Preface and Acknowledgements

The public performance of politics is significantly practised through interrogative exchanges in the media. Whether this consists of extended critical questioning in a political interview, prime ministerial posturing in a leaders' debate during the height of an election campaign, or the relaxed, jovial banter in an interview on a daytime chat show, political success is predicated on the ability to perform across a variety of such exchanges. These encounters are a vital means by which politicians promote themselves and are subject to scrutiny. Political leaders must express in a dramatic yet authentic way an individual identity or subjectivity, and their performances are realized by the successful negotiation of the power struggles that occur between the politicians themselves and the journalists they encounter.

This book will highlight broadcast interviews, leaders' debates and press conferences as fundamentally contestable encounters and argue that this ‘dialogical’ (Bakhtin 1981, 1986) and ‘agonistic’ (Mouffe 1993, 2000) quality is integral to political subject formation and democratic process. This argument is in contrast to research and public discourse that assesses how the conventions of interaction across types of mediated political interrogative exchanges fail to facilitate ideals of mutual understanding and truth production. In this sense, the book argues that public consternation over the ‘games’ of contemporary political communication must be reoriented to appreciate how interviews, debates and press conferences represent necessary struggles over the meanings of important public issues. It does not offer a ‘solution’ to the crisis of political communication: rather, it argues that we should understand that the ‘games’ that are played in interviews, debates and press conferences are the necessary ‘play’ of politics. This is not to be blind to the limitations of modern interactions between politicians and journalists or closed to seeking more constructive relations between the two, but it is to argue that we need to develop greater media and political literacy about such interrogative exchanges specifically, and political and media relations more generally.

It has been claimed that we live in an ‘interview society’ (Atkinson and Silverman 1997) and that the interview is ‘the fundamental act’ of contemporary journalism (Schudson 1994). Journalism researchers identify the importance of interviews, but such discussion is usually limited to the practice and mechanics of interviewing (Conley and Lamble 2006; Sedorkin 2011). Much existing scholarly research on political interviews, debates and press conferences has been dominated by linguistic studies that have focused at a textual level on the nature of exchanges between the participants (Clayman and Heritage 2002a; Tolson 2006). While these kinds of studies are vital in understanding the communicative effects of interviews, debates and press conferences, we are also concerned with locating such interactions in the contexts of a broader struggle between journalism and politics that can be illuminated with reference to media and political theory.

The first two chapters will outline the theoretical framework of the book. The opening chapter will provide a comprehensive theorization of the mediated and televisual contexts of interviews, debates and press conferences and the importance of individual performance and style in political and journalistic practice, in contrast to political communication research which sees media and public focus on image and performance as a distraction from more substantive political realities. It will begin by outlining the mediated basis of public life and then discuss both how disciplined bodily performance is integral to journalistic and political professionalism and why the reading of bodies is an important feature of the meanings of interviews, debates and press conferences. Bourdieu's concept of habitus will be introduced, and the chapter will conclude by offering a theorization of performance and, specifically, note the centrality of televisual performance to the production of political and journalistic identity.

The second chapter discusses the idea of the ‘game’ that accounts for the discursive and institutional struggles between journalists and politicians in interrogative encounters. It introduces political interviews, leaders' debates and press conferences as communicative events, briefly accounting for their similar and different features and describing their significance as both face-to-face and highly mediated exchanges. The role of the public in such interactions is also considered. The chapter then explains how the political games that occur in political talk television formats derive from the contestable nature of both language and politics. The dialogical basis of language and the agonistic nature of politics will be outlined, and it will be argued that politics is concerned primarily with persuasion and trust and that the main task of journalists in interviews, debates and press conferences is not to discover the truth but to engage in a constant scrutiny that keeps the political open. Finally, the chapter will set out the methodological approaches that inform the analyses in the book.

The succeeding chapters will offer a textual analysis of a range of interview genres, leaders' debates and press conferences. This will be supplemented with discussion of how such interactions are manifestations of broader struggles between the media and political fields for public authority (Bourdieu 1991, 1998). The textual analysis will be informed by critical discourse analysis theory, and the resulting thick descriptions will reveal how language use expresses the power relations between interview participants and their struggles to represent the nature of their relations with other social actors, including the public. In addition, the bodily performance of both interviewers and interviewees will be analysed.

The book argues that the essential communicative form of interviews, debates and press conferences facilitates the interrogation and the promotion of the interviewee, as well as the promotion of the interviewer. These functions are necessarily fused in these interactive exchanges, but the relationship between interrogation and promotion varies across different formats, initiating different power relations between participants, generating different kinds of knowledge, values and emotions, and establishing various representations of social actors, institutions and public life. Political interviews on current affairs programmes, for example, are characterized by greater degrees of interrogation than interviews in so-called soft media, where the interactions between interviewer and interviewee can function more collaboratively in the construction of personal narratives. In contrast to dyadic interview structures, the dynamics of press conferences usually enable politicians to exert more control over the interactions, and there is usually less sustained and direct interrogation.

The case studies in chapters 3 to 7 draw on interrogative exchanges with high-profile political leaders across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Chapter 3 offers analyses of political interviews with the UK prime minister David Cameron on The Andrew Marr Show and the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd on Insiders and the 7.30 Report. It prefaces such discussion with a brief overview of the history of political interviews and an examination of the nature of the dialogue of political interviews as well as their public dissemination. Chapter 4 provides analyses of leaders' debates in the 2010 United Kingdom election campaign and the debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the 2012 US presidential campaign. It outlines the formats and structures of leaders' debates and considers their functions and effects in election campaigns. Chapter 5 examines press conferences through case studies involving US President Barack Obama, both a solo press conference and a joint press conference between Obama and the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. It also details the history and dissects the significance of different types of press conferences. Chapter 6 examines current affairs forum television, where politicians appear on a panel of public figures and are questioned by members of the studio audience. The case study involves the high-profile Australian programme Q&A. The chapter first defines the genre of current affairs forum television before examining the roles of the programme host, panelists and audience members. Chapter 7 deals with political celebrity interviews and features an analysis of Barack Obama's performances (including with his wife, Michelle) on the daytime talk television programme The View. It offers a theorization of the concept of political celebrity – in particular the celebrity status of the American president – and the engagement of such individuals with ‘non-political’ media. A conclusion brings together these analyses of different interrogative exchanges and offers some judgements about the nature of the political games that take place between politicians and journalists, including the production of identity and the power struggles that occur between the journalistic and political fields.

It is important here both to acknowledge the basis of the selection of case studies and the limitations of the comparative basis of the analyses and to provide some perspective on the strength of the overall conclusions that are offered. The individual case studies have been chosen because they feature current or recent national political leaders who will be familiar to students and other readers across a range of countries, most notably the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Their selection also derives partly from my own political interests and previous research, most notably the inclusion of the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, who generated considerable public discussion about the nature of contemporary political performance during his tenure as a political leader. It is acknowledged that there is not a strict uniformity to the approaches in each of the chapters. With the exception of the press conferences, the case studies involve interrogative exchanges that are also part of televisual programming. There is a greater degree of scrutiny of news media coverage of the interactions in some chapters than others, and the extent of the interactions between politicians and journalists varies. The chapter on leaders' debates, for example, sees journalists in the more limited role of moderator, and the emphasis is more on the interactions between politicians, their engagement with the audience, and the reactions from the public on social media. In this sense, as the title of the book suggests, the focus is on the nature of political performance across a range of interrogative formats that primarily feature journalists but also include questions from the public in different communicative contexts. In three of the chapters there are two case studies, and the final two address a single programme. These selections have been made to enable a more in-depth textual analysis that would not have been possible had there been a study of fragments across a greater range of programmes. The book adopts a synchronic approach, examining instances of contemporary political performance, rather than a diachronic approach to explain the historical evolution of the interrogative encounters. The analysis chapters do, however, provide the historical contexts of each of the studied formats, revealing how and why they have assumed their present-day shape and significance.

It must be acknowledged that we are providing examples of political leaders who are working in different political systems. While there is considerable uniformity in the nature of the performances of contemporary political leaders across modern Western democracies, and although there has been a general trend towards ‘presidentialization’ in national politics, we should note, for example, that the president of the United States has a different orientation towards the media and journalists than prime ministers, who regularly perform and experience scrutiny in parliamentary chambers. In addition, the significance of political performance is influenced by a range of factors, such as whether there are compulsory or voluntary voting systems, and the character of the media industry, including the distribution and cultural significances of public and private broadcasters.

This book has been prompted partly by the belief that, while political communication has been well served by research into individual respective areas, such as political interviews and political talk shows, there has been less research that has considered the character of political performance and the interactive relationships between politicians and journalists across the range of interrogative encounters examined here. In this way, it is hoped that one advantage of the book is that readers can observe the contrasts and similarities of political performance across the communicative genres. It is acknowledged that is difficult for systematic conclusions about political interviews, leaders' debates, press conferences, current affairs forum television, and political celebrity interviews to be derived from a study that is limited to one or two case studies in each chapter, and this volume in a more modest way seeks to highlight the range and flexibility of political performances. This task has been facilitated by examining the performances of individuals such as Barack Obama and David Cameron across a number of the chapters. As always, then, the book is but a contribution to the field of political communication, and it is certainly hoped that it will encourage further research on political performance across these communicative genres.

Performing Politics is the culmination of research and teaching on the topics of political interviews, leaders' debates and press conferences over several years, and I have benefited greatly from feedback from colleagues and students. My interest in political interviews was initially provoked many years ago as an honours student at Macquarie University in Sydney, where I was fortunate enough to be supervised by Philip Bell and Theo van Leeuwen and to have been taught by other outstanding scholars, including John Tulloch and Warwick Blood. Later, my investigations into the nature of journalism were facilitated by great support from my PhD supervisor John Hartley. More recently, research that has informed the book has been presented at a number of conferences and seminars: the 2010 Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference in Canberra; the 2011 International Communication Association conference in Boston; the 2012 conference on Identity, Culture and Communication in Madrid; the 2012 Celebrity Studies conference in Melbourne; and the 2014 Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association conference in Bournemouth. I have also presented seminars at the University of Canberra and the University of Otago. I am grateful for the support I have received from many colleagues across a number of institutions over recent years, among them Lance Bennett, Libby Lester, Cathy Greenfield, Peter Putnis, Kerry McCallum, Jason Wilson, Stephen Harrington, Marian Simms, Philip Nel, Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward, Vijay Devadas, Olivier Jutel, Tim Luckhurst and Alex Frame. I have also enjoyed exploring ideas with students across different courses, including ‘Political Talk’ and ‘Theory of Communication Studies’ at the University of Otago. I appreciated the feedback from three anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. And I am grateful, as always, for the love and support of my family: Wendy Parkins, Maddy Parkins-Craig and Gabriel Parkins-Craig.

Parts of this book have been previously published in article form, and I am grateful for permission from the journals and editors to reproduce them here: ‘How does a prime minister speak? Kevin Rudd's discourse, habitus and negotiation of the journalistic and political fields’, Journal of Language and Politics, 12/44 (2013), pp. 485–507, with kind permission of John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, www.benjamins.com; and ‘Kevin's predicaments: power and celebrity across the political and media fields’, International Journal of Press/Politics, 19/1 (2014), pp. 24–41, with kind permission of the publishers.