Politics at breakfast

This article examines morning news interviews in contemporary political and media life. These interviews have a very specific format and ’function’, for they launch the political news of the day, which will then resonate on social media, particularly Twitter (X). While they appear to follow the ’classic’ media codes of the interview genre, they are also more than that. They have established themselves as a common hybrid format across the audiovisual media, consisting of a set of media constraints that dictate the in-studio interactions as well as their timing, for journalists and interviewees alike, even if there are some variations within these programmes. The study presented here demonstrates the value of fruitful dialogue between the social sciences and computational sciences. Using dedicated digital tools, it offers an analysis of the interactions between journalists and elected officials in interview situations. The events and topics discussed on set are cross-referenced with the participants’ social and political characteristics. The use of detailed, semi-automated analysis of turn-taking provides a more nuanced understanding of interactions in political competition, which cannot be reduced to mere opposition between strategic moves and political stakes.