Politicians at Night: Interaction and Discourse on the Entertainment-Political Interview studies the exchanges between presidential candidates and talk show hosts on broadcast late-night shows in the United States. Gonen Dori-Hacohen; Eean Grimshaw and Menno H. Reijven use various language and social interaction frameworks, including membership categorization analysis, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and semiotics. They develop a broad understanding of the Entertainment-Political Interview (EPI) and cultural role. They discuss how politicians use pronouns to achieve inclusion and exclusion. Similarly, the authors demonstrate how and why the hosts ask softball questions. Unlike these two elements that create politics, the authors demonstrate how politicians use stories to present themselves like celebrities. They then demonstrate how politicians intersect with entertainment when they analyze one specific segment called "Slow Jam the News," on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.The linking of the politician to entertainment is part of the final argument of the book, where the authors critically examine the EPI as part of a myth since it vacates the politics of its original form while maintaining a facade of politics.EPI promotes a capitalist neoliberal ideology that is at the root of both entertainment and politics in the U.S.
Gonen Dori-Hacohen is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Menno H. Reijven is Assistant Professor of Argumentation and Communication in the Department of Dutch Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Eean Grimshaw is Assistant Professor of Communication at the Oregon Institute of Technology.
"Politicians at Night subjects politicians' appearances on late night political talk shows on U.S. network television to rigorous discourse analysis and biting cultural critique. The authors' argument could not be clearer: these appearances are no more, and no less, than appearances, constituted through strategically deployed discursive devices for the dual purpose of entertainment and sustaining a semblance of democratic co-participation among hosts, politicians, and views. The book is a valuable contribution to scholarship on the doing and undoing of democracy in the United States." --David Boromisza-Habashi, University of Colorado Boulder "The book masterfully shows why interviews with presidential candidates on broadcast late-night talk shows are so entertaining what is so political about them. With a surgical scalper, Dori-Hacohen, Grimshaw, and Reijven reveal the structure and mechanism of 'the entertainment-political interviews', convincingly connecting between micro-level discursive phenomena and macro-level democratic mythologies and political trends. A must-read contribution to communication, media, and political scholars." --Zohar Kampf, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem "Using details of language and interaction, the authors exhaustively demonstrate that politics are not merely brought into entertainment contexts, but political figures and situations themselves become sources of entertainment in this genre of talk show. This book elevates the analysis of entertainment and politics beyond politics as personal and conversational, and in the process reveals something more insidious at the heart of how humor is used to mythologize US politics and rob political life of serious engagement." --Jessica Robles, Loughborough University
