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A very interesting paper today by Göran Eriksson (of Örebro University, Sweden) on how the TV news interview has developed over time. Eriksson studied TV news interviews on the major Swedish TV news shows in 1978, 1993 and 2003, looking at things such as editing techniques, use of voiceover, framing of the interview, use of visual elements etc. His study – along with other, similar studies done in other countries – is that what we can call the journalistic initiative has expanded. This means that instead of letting sources speak uninterrupted and un-interpreted, journalists have become much more active, framing the interview, putting the journalist him/herself forward as an actor – and it also means that interviews have become more adversarial, more aggressive. Specifically, Eriksson finds some very striking trends in the time period he has studied:

TV news interviews have gone from being transparent to being decontextualised. In 1978, a journalist would often open an interview segment with “In Parliament today, the PM said...” or “At a meeting with union representatives in Sidcup, the Chancellor presented the following initiative...”, i.e. the segment would begin with saying something about when, where and in what context the interview took place. Today, this is virtually non-existent. Journalists present no information to help audiences put the interview in context.

This leads on to a second key trend: the journalists have become much more active in interpreting and analysing the interview – the interview is intercut with commentary from the journalist, commentary that is mainly concerned with how what the sources say fit in with the ongoing political process. The difference is that before, the context would be what the politician-source did to make the interview interesting in the first place (i.e. presenting a policy initiative, making a speech etc), whereas now, the context is the general political process as interpreted by the journalist. Before, sources set the scene; now, journalists set the scene.

The conclusion thus becomes that politician-sources primarily appear in interviews in order to explain and support that the journalists’ own analyses of the political process are truthful and legitimate. The journalist’s interpretation of events are presented first, and then the interview is used to support this interpretation – sources are not allowed to speak on their own terms. I have a hunch that these trends will not look too different in countries other than Sweden – research indicates that the rise of the journalist as active interpreter and interrogator is near-universal. Does anyone have examples from their own home nations to share, perhaps?