Adversarialness and evasion in broadcast political interviews

In contemporary broadcast political interviews, interviewers are getting more and more adversarial in their questioning, whereas politicians seem to have earned their notoriety for their evading giving direct answers. On the other hand, in case journalists take a rather “lenient” approach, the result may be just the same—more evasive action from interviewed politicians. The focus of this paper (i.e., the interplay of the two phenomena of adversarialness and evasion) is illustrated on a corpus consisting of British, American and Montenegrin political interviews. The aim is to determine whether there exists a connection between the two, to which end we suggest a methodology for assessing their levels and also compare the three groups of political interviews using such methods. The results point to a cause and effect relationship between adversarialness and evasion.