How Does A Prime Minister Speak?
- 31 December 2013
- journal article
- Published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in Journal of Language and Politics
- Vol. 12 (4), 485-507
- https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.12.4.01cra
Abstract
This paper investigates how political subjectivity is framed and expressed through language use in television political interviews. The paper argues that Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field provide a useful framework for analyses of political subjectivity in news media interviews, but it also argues that the more sociological emphasis of Bourdieu’s theory cannot sufficiently account for the constitutive importance of discourse in the agency of the habitus and the boundaries and authority of different fields. As such, the analysis also draws on critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how Prime Ministerial discourse involves negotiations of different constitutive features of an individual subjectivity, and also negotiations between a particular habitus and the exigencies of the journalistic and political fields. Through an analysis of interviews of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on influential Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) programmes,Insidersand the7.30 Report, it is argued that the Prime Minister attempts to exercise political authority through an ensemble of discourses, initiating different relations with the interviewers, political colleagues and opponents, leading public figures in other fields, and the Australian public. Keywords: Television interviews, subjectivity, political style, habitus, fields, discourse, journalism, Rudd, AustraliaKeywords
This publication has 21 references indexed in Scilit:
- ‘Getting people on board’: Discursive leadership for consensus building in team meetingsDiscourse & Society, 2011
- Generating forms of media capital inside and outside a field: the strange case of David Cameron in the UK political fieldMedia, Culture & Society, 2010
- Media interviews and debatesAustralian Cultural History, 2010
- Dialogue and dissemination in news media interviewsJournalism, 2010
- THE DISCOURSE OF THE BROADCAST NEWS INTERVIEWJournalism Studies, 2008
- Learning the ‘linguistic habitus’ of a politicianJournal of Language and Politics, 2006
- Bourdieu, the media and cultural productionMedia, Culture & Society, 2006
- Leadership talk: How do leaders ‘do mentoring’, and is gender relevant?Journal of Pragmatics, 2005
- SO, HOW DID BOURDIEU LEARN TO PLAY TENNIS? HABITUS, CONSCIOUSNESS AND HABITUATIONCultural Studies, 2003
- Politicians Interviewed on Television NewsDiscourse & Society, 2001