Assessments and the social construction of expertise in political TV interviews

This paper investigates how rights to knowledge and opinion are negotiated through assessments embedded in questioning sequences in political news interviews. The focus is on describing how assessments index epistemic positions and evaluative stances embedded in the turns through which the institutional goals of the interview are achieved. The analysis shows how assessments combine with other turn-constructional resources to build a critical or opposing position toward the interviewee's actions, deeds, status, views, or attitudes. It also sheds light on the strategies through which interviewees (IE) engage with and resist the positions displayed by interviewers (IR). Findings show that in the data corpus interviewers often challenge the IE through unmitigated assertions of “facts,” while matters of opinion and assessment of the IE involve footing shifts in the form of citations and quoting written texts. The paper adds to existing research on the tensions in news interview talk; the need to present newsworthy information and hold public figures to account while adhering to the norm of factual, neutral reporting.