Question design and stance-taking in political interviews in Flemish news media

Abstract

This contribution proposes a hybrid methodological framework to study stance-taking in political interviews, combining a granular grammatical analysis of question design with a discursive analysis of ‘active questioning’. Focusing on political interviews in the Flemish current-affairs programme Terzake, the study applies this analytical framework to examine journalistic stance-taking in different contexts, based on the topic of the interview and the role of the interviewee. The findings indicate that while journalistic stance-taking is standard practice across contexts, specific differences emerge at finer linguistic levels (cf. grammatical question types). The topic of the interview is found to be a more important factor in the likelihood of interviewers expressing stance than the role of the interviewee. We link this to the different intents (i.e., exploration, systematisation, or explanation) that interviews can have, which influence the dynamics of the question-answer exchange and, hence, how active a role the interviewer might take within that exchange. Finally, the study emphasises the usefulness of combining a grammatical and a discursive analysis of interviewer questions, as the specific ‘design’ of questions (i.e., their grammatical form and function) can point to subtly different ways in which interviewers position themselves vis-à-vis interviewees that may be glossed over at the discursive level of linguistic analysis.