• Organisation

The constructive role of the media in political reporting has long been noted, as has the media’s changing function within democracies from mediator or watchdog to almost a political institution itself. Regarding election campaigns, Blumler and Gurevitch have noted that television editing often yields a severely boiled-down version of the campaign. One of the journalistic “packaging devices” employed is the juxtaposition of statements made by the parties: [...] in continually counterposing one party’s stand on an issue with that of its rivals the journalists appear to be promoting inter-party communication. It is as if the news personnel are trying to create a dialogue between the parties, where it otherwise might not have existed, and to trigger the politicians into comments and actions that might not have been forthcoming otherwise. Television journalists thus help to orchestrate the campaign, even if they did not write the original score. (Blumler & Gurevitch 1995: 134) What happens after the election, when the campaign has been fought, the polls have closed and the major television stations start their election night specials? A multitude of voices is orchestrated by one or more presenters in the studio, who communicate with experts, news personnel and interviewees both in the studio and on outside locations. For several hours, while the results of the election are taking shape, the live election night broadcast weaves a complex web of intertextual relations, made up of various media, formats and texts, in various semiotic modes. Processes that might be observed over the course of days and weeks during an election campaign may be condensed into the space of a few hours during election night. In this paper I will focus on the analysis of political interviews on election nights and on a particular interviewer practice, that of attributing utterances to other speakers. The practice is central to the “packaging device” of juxtaposing positions mentioned by Blumler and Gurevitch. It is prominent in election night interviews, where it serves different functions from those observed by Blumler and Gurevitch during election campaigns.