Abstract
In media-centered democracies, political TV interviews can reveal a lot about the relationship between journalists and politicians. However, knowledge about these formats during non-election times is lacking. Against this background, this study aims to generate insights about specific conversation strategies, the staging of politics, and agenda control in a long-term comparison, and to link them with media logic, which has been identified as a factor that shapes agenda-setting strategies in related contexts. Following a static-dynamic approach, a quantitative content analysis was conducted for all statements (N=19,108) from 125 episodes of a specific Austrian interview format in a one-on-one setting broadcast between 1981 and 2016. Regarding the number of statements in which a newly introduced topic is discussed as a measure for agenda control, specific conversation strategies were identified that contribute to a stronger position for journalists. Moreover, specific aspects of media logic help to introduce and anchor a new topic, although their success varies over the decades.
Funding: Funded by the cultural section of the City of Vienna.
Acknowledgments: The study was initiated by Jens Erich Tenscher (†), whom the author wants to thank retrospectively without having known him personally. Those first project outlines and drafts were consulted to develop the final concept as presented here. Furthermore, the author thanks Diotima Bertel, Barbara Metzler and Claudia Strate for coding, Moritz Staltner and Julia Himmelsbach for their great support in data management and Gabriele Melischek, Josef Seethaler, and Peter Maurer, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their helpful feedback on previous versions of the paper.
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