Confrontation Talk

Arguments, Asymmetries, and Power on Talk Radio

Ian Hutchby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136688386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Using conversation analysis to explore the nature of argument, asymmetry, and power on talk radio, this book focuses on the interplay between the structures of talk in interaction and the structures of participation on talk radio. In the process, it demonstrates how conversation analysis may be used to account for power as a feature of institutional discourse. To address a number of key issues in the study of institutional communication and conflict talk, a case study of a British talk radio show is presented, stimulating some penetrating questions:
* What is distinctive about interaction on talk radio?
* What is the basis of the communicative asymmetries between hosts and callers?
* How are their arguments constructed, and in what ways does the setting enable and constrain the production of conflict talk? These questions are answered through the detailed study of conversational phenomena, informed by a critical concern for the relationship between talk and social structure. This book will be of interest to a wide readership consisting of academics, advanced undergraduates, and postgraduate students in a range of courses in sociology, linguistics, media/communication/cultural studies, anthropology, and popular culture.

1 Talk Radio and the Discourse of Argument

This is a study of how arguments are conducted in a particular social setting: an open-line radio phone-in broadcast, or talk radio show. Open-line talk radio shows are notorious for generating a high degree of controversial and confrontational talk between their hosts and the callers—ordinary citizens, for the most part—they encounter. This notoriety extends deeply enough into Anglo-American culture for it to have provided the focal point of a movie released in the 1980s, Talk Radio. That film centered around the daily life and work of a controversial talk radio host whose character, although fictional, was loosely based on a real-life host, Alan Berg. Berg generated such controversy through his show that he ended up being shot by a vengeful listener.

Thus, when I decided to begin researching the interactional properties of argument, and was casting around for likely sources of data, an argumentative talk radio show seemed a good idea. In Britain (where the research was done) the most well-known talk radio show at that time was The Brian Hayes Programme, a daily show on London’s LBC station. Hayes’ propensity for skepticism and sarcasm was notorious enough that a profile for the national magazine Radio Times (Purves, 1991) described his show in these terms:

For 14 years his reign of terror stretched across Greater London, as he daily pulverised Dave from Dalston and Janice from Walthamstow with terrifying put-downs and rebukes like, “A teeny bit muddled there” or, “You keep on saying that” or, ultimately, “We’ve gone through this several times, and if you don’t understand now you never will.” Click, (p. 18)

I randomly recorded nine entire broadcasts of the Brian Hayes phone-in, and ended up with a corpus of just over 120 calls.¹ These calls (not all of which involve Hayes as the host; in fact, three different hosts appear on the tapes I have) comprise the principal database for this book—although for comparative purposes I occasionally draw on other sources of data such as telephone conversations between friends, psychotherapeutic conversations, televised news interviews, and others.²

I considered talk radio to be a data source with distinct advantages over others used by researchers on argument, such as taped family discussions (Billig, 1991; Schiffrin, 1985; Vuchinich, 1990), recordings of children’s play either on the street (M. H. Goodwin, 1990) or in the nursery (Gorsaro & Rizzo, 1990; Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981), or recordings made in some kind of laboratory setting (Lein & Brenneis, 1978). The reason for this is simple: Although the participants were undoubtedly conscious of the fact that their talk was being broadcast to an overhearing audience, I took it that they could not reasonably be said to be aware—or to suspect—that some particular member of that audience was taping the proceedings in order to engage in sociological analysis of their talk. Essentially, what I captured on my tapes were interactional episodes that were as unaffected as they could possibly be by my presence as a researcher. That is, each of the broadcasts I recorded contained talk that would have been produced just the same if I had not turned on the tape recorder that morning. (Indeed, I recall listening to some broadcasts on mornings I had not elected to record, deeply regretting my decision, because they seemed to contain such good examples of argumentative talk!)

Yet the fact remains that the arguments I had recorded took place in a particular kind of setting: not in the family home or the psychology lab, but on the radio. Radio is of course a principal medium of mass communication, and media analysts in the past have shown some interest in studying talk radio as a mass communication phenomenon. The kinds of questions that have been asked, however—such as how effective is talk radio as a democratic forum, or how does it influence public opinion—are quite different from the questions that animate my research. I am interested in analyzing the actual talk that is at the heart of the talk radio show, without which, indeed, there could be no such thing as a talk radio show. As I have said, that talk involves argument as a central activity. But a second theme of this book considers how the arguments that take place can involve a particular set of power relationships between the two participants: the host and the caller. In the empirical chapters of the book one of the things I will do is to trace the social forces at work associated with these asymmetrical participant statuses, because these footings carry with them an unequal distribution of resources for initiating, sustaining, and terminating arguments.

The analytic approach I take comes from the perspective of conversation analysis (CA).³ CA has two key methodological features. The first is its basic aim: “To describe the underlying social organization—conceived as an institutionalized substratum of rules, procedures and conventions—through which orderly and intelligible interaction is made possible” (C. Goodwin & Heritage, 1990, p. 283). The second is its central belief that that underlying social organization need not be reconstructed from field notes or members’ reports on social happenings, as in traditional ethnography. Rather, it is directly available to observation in the details of naturally occurring interactions, which can be recorded using audio or video equipment (Sacks, 1984).

Accordingly, throughout the book, I base my analyses on recorded actual calls to a talk radio show. Transcripts of these calls are reproduced not just as illustrations, but as part of my analysis. They should be read as such, because I am dealing with events occurring in the real world, and the ultimate criterion by which my account may be judged necessarily lies in the organizational detail of those events. Of course, the transcripts themselves are only one kind of rendition of real-world events; but they allow the reader as far as possible, within current technological constraints, to match my interpretations to the details of the data on which they are based—and of course, if necessary, to disagree with me.

ANALYZING TALK ON TALK RADIO

This is not the first time that talk radio—or public-access broadcasting more generally—has been subjected to sociological and communicational analysis. Analysts in the past have brought a range of questions to bear on this genre of broadcasting. But this is the first time that talk radio has been studied from the distinctive perspective of conversation analysis. Consequently, many of the questions I will be asking about the data in this book are somewhat different from those that have previously been addressed.

A central focus in previous studies has been the question of how “democratic” talk radio is. These analyses tend to come from a media studies perspective, and focus on the fact that talk radio (and counterpart audience participation shows on TV) can be seen as a means of providing ordinary citizens with access to the public sphere represented in large part, in modern society, by broadcasting. Many years ago, the playwright and radical Bertolt Brecht (1932/1964) put forward the idea that “The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network. . . . That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him” (p. 52).

To some extent, these possibilities are realized in the talk radio show. And this has led some media analysts to try and assess the extent to which talk radio in fact functions as a democratic forum. For instance, both Crittenden (1971) in one of the earliest studies, and Verwey (1990) in a more extensive, book-length treatment, explicitly address the democratic functions of talk radio, by examining the degree to which arguments put forward in talk radio discussions permeate the wider population of the overhearing audience, or by evaluating how different talk radio hosts facilitate open debate between themselves and members of the public.

But from the standpoint I adopt in this book, there is something radically missing from these studies of talk radio as a democratic forum (see also Avery & Ellis, 1979; Rancer, Miles, & Baukus, 1994; Step & Rubin, 1994; Turow, 1974). Nowhere in these studies does one find a consideration of the actual talk that talk radio shows broadcast. For instance, Verwey (1990) presents no examples of words actually spoken, or an exchange actually broadcast, during the many shows she recorded for her database. Verwey’s preferred method is to transform the words people spoke into coded units or categories, such as expressions of opposition or support for some proposition, and then quantify the results in order to represent those positions in statistical tables.

This statistical approach does tell us something, albeit on a relatively gross level, about certain types of patterns in talk radio discourse, for instance, patterns of agreement and disagreement with various propositions, or at least patterns of positive and negative viewpoints given airtime by the show’s producers. But, in the process, it leaves completely out of account the underlying question of the actual, situated speaking practices by which citizens’ opinions on issues, and their debates with hosts, are managed in the public arena represented by the talk radio show. In other words, the talk that is at the heart of the talk radio show—through which, indeed, the talk radio show is constituted—is taken for granted as a window on underlying sociological variables, rather than being treated as a topic of analysis in its own right.⁴

There have been other studies that have avoided this pitfall, and focused on the central role of talk in talk radio shows and their television counterparts. One of the earliest was by Moss and Higgins (1984). Their interest was in the ways in which different roles or discourse identities are embodied at different moments in the talk of hosts and callers to a talk radio show. To conduct this analysis, it was necessary to consider some actual examples of radio talk. Using Halliday’s (1978) linguistic model of register, Moss and Higgins began to reveal the relationship between cultural knowledge and communicative intentions in actual talk radio discourse, and showed both the expressive dimensions of that discourse and the way in which the medium itself has a language whose features it is possible to delineate empirically. In short, Moss and Higgins’ approach contributed to a shift in attention in media studies toward the question of how talk radio interaction is conducted, which is one of the central themes underlying the present book (see also Scannell, 1991).

This tendency is also evident in Garbaugh’s (1988) study of the TV debate show Donahue. Here, the theme of democracy and the kind of public sphere being created by these shows again emerges, but in a different way from the survey-based statistical studies mentioned previously. Garbaugh suggests that one kind of significance of the public discourse of shows such as Donahue is that it can tell us a lot about the symbolic patterns and cultural structures of meaning circulating in mundane civil society: “Just as we have learned about Roman society by studying orations in the Assembly, and Colonial society by studying negotiations in the town hall, so we should learn much about contemporary American society by studying the kind of talk that is heard on Donahue” (p. 4).

Carbaugh takes an anthropological approach to the talk of debates on Donahue, using the contributions of audience members as a trace for the cultural categories and symbolic systems that circulate in contemporary American culture as a whole. He shows how, in the contributions of ordinary audience members, complex cognitive models of the self, authenticity, and “communicating” can be found. Thus, the discourse of Donahue interfaces the public and the private not only in terms of being the public talk of private citizens, but also in the sense that it illustrates the routine reflection of wider social patterns of reasoning in the speech of individual participants.⁵

Most recently, Livingstone and Lunt (1994), again focusing on TV debate shows, have been concerned with the contribution such shows make to the creation of a modern, mediated public sphere. In addition to analyzing the relationship between private and public themes and dimensions in the talk, Livingstone and Lunt discuss a number of dimensions such as the relationship between expert and lay perspectives (and the way in which these shows subordinate the former to the latter), the relationship between abstract argument and lived personal experience in discussions of issues, and the broader political question of the media management of debates and consequences for the kind of participatory space that such shows in fact open up for the public.

The principal contribution these studies make, from my point of view, is to take seriously the fact that what talk radio broadcasts and their television equivalents consist of is, above all, talk. More specifically, they consist of what Goffman (1981) dubbed “fresh talk,” talk that in general does not involve the speaker recalling memorized texts or reading aloud from a text, talk that is more or less spontaneous and, crucially, sensitive to its immediate context of production.

However, there are numerous ways in which the role of talk in such settings can be approached. In the studies just mentioned, the main concern is with how the content of the talk itself relates to wider social and cultural issues. Less attention is paid to the question of how that talk is actually produced, to the interactional and sequential contexts in which different participants speak, and to the relationship between the talk and the local organizational constraints of the setting itself. It is these latter three interests that represent my principal concerns in this book.

One of my main interests in the following chapters is in how sequential patterns in talk reveal participants’ construction of social realities and communicative activities, and their orientations to social contexts and identity relationships. Beginning from this perspective, I will analyze the ways in which the communicative activity of arguing is practically accomplished through sequences of talk within the social setting of talk radio. In line with the general policy of conversation analysis, I will begin by bracketing the commonsense assumption that organizational features of talk radio, and/or the specific identity categories of host and caller, are automatically relevant for the course and outcomes of the interactions I recorded. This is not to deny that such factors may be relevant. In fact, one of the things I will show is that they are, Rather, it is to emphasize that the discovery of their relevance must be an empirical matter (Schegloff, 1991).

As this chapter proceeds, it will become clear that I aim to reveal the fundamental impact that organizational structure and the operation of power have on the trajectories of calls in my data. I will seek to show the way that the talk radio format itself is structured to promote a certain type of argument and confrontation. And I will examine how, as a consequence of this, the framework of interaction within calls functions to both enable and constrain the particular kinds of argumentative activity available to and undertaken by hosts and callers. This, I will argue, represents a way in which we can articulate the relationship between talk, asymmetry, and power in the discourse of social institutions.

In the rest of this introductory chapter, I outline in more detail just what all this entails. Beginning with a discussion of talk radio as a form of “institutional” discourse, I then discuss some broad themes in the conversation-analytic approach to that form of talk, before moving on to suggest how my analyses in this book will make a contribution to CA-oriented research by adopting its fundamentally local, sequential approach to address the question of power in institutional interaction.

TALK RADIO AS INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE

Talk radio is a form of institutional interaction. The talk takes place within an organization, the broadcasting company, which has its own structure and stability. That structure and stability are themselves phenomena which are produced and reproduced through talk and interaction (Boden, 1994; Drew & Heritage, 1992). The activities of the organization’s members at all levels, from executive offices to the production floor of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• 1 Talk Radio and the Discourse of Argument
• 2 Analyzing Argument
• 3 Arguments, Agendas, and Asymmetries
• 4 The Pursuit of Controversy
• 5 The Uses of Interruption
• 6 Endings and Outcomes
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• References
• Author and Subject Index