Hybridisation, Personalisation and Tribuneship in the Political Interview

This article discusses elements of hybridisation in political interviewing within the contemporary environment of broadcast news. Beginning from a conversation analytic perspective, four types of political interview programmes are described in terms of their different approaches to questions and answers; opinions and arguments; and neutrality, agency and advocacy. The analysis then turns to the different ways in which ‘tribuneship’ is manifested in different types of interview, comparing the representation of the public interest as found in both neutralistic and adversarial interviewing with the type of personalised and ‘non-neutral’ tribuneship found in hybrid political interviews.