Monologisation as a Quoting Practice

Abstract

This paper explores a particular aspect of journalistic quoting, monologisation. During monologisation, the interactive turn exchange between the journalist and the interviewee is simplified in the resulting article. This simplification process mainly takes the form of obscuring the role of the journalist in the original spoken discourse. As a result, the quotations appear to be unprompted, continuous utterances by the interviewee, and this in turn has seminal consequences for the interpretation of the quotation. This paper will demonstrate that monologisation is an effective means for journalists to steer the reading of the article and to include their own points of view without breaking the professional rule that journalism must separate facts from opinions. The results of this study are based on a comparison between two types of empirical data; recordings of journalistic interviews, on the one hand, and published articles, on the other. This study will focus on one particular type of journalistic interview that has been largely neglected in prior research along with its specific quoting practices, namely the interviews were conducted by the journalists in order to collect raw material for written journalistic items, published either in print or electronic form. This paper will show that interviews of this type involve highly diverse and mutually adaptive interaction, contrary to the clearly structured question–answer interviews that are used as sound bites in television news items and have thus far remained the primary focus of research on both journalistic interviews and quoting processes. The notion of monologisation could be applied in various domains where an interview is converted into a written account, such as research interviewing and police interrogations.

KEYWORDS:

•  direct speech
• journalistic interviews
• monologisation
• print media
• quotations
• quoting practices
• version analysis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful especially to Henna Makkonen-Craig, Ritva Laury, Daniel Perrin, and Marlies Whitehouse for their valuable comments on the different stages of the manuscript and to the anonymous reviewers for urging me to elaborate and clarify the structure of my argument.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The author has no financial interests to disclose.

Notes

1. Outside media studies, a somewhat similar phenomenon has been discussed, especially in connection with police interrogations (see e.g. Jönsson and Linell 1991; Komter 2006; Van Charldorp 2014), but also in contexts such as parliament records (Slembrouck 1992) and therapy (Ravotas and Berkenkotter 1998).

2. It is worth pointing out that within all the literature concerning press conferences, news interviews, and television news sound bites, the greatest attention thus far has been devoted to interviews dealing with politics (e.g. Ekström and Patrona 2011, 1). As Montgomery (2007, 147) has noted, the whole genre and practice of news interviews have been defined by “one sub-type”, although its primacy “is neither supported by the history of the journalistic interview nor justified by a survey of current broadcasting practice”.

3. “Gathering” is, of course, a simplifying conceptualisation. As Nylund (2011, 488) has argued, a “[journalistic] interview is more about generating and constructing knowledge, rather than simply gaining or collecting it”.

4. The inconsistency between the number of recordings and the number of articles results from the fact that there are two journalists in the data-set who wrote an article on the same press conference.

5. A video recording might reveal possible non-verbal communication by the journalist. However, videotaping would have undesirably influenced the interview, and was therefore not included in my data collection.

6. In fact, the “Midsummer 1994” issue is also discussed in the interview, but approximately five minutes earlier than the section transcribed above.

7. It has been argued that these fundamental decisions are influenced by factors such as the publishers’ ideological values and purposes, the financial basis of the publication, the needs and interests of the audience, and, on a grander scale, the current journalistic culture and the societal context in which publishing takes place in general (Haapanen, forthcoming a; Helle 2010; Kang 2007; Kuo 2007).

8. I have also demonstrated elsewhere that besides quotations, a substantial part of other text material in journalistic articles is often based on information that has been abstracted from an interviewee. When this occurs, the monologisation practice can actually be conceived of as occurring the other way round: now the interview’s interactive turn exchange is presented merely as the journalist’s independent text without attribution to its co-adaptive origin (Haapanen 2016). However, this procedure is outside the scope of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Eino Jutikkala Fund.