Interactional Alarms: Experts’ Framing of Health Risks in Live Broadcast News Interviews

ABSTRACT

This study examined how experts frame health risks in real-time interactions with journalists. Though there is evidence that experts influence media framing of health risks, the ways they respond to journalists’ agendas in real-time interactions have yet to be explored. This paper examines instances of risk assessment extracted from a corpus of news interviews to determine how expert assessments were requested and provided. The analysis reveals that experts rarely deliver their assessments neutrally but rather treat these exchanges as opportunities for framing or reframing the topic. Their framing is shown to be responsive to journalistic agendas and to those who experts understand to be accountable when their assessment is elicited. These findings suggest ways in which news interviews can be useful in health communication. The implications for experts, journalists, and public information officers who plan to use interviews for this purpose are discussed.

Acknowledgments

The data for this study were collected in the course of post-doctoral fellowship granted to the author in the Department for Education in Science and Technology in the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The author wishes to thank Deborah Chinn and anonymous referees for careful reading of the manuscript, Ben Rampton and Alexandra Georgakopoulou-Nunes who advised the project, and the DARG group at Loughborough University for commenting on the data.

Funding

The analysis and writing of this paper was conducted in the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication (LDC) at King’s College London and was supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship granted to the author by the European Union (PIEFGA-2012-329249).

Notes

¹ The codebook used for searching the transcripts for risk categories is available from the author.

Additional information

Funding

The analysis and writing of this paper was conducted in the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication (LDC) at King’s College London and was supported by a Mary Curie Fellowship granted to the author by the European Union (PIEFGA-2012-329249).