Striking a balance between norms of impartiality and adversarialness in broadcast interviews

This study focuses on questions posed by professional journalists in broadcast interviews on sensitive topics, like pandemics, wars, and international affairs. Proceeding from the rules of conduct of interviews as characterised in manuals and scholarly studies, particularly with reference to journalistic stance, the aim of the research is to check if, and to what extent, interviewers diverge from the ‘rules’ advocating impartiality so far as to betray subjectivity/adversarialness. To carry out the study, I analyse a subsection of the InterDiplo Corpus, where the interviewers are mother-tongue speakers of English while their interlocutors are ambassadors from different lingua-cultural backgrounds; the data are screened both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results unveil a set of discursive traits in the questions posed by journalists that partly diverge from the current rules of conduct, while also pointing to sociolinguistic differences between male and female journalists.