The construction of conflicting accounts in public participation TV

Abstract

Some of the recent work in the field of media discourse has been concerned with various levels in the organization and structure of audience participation programs on radio and television; other approaches to the analysis of talk in these settings have focused on the interactional frameworks at play in the talk. The aim of this article is to develop the interactional approach by looking at the production of narratives in a mediated context: specifically, the production of a story from two different, and conflicting, points of view. The stories I analyze occur within two different program genres (talk show and television court) where lay members of the public are often called upon to produce accounts of events which are then contested by another participant. This article discusses the significance of tense shifting in these second versions, from narrative past to conversational historic present, in the public construction of believable alternative stories.