“And All of That”: The Long List in Political Discourse

We look at long lists (i.e., longer than three parts) in political discourse, especially in talk shows from three cultures, the U.S., Pakistan, and the Netherlands, and ask how a long list is accomplished. Long lists are routinely produced in political discourse by extending the typical three-part list. The listing process to create a long list can happen in many ways, explicitly via counting verbally or physically and implicitly through other resources. These resources can also be used to project a list in advance and to create one retrospectively. Last, listing in politics creates two problems for the lister, requiring an artful application of the available listing resources. The audience may orient to only three parts, and the politician is faced with selecting the last item. Thus, we show that politicians use lists to structure their talk, but they also have to anticipate problems regarding the practice of listing

“That’s Not Funny!” Identity and the organization of interaction on USA entertainment-political interviews

Late-night talk shows have become a central venue for political communication in the U.S.A. In these interviews, entertainment and politics are both used and therefore we name them Entertainment-Political Interviews (EPIs). While research on such shows generally assumes that the EPI is a hybrid discourse, crafting entertainment and politics into one coherent discourse, this assumption has not been empirically justified. Using membership categorization analysis (MCA) to study how the participants self-categorize in the EPI, we illustrate how they orient to political and entertainment talk. First, by applying Sacks’ (1972) hearer’s maxim to its fullest extent, entertainment and politics are identified as independently foundational devices for the EPI. Second, only one of these devices is relevant at a time to shape a turn at talk. Third, still, each device is continuously relevant to the participants. Thus, the understanding of the activity is based on the separation of the device of politics and of entertainment. Therefore, we argue, the EPI does not result in a hybrid device with a hybrid form of talk, but rather, participants alternate between politics and entertainment

Harnessing the Potential of the “Demotic Turn” to Authoritarian Ends: Caller Participation and Weaponized Communication on US Conservative Talk Radio Programs

International audienceAudience participation is a standard feature of US conservative talk radio (CTR) shows. The leading format among non-musical radio programs, CTR provides listeners with a daily opportunity to speak on air. As a radio genre that claims to be participatory, it is intended to be a forum where listeners can engage in conversation with the host. However, these shows also convey a form of authoritarian discourse, which is not only expressed discursively but reflected more specifically in the hosts’ approach to media practice, the specificity of the shows’ apparatus, and within it, in the status of the audience such as it is embodied by callers. In this chapter, Sébastien Mort analyzes how the affordances of CTR shows’ apparatus enable the hosts of nationally syndicated CTR programs to instrumentalize audience participation as part of their strategic use of “weaponized communication”, typical of authoritarian figures. Here, audience participation is instrumentalized to forge a representation of what is supposed to be an archetypal conservative, through a simulacrum of democratic exchange that the shows’ apparatus creates