Talking Politics: Politicians, Journalists, and the Public Debate

How political leaders appear and perform in public and how they interact with the journalists who question them has become an object of study in its own right. We now possess an unusually full and continuous public record of heads of state, ministers, and other political actors across very different political systems: speeches, interviews, press conferences, parliamentary debates, and an ever-expanding stream of social media communication. These communicative encounters mediate the relationship between governors and governed, and their changing forms reveal much about the health of democratic communication. This panel focuses on political talk as interaction, such as the dynamics of political interviews and press conferences, including evasion, equivocation, and confrontation between politicians and journalists; the formats and rituals of politicians’ public appearances, from parliamentary questioning to talk shows; the shifting balance between journalistically mediated encounters and direct; incivility, insult, and the coarsening — or democratization — of public exchange; and the changing role of journalists as interlocutors, gatekeepers, and targets. We welcome discourse-analytic, content-analytic, computational, experimental, and qualitative approaches alike.