6 - Adversarial questioning: setting agendas and exerting pressure

Summary

In chapter 5, we looked at how journalists work to design their questions so as to be defensibly neutral and legitimate. In this chapter, we turn the issue around, and consider the various ways in which interviewers adopt an adversarial stance and exert pressure on their respondents. This topic is an important one: it is at the level of question design that interviewers fundamentally and necessarily handle the competing journalistic norms of impartiality and adversarialness with which we have been concerned throughout this book. In part, of course, the management of the tension between these two norms is handled by questioning itself. As chapter 4 showed, questioning is conventionally understood as a neutralistic action which does not take up a substantive position – involving either agreement or disagreement – vis-à-vis the interviewee. For this reason, interviewers work hard to package their actions as “questions,” and may invoke this packaging to defeat interviewee claims that they are pursuing some kind of agenda of their own.

However, as we have suggested through the use of the term “neutralistic,” news interview questioning is not, and cannot be, strictly neutral. Because questions unavoidably encode attitudes and points of view (Harris 1986), interviewers must still design their questions to strike a balance between the journalistic norms of impartiality and adversarialness. The particular balance that is achieved between these two norms can be a distinctive, or even defining, characteristic of particular interviewing styles.