Journalistic neutralism and personalisation in the accountability interview

Through a study of a so-called “critical” case, the article examines the political accountability interview as an interactional negotiation between two clusters of truth claims of journalistic legitimacy. The first relates to the practice of ‘neutralism’ and the second to ‘personalisation’. The article analyses how and when neutralism and personalisation become resources for struggles for journalistic legitimacy and shows how neutralism and personalisation are at the same time interactional accomplishments. The case study reveals that neutralism continues to be a strong journalistic claim against accusations of personal evaluations in the accountability interview. However, personalisation is a strong claim in overt journalistic commentary and to some extent in the journalistic contextualisation of the interview.
The study concludes that personalisation and neutralism exist side by side as truth claims in the accountability interview. The case is critical because the specific news interview was framed and marketed as an adversarial interview with a personalised “signature host”. Accordingly, it can be assumed that neutralism can still be a resource for political sources to challenge the legitimacy of the journalistic institution in similar media systems, however challenged by journalistic, personalised truth claims that do not retreat to neutralism in order to claim legitimacy. Consequently, personalisation may continue to engage citizen consumers, not despite but because of its spectacular counter forcing of the basic neutralistic procedures of the journalistic interview.