Neutrality in news interviews: An open question

News interviews have always been considered a setting where journalists are supposed to be neutral, since they are required to withhold from expressing their opinions in the interviewing process (Clayman 1992; Hutchby 2003, 2006). This paper explores the issue of neutrality in televised interviews involving journalists and diplomats/international operators; specifically, the study attempts to shed light on the role of WH-questions (how/why) in complying with and prioritizing the ethos of transparency in news interviews also focusing on the differences between native and non-native journalists in asking questions. The final aim of the paper is to assess whether and to what extent neutrality is still safeguarded by journalists in media interviews. To answer the research question, an analysis has been carried out on a corpus of televised interviews designed to cover one-to-one broadcast interviews from professional and non-professional journalists addressing diplomats on (potentially) sensitive topics, like Covid19, wars, climate change, health and wellbeing, and – more broadly – international affairs. Gathered between 2020 and 2022 from major English-language international broadcasting companies, the corpus (i.e. the InterDiplo_JD Corpus, collected at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures – University of Verona, Italy) includes 80 interviews involving both native and non-native speakers that use English to communicate. Data was investigated using a mixed-method approach; indeed, a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of WH-questions was carried out, with special reference to how and why questions, to provide a quantitative and qualitative overview on their use by native and non-native interlocutors. Questions were extracted via corpus tags, tailored on the identification of interrogatives, as well as on metadata for speakers’ nationality. Results testify to an ongoing trend in broadcast interviews where questions appear to express the journalist’s point of view overtly, particularly when it comes to sensitive issues. This tendency appears to be more prominent in the questions asked by native interviewers vs non-native ones, who also use more neutral how-questions to elicit the opinion of the interviewee.