Who makes the news? Descriptions of television news interviewees' public personae

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Abstract
Television news interviews afford audiences — and social scientists — the opportunity to observe the casting and recasting of interviewees' public personae, as accomplished through the interplay of interviewers' questions and interviewees' responses to those questions. Based on a video-taped corpus of news interviews broadcast in the UK and USA, this article examines person-description as an interactional practice employed by interviewers to characterize and identify interviewees in the course of questioning them. The author analyzes three standard uses of person-description by interviewers: (1) to establish interviewees' expertise, (2) to juxtapose multiple perspectives and (3) to challenge their positions. Three types of interviewee responses that display interviewees' orientations to the relevances of those descriptions are also analyzed. The concluding discussion considers the significance of the analysis for an extensive sociological literature on the relationship between news sources and the production of news content.