Ian Hutchby's Media talk is an introduction to the analysis of talk-in-interaction on television and radio. Since the early 1990s, attention to interactive and discursive patterns in these broadcast media has produced a large, rich, and diversified body of work, targeting a wide range of media genres and issues from a variety of approaches. Gradually, this body of work is combining to form a unique field of study. One possible indication of this gradual consolidation of the field and of its diversity and richness is the recent, almost simultaneous publication of two introductory texts on media talk that share the same title but differ in scope, methodological approach, and generic breadth (the other is Tolson 2006). Despite its development, the study of media talk has remained until now on the periphery of media studies, and attention to the details of talk-in-interaction is often missing from the methodological mainstream of the discipline. Ian Hutchby's book aims at addressing this gap by introducing the study of media talk to students of the media. The book can be read as an extended argument for the analysis of talk, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing macroscopic questions regarding broadcast media as a social institution from a unique perspective grounded in micro-analysis.
The book is explicitly restricted to presenting the study of media talk within a singular disciplinary tradition – conversation analysis (CA). However, in keeping with its target audience, largely unfamiliar with this tradition, the style and structure of the book are highly accessible. Hutchby presents rigorous and meticulous analyses of detailed transcripts in a clear and highly readable style and refrains from using jargon and technical terms where possible (e.g., by discussing preference in lay terms, p. 105). Similarly, although for the informed reader it is evident that Hutchby's perspective on media talk is well grounded in the ethnomethodological tradition, for instance in commenting on the taken-for-granted status of talk (3), he refrains from an explicit theoretical discussion of this tradition, focusing instead on applying and demonstrating it. In line with this tradition, the analyses in the book are never confined to the documentation of local practices of talk-in-interaction, but rather are focused on the ways these practices orient to and accomplish the social and institutional setting of media talk – and, first and foremost, its public, mediated, and distributed address. This highlights the relevance and unique contribution of conversation analysis to the understanding of broadcasting.
The opening section of the book presents its analytic approach and places it in its larger intellectual contexts and histories. Chapter 1 describes the rise of attention to media interactions as a step in the development of media studies, from a focus on effects, uses and gratifications, to a focus on texts and the encoding and decoding of ideological meanings within them, and finally to a focus on talk and the communicative ethos of broadcast media, promoted primarily through the work of Paddy Scannell. Though brief, this is a unique and thought-provoking discussion of the study of media talk in its larger disciplinary context that serves as an important introductory frame for the book and for the field. Chapter 2 presents the basic tenets of conversation analysis, centering on the study of institutional talk-in-interaction, which serves as the framework for examining media talk within this tradition, and examining CA against the backdrop of other approaches to language use, mainly pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. Hutchby's discussion of the relations between pragmatics and CA (19–22) is intriguing, though not fully developed. While this avoidance of an extended theoretical discussion may contribute to the accessibility of the book, such a discussion could have been a unique contribution for the more informed reader. Missing from the discussion of different approaches to talk-in-interaction are other traditions that have informed the study of media talk, such as sociolinguistics, stylistics, and ethnography of communication.
The following six chapters are defined as case studies, each focusing on a particular media genre or subgenre and on specific aspects of its structure and function that can be explored using micro-analysis of talk-in-interaction. In chapter 3, an extended segment from the Oprah Winfrey Show is reproduced in full and analyzed for the different participant positions open to lay people, experts, representatives of institutions, and the studio audience. This analysis functions as a compelling detailed demonstration of the principles outlined in the first two chapters; however, as an overview of talk-show discourse it is somewhat lacking, since it focuses on one aspect of talk-show discourse and does not address other aspects that have been examined in previous research in a variety of disciplines, such as the construction of intimacy through speaking style. Chapter 4 looks at a different subgenre of the talk-show, analyzing the sequential construction of arguments as spectacle for an audience on the Ricki Lake Show. In chapter 5 Hutchby draws on his previous extensive work on phone-in radio, focusing on the use of claims to first-hand knowledge by callers as a device for legitimating opinions and on the use of sequential resources by the host in constructing an argumentative frame. Chapter 6 demonstrates how radio advice-giving shows are jointly structured by hosts, experts and callers as public discourse through interactive devices that allow for supplementing direct answers to questions with general advice and information.
In chapter 7 Hutchby targets the genre that has been most thoroughly studied by conversation analysts: the news interview. Accordingly, this chapter is structured slightly differently than preceding chapters. It presents a summary and demonstration of major findings of previous research on the genre, with a focus on the local accomplishment of a journalistic stance that balances neutralism and challenge. Finally, chapter 8 is focused on political debates and panel discussions and examines alignment structure and persuasion devices on Question Time, following Atkinson's work on political discourse.
The book's exclusive focus on CA gives rise to several limitations in scope and methodology that characterize many works in the CA tradition but pose difficulties when applied to media talk, which is by nature a highly complex and rich phenomenon that merits interdisciplinary analysis. First, the book does not discuss some central aspects and genres of media talk that have been studied in other approaches, such as interactive formats of news presentation or celebrity persona construction. Similarly, it does not draw links between CA-informed analyses and work in other traditions, for example the pragmatic perspective on news interviews (e.g., Fetzer & Weizman 2006). Second, though the analyses of television talk include some anecdotal reference to visual aspects of mediated interaction, these are not systematically addressed, nor are they incorporated into the transcription system. Finally, despite high cross-cultural diversity in genres of media talk, the book does not discuss the impact of cultural context except for one passing mention (30), and discusses only American and British media texts. More broadly, discussion of other contextual factors, such as generic and subgeneric diversity, historical evolution of the mediascape and larger-scale social and institutional developments that inform it, is reserved to a few opening paragraphs at the beginning of each chapter and is not comprehensive. The relatively marginal place assigned to context is also evident in the omission of dates from transcripts in the book.
Although this limited attention to context is in keeping with the CA tradition and is explicitly discussed by Hutchby, who emphasizes the need to examine the public orientations of participants to contextual features and the local accomplishment of social structures and institutions, rather than assuming them based on a “container” view of context (24), it is problematic when applied to media talk, particularly because it obscures processes of change that are a constant central feature of media genres. For instance, although Hutchby mentions the growing emphasis on interactive formats in the news media and the process of conversationalization of public discourse (121–22, 126), his overview of news interviews focuses on the traditional basic format and does not elaborate on gradual changes in its structure and style. In addition, the book does not address unscripted talk in relatively new television genres, such as reality programming. As a result of its limited focus, Media talk does not provide an exhaustive overview of the field, but rather an introduction to one specific perspective.
Despite these limitations, Hutchby's accessible writing, rigorous and compelling analyses, and constant emphasis on the contribution of micro-level interactive patterns to the construction of the macro-level of the social role of the media and its public distributed address make this book a persuasive introductory text that may draw the attention and awareness of students and scholars of the media to the importance of close analysis of talk-in-interaction, thus promoting the development of this unique and important field of study.
