Question design and the construction of populist stances in political news interviews

This paper focuses on the relationship between journalism and right wing populist discourses in the context of broadcast news interviews. We analyse a specific feature of question design in which the public is invoked as a source of opinionated positions in adversarial interviewing. Analysing data from a range of socio-political contexts, we identify a shift in adversarial questioning along a scale of ‘soft’ populism, that is the attribution of views and concerns to a generic public ‘in crisis’, to ‘hard’ populism, where interviewers construct hypothetical scenarios in which populist positions are attributed to ‘some people’. We argue that the democratic role of journalists as public watchdogs, holding politicians and public figures accountable on behalf of the public, is challenged by this normalisation of populist moral order discourses in a routine journalistic practice, both drawing on and contributing to the propagation of populist agendas and anti-democratic populist rhetoric.

testimonial injustice ‘out here in the projects’ – misrecognising victimhood in the bed intruder meme

In the wake of ‘Black Lives Matter’, this paper examines the concept of testimonial injustice and the prejudicial stances held towards victims that diminishes the credibility of their claims and the social support they receive from the public. To explore this concept, the following work revisits the widely parodied U.S. originating broadcast news report, The Bed Intruder. In the broadcast, victims of a home invasion and attempted rape deliver a public call that outlines the conditions of their victimhood and the potential threat to the community. A rhetorical stylistic analysis of the victims’ testimonial discourse and a thematic analysis of a sample of YouTube videos that reappropriate and parody their discourse are conducted. The analyses highlight the memetic elements of the video parodies that acknowledge the victimisation and yet strategically misconstrue events in ways that 1) render the victims and their claims less credible and 2) fail to provide them with the moral concern such an acknowledgement deserves.