Interviewing Didier Raoult: The scientist who breaks the frame

Abstract

This paper examines how normative roles of interaction in broadcast news interviews are disrupted during interviews with French expert immunologist and scientist Didier Raoult. The analysis is based on the organisation of the news interview as a particular form of institutional talk, and on the discursive features of expertise. There are three key aspects to the construction of Raoult as a central figure of the pandemic scene in France. The first is his prominent media presence online, the second is his regular appeal to historical events, in relation to France and to his family, and the third is his own status as director of a team of epidemiology experts at the IHU (Institut Hospitalier Universitaire) in Marseille. In the three interviews in the data set, these three aspects emerge as legitimate discursive grounding for his stance regarding the pandemic, and relevant treatment for the virus. The paper is organised as follows: the first part is a presentation of Didier Raoult and the mediated context from which the corpus of interviews is selected. In the second, the discussion focuses on the discourse of scientific expertise, and how Raoult constructs his expert status in the interviews. The final part will analyse how he puts this expert status to work as a discursive resource for disrupting the interactional norms that generally hold between journalists on the one hand, and interviewees on the other.