Cultural variation in interviewing styles: Challenge and support in "Al-Jazīra" and on Israeli television

This study explores patterns of interviewers’ challenge and support in political interviews in Arabic and in Hebrew. Specifically, it focuses on triadic interviews with two interviewees each, and examines whether the examined patterns are distributed symmetrically between interviewees. The analysis draws on a corpus of evening news interviews in Al-Jazeera, broadcast from Qatar, and on Israeli television, Channel 1. The programs in question are Al-Ittijāh al-Mu'ākkis, literally “The Opposite Direction”, and “bein hakotarot”, literally “Between Headlines”, each having one interviewer and two interviewees, representing opposing political views. The two hosts are, respectively, Faysal al-Qāsem and Ben Kaspit.  The corpus consists of 4 interviews in each language, i.e. 3408 turns in Arabic, and 1157 turns in Hebrew. 

In line with the overall purpose of the comparison, we explore three interviewers’ patterns: explicit comments (including in the topic introduction in the openings), meta-pragmatic comments and elaborative reformulations in the course of the interviews.

Based on the textual analysis as well as on intrerviewees’ metacomments, we argue that through the use of these patterns, Faysal al-Qāsem consistently favours one of the interviewees. Ben Kaspit, on the other hand, marks potential expressions of assymetrical preferences as interactional deviations, and makes attempts to compensate for them. This difference will be accounted for in terms of positioning. It is argues that Faysal al-Qāsem positions himself as the author of some of the political convictions he expresses, whereas Ben Kaspit positions himself as fulfilling the traditional interviewer’s role of managing the interview.