Moral Discrepancy and Political Discourse: Accountability and the Allocation of Blame in a Political News Interview

William Housley and Richard Fitzgerald

Sociological Research Online, 2003, vol. 8, issue 2, 18-26

Abstract: During the course of this article we intend to explore some issues surrounding government policy and actions and the moral organisation of political discourse surrounding the recent enquiry into the BSE crisis and the publication of the Phillips Report in the UK. More specifically, we wish to develop the concept of moral discrepancy and it's use in politically accountable settings, in this case the political interview. The paper, through the use of membership categorisation analysis, explores issues surrounding the social organisation of interview settings, the discursive management of policy decisions and ‘bureaucratic mistakes’ and the allocation of blame in situated media/political formats. The paper then relates these issues to notions of democracy-in-action, public ethics and the respecification of structure and agency as a members phenomenon.

Keywords: Accountability; Categorisation; Interaction; Moral Discrepancy; Political News Interview (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5153/sro.795 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socres:v:8:y:2003:i:2:p:18-26

DOI: 10.5153/sro.795

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Research Online
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().