The Relationship Between Challenging Questions and Persuasive Answers: Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat in Foreign Television Interviews

Political actors rely on broadcast interviews to promote their interests and policy objectives in the public sphere, recognizing that media appearances provide opportunities to engage the general public and influence processes of opinion formation. Notwithstanding their considerable benefits for politicians, news interviews also carry significant risks and potential pitfalls, requiring public figures to confront the challenges and criticisms of interviewers. While scholars have explored interviewer aggressiveness from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, few have considered whether challenging interview questions influence the general persuasiveness of a politician’s messaging to news audiences. My study addresses this apparent gap in the scholarly literature, examining whether aggressive interview questioning affects features of effective communication in a politician’s responses. I explore this question through an intensive content analysis of American and British news interviews featuring exchanges with Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat. Significant criticism of Israel in foreign media makes this case an ideal subject of analysis, providing substantial documentation of a politician’s reactions to aggressive interviewers. An analysis of adjacency pairs (question-response sequences) shows that answers to challenging questions contain fewer features of persuasive messaging when compared with responses to non-challenging questions. Combined with a qualitative analysis of Barkat’s interview performance, this finding advances the academic literature by highlighting obstacles to effective messaging in a hostile news environment. After presenting a review of the study’s findings, the paper explains their significance for media practitioners and political communication scholars. Note: This paper is the winner of the 2017 Yifat Prize for outstanding scholarship at The University of Haifa.