Everybody is Concerned’: Extreme Case Formulations, Generalization and Evasiveness in News Interview Settings

This paper contributes to the existing literature on evasiveness, question design, and political accountability in news interview settings by examining one of the designs of evasive answers, which we term ‘generalization’. It adopts a Conversation Analytic method to observe the construction of generalization and note how it contributes to evading questions and challenging their negative import. The data consists of six hours of interview material from six channels. The findings identify three interactional patterns in which interviewees recruit “Extreme Case Formulations” (Pomerantz, 1986) to introduce generalization of the matters at hand to evade questions and undermine their propositions. In the first pattern, interviewees introduce generalization to display normalization of accountable actions. In the second one, they demonstrate generalization to legitimize actions by showing consensus towards these actions, while in the third, they proffer generalization to avoid the damaging positions presented in questions. Further, the findings reveal that generalization prompts interviewers’ follow-up questions.