Indirect defensive responses to hostile questions in British braodcast news interviews

Live broadcast interviews came into existence from 1950s in the western media. Over the last 40 years the previously deferential style of questioning in broadcast news interviews has become more direct, challenging, penetrating, pursuing—in a word, hostile. These hostile questions create 'avoidance-avoidance conflict' for the interviewee (IE), i.e. these questions can be sufficiently hostile that the only available direct responses are negative, yet a reply must be made. To avoid the negative consequences of direct replies, the IE often provides a response with 'evasion', 'equivocation' or 'indirectness'. My research sets out to explore the phenomenon of 'indirectness' in IE answer turns. Data was collected from BBC radio 4 'Today Program' (January-May 2005). Conversation Analysis was used as the research method.