Good Professional Reasons for Bad Journalism Practice: Inventing Audience Contributions in a Live Tv Debate

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in the decision making and use of an invented questioner by a journalist during a live televised political debate in Switzerland. By adopting a combined methodological perspective: between an ethnographic approach to journalism augmented with Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA), we consider in detail the preparation for the debate by the journalists behind the scenes as they raise and negotiate journalist ethics in relation to inventing an audience member to ask a question during the debate. Our analysis highlights how and why an “ideal” intervention (all the debaters agree the relevance of the question) is balanced against the journalism apparent ethics in using fictitious identities in the name of public interest.