6 Designing Questions and Setting Agendas in the News Interview John Heritage UCLA In news interviews, unlike speeches, lectures or other forms of monologic communication, public figures overwhelmingly give information and express opinions in response to journalists' questions. The news content that results is thus a joint construction, whether collaborative or conflictual, that emerges from the confluence of the questions journalists choose to put and the responses that those questions engender. 1 For this reason, questioning is central to the practice of news interviewing, and skill in question design is at the heart of the interviewer's (IR) craft. The limits of questioning play a significant part in defining the parameters of the permissible in mass media content, and innovations in question design often embody efforts to redefine these parameters. In designing questions, IRs ordinarily attempt to strike a balance between two competing journalistic norms. On the one hand, IRs are expected to be impartial, objective, unbiased, and disinterested in their questioning of public figures. They are expected to have respect for the facts and the perspectives that interviewees (IE) communicate, and to work to bring these into the public domain. On the other hand, IRs also subscribe to a norm of adversarialness. They should actively challenge their sources, rather than being simply mouthpieces or ciphers for them. This second norm is one that pushes IRs not to let the interview be a kind of platform or soapbox from which public figures can get away with their own spin on events. 1 Schudson (1994) gives a nuanced account of the emergence of the news interview as a medium of journalistic practice. Clayman and Heritage (in press) describe its development in British and American broadcasting.