International Review of Pragmatics 2 (2010) 46–94 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI 10.1163/187731010X491747 brill.nl/irp A Genre Approach to the Study of Im-politeness Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA pgblitvi@uncc.edu Abstract his paper argues that genre notions, as understood by (Fairclough, 2003), can provide an over- arching unit of analysis to accommodate both top-down and bottom-up analyses of im- politeness. hese notions are here applied to the study impoliteness within an institutional genre: news interviews. Impoliteness is seen as the driving force behind a new genre, “news as confrontation”, whose communicative goal is to reaffirm a view of the world. he multifunction- ality of impoliteness in this context has been related to a mismatch between the introduction of impoliteness as a novel staple in the news as confrontation shows, and the unchanged social expectations of politeness as the default term in social interaction. At the level of the relation- ship between interviewee and interviewer, impoliteness manifests itself both at the lexico- grammatical level and interactionally. However, impoliteness is used to create rapport between the interviewer and the overhearing audience. hus, incivility toward those guests who differ ideologically from the audience has to be assessed as rapport building, and seen as constitutive rather than disruptive of communal life. I provide two examples of the new genre by providing an in-depth analysis of two interviews by Bill O’Reilly for Fox News’ he O’Reilly Factor the epitome of news as confrontation shows. Keywords impoliteness, news interviews, media discourse, genre theory, Bill O’Reilly Introduction his paper has two main goals. Its first goal is to argue that genre notions, as understood by Fairclough (2003), can provide an overarching unit of analysis that accommodates both top-down (politeness2) and bottom-up analyses of im-politeness (politeness1) (Watts, 2003). he debate between the proponents of politeness1 and politeness2 approaches is currently at the crux of the theoretical advancement of the field of im-politeness studies. he repercus- sions that choosing one or the other approach has for the figure of the ana- lyst, and thus the field as a whole, have been an issue hotly debated in the literature (see among others Eelen, 2001; Haugh, 2007; Mullany, 2005, 2008; Terkourafi, 2005).