Going meta: Interaction at the normative boundaries of the news interview

Abstract

In the modern hybrid media landscape, the relations between journalists and politicians in arenas such as the broadcast news interview can seem less stable. Politicians and their advisors seem increasingly confident in identifying when and how to engage with political interviewers while journalists, in response, feel under pressure to intensify their role as scrutineering tribunes of the people. In such an environment, the normative interactional boundaries of the news interview itself can come under pressure from both sides, and even be breached. This article discusses the phenomenon of ‘going meta’ – occasions in which participants break out of the interview’s interactionally managed frame, and render topical the very practices that, ordinarily, constitute and reproduce the rules of that frame. Going meta is a practice that simultaneously breaches the ‘rules’ of the interview, and invokes the same rules in the construction of complaints about the behaviour of a coparticipant. The analysis shows how interview participants use going meta to raise questions of objectivity, truth, and the interests of ‘the people’, often in moments of heightened conflict talk.