Rituals of Morality: Questions of Regret and Sorrow in News Interviews

This chapter discusses a specific ritual that encapsulates journalists’ role in reaffirming social norms and values and setting up models for “proper” moral behavior—interview questions regarding regret and sorrow. Keyword searches in a database of Israeli electronic news media from 2008 to 2018 for strings including the Hebrew speech act markers regret (mitkharet) and sorry (mictaer) yielded 627 instances of moral questioning. Three prototypes of the use of such questions were identified: as the ritual shaming of criminal offenders during the coverage of court proceedings, as a challenge in accountability interviews with politicians and public figures, and as eliciting emotion and evaluation in personal interviews narrating the interviewee’s life events. The chapter concludes by discussing the journalistic positionings and the ethical and moral assumptions embedded in these prototypes.