The Visible Politics of Intersubjectivity: Constructing Knowledge as Shared to Manage Resistance in News Interviews

Abstract

This paper describes one practice of “resistance” to challenging interviewees in television news interviews. Interviewers use turn medial tags when working with field reporters to display shared knowledge to an overhearing audience. In contrast, analysis focuses on examples in which tag questions are issued midturn, e.g., “You put your finger on the button didn’t you.=when you said …”. In this practice knowledge and understanding are built as shared in the face of resistance from high-status and highly experienced interviewees. The syntactic reorganization of different elements within individual turns, combined with the possibility of manipulating the sequential positioning of an utterance, allow intersubjectivity to be invasively and coercively re/built through displays of mis/alignment across turns and sequences of talk. We explore the implications of this for how resistance can be understood. Our analysis also contributes to a politics of intersubjectivity and, more specifically, interknowledgeability.