Just as the conventions that organize news interviews can shed light on the profession of journalism and its evolving relationship to the state, the conventions that organize audience participation formats can shed light on constructions of the public in relation to officials, experts, and other elites. Accordingly, studies of broadcast talk have the potential to expand the reach of communication research in ways that bear on broader aspects of social life.
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