The Tunisian news interview: Serious deviations from the news interview norms

This study broadly aims at investigating Tunisian interviewers’ and interviewees’ performance in news interviews. More particularly, it examines both interactants’ departures from the news interview norms and elucidates the impacts such departures have on the Tunisian news interview, interviewers and interviewees. Sixteen Tunisian interviews that range from six- to eight-minute length are selected via criterion sampling and analysed via the structural method of conversation analysis. What is concluded post-analysis and discussion is that both Tunisian interviewers and interviewees make critical departures from the news interview norms and conventions. Tunisian interviewers display a distinct propensity for an excessive extraneous use of interruptions, acknowledgements and comments. Those practices disrupt the formality of the news interview, rendering it more of a conversational nature, undermine the interviewer’s neutrality and overtly disregard the audience and its integral role in the news interview. Similarly, this study reveals that, by committing multiple serious violations of the question-and-answer (Q&A) format, Tunisian interviewees have offensively infringed both the basic Q&A ground rule of the news interview and the interviewer’s power position.