Mind & Brain

Steve Clayman is a social scientist and conversation analyst at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the coauthor, with John Heritage, of The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. In recent years he has specialized in studying how journalists ask questions and how presidents answer—or don’t answer—them.

What is conversation analysis?

C: It’s a form of sociology that studies everyday interactions between people. One of the starting assumptions is that we really don’t know much about how humans interact; we don’t know what the basic units of interaction are. It’s largely uncharted terrain. We’re sort of like explorers who want to study the plant life in a new land: We collect specimens of interaction that exist out there, then systematically examine and compare them. One of the first dissertations in the field, in the 1960s, was called The First Five Seconds, by Emanuel Schegloff. It was a study of the opening moves in some 500 phone calls gathered from a variety of settings. Doug Maynard, a colleague at the University of Wisconsin, just published a study of how people deliver good and bad news—not just in conversation but also in clinical settings: Doctors are in a position of having to deliver bad news much of the time.

How did you come to study news interviews?

C: In the early 1980s, people were beginning to get interested in more specialized genres of interaction: doctor-patient communication, courtroom examinations, plea-bargaining sessions, that sort of thing. Journalism struck me as a useful world to study because interaction is such a central part of what journalists do. Also—and this is a practical consideration—it’s easy to get your hands on recordings of broadcast interviews: They’re in the public domain. We take it for granted today that journalists are going to regularly interview public figures and elected officials. In fact, we expect government officials to make themselves accessible to reporters, answer questions, have news conferences and interviews. But this wasn’t always the case. In the early 19th century, most newspapers didn’t really have reporters who went out and gathered news. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that it began to be accepted as a kind of standard practice for journalism. Not until the early decades of the 20th century did presidents first start having regular news conferences with reporters.

How does my interview with you compare structurally to the broadcast-news interviews that you’ve studied?

C: In some respects it seems similar. You and I are both basically adhering to the ground rule that says that the interviewer should only ask questions and the interviewee should only answer your questions. So the talk comes out in these enormous blocks: Interviewers usually produce long questions, sometimes with extended prefaces, and interviewees produce long answers. In any interaction, a lot of the basic ground rules involve how people take turns. Before anything else can happen, we have to figure who has rights to the floor at any given moment—who has the right to speak, and for how long, and who gets to speak next. In a news interview, there’s a special turn-taking system at work that is different from ordinary conversation; it’s our adhering to that simple question-and-answer rule that defines the boundaries of what can and cannot occur in a news interview. That seems obvious, right? Where it gets interesting is when you start asking how a simple rule like that actually gets implemented—and what happens if it gets broken. One famous case we’ve looked at was a CBS Evening News interview in 1988 between Dan Rather and Vice President George Bush. At the time, the presidential campaign was just getting under way. Dan Rather came to focus on what Bush may or may not have known about the Iran-contra scandal; Bush naturally didn’t want to talk about that. What started out as a standard news interview soon devolved into a very heated argument; by the end, a lot of the ground rules that define a news interview and make it the type of interaction that it is had been swept away. What John Heritage and I noticed was that from the very beginning of the encounter, Bush was being more active as an interviewee than interviewees normally are. Usually, interviewees stay silent and wait for a given question to be delivered, but Bush began to interject at the end of prefatory statements with these acknowledgments: “Right,” “Mm-hmm,” that sort of thing. In ordinary conversation, that’s a friendly action; it’s a way of showing that you’re listening, that you accept what the person is saying. But in a news interview, its social meaning is turned upside down—it becomes a way of asserting the right to speak at a place where normally interviewees don’t have the right to speak. In this case, it turned out to be a harbinger of trouble to come.

What constitutes a news interview is not just that it’s questions and answers. It’s also all the other forms of behavior that get stripped out that make it so—and a large amount of human conduct does get stripped away in order for us to do a news interview. One remarkable thing is that ordinarily in a broadcast-news interview, the parties do not give each other what conversation analysts call acknowledgment tokens.

Hmmm!

C: They don’t say things like “Hmmm,” or “Ah-hah,” or “OK” or any of those things. Ordinary conversation is filled with that stuff, right? But you can look through literally hundreds of pages of broadcast-news interview transcripts and not see a single case where an interviewer says “Uh-huh” or some such thing in response to anything an interviewee has said. It’s a routine behavior that gets stripped out in a news interview context. It’s quite remarkable. One way to think about it is that the interviewer feels an obligation to appear neutral. Journalists don’t want to be seen as taking sides by saying things like “Yes” or “OK” or even “Oh.” In other institutional settings these behaviors also get stripped away. Doctors never say “Oh” in response to the symptoms a patient is describing.