ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the interactional machinery of policy debate within media settings and demonstrate that the interactional practices within these settings can be understood to organize and present activities associated with the dissemination of information, public scrutiny and accountability within democratic social forms. In this chapter the themes of public accountability, government policy and interaction are examined through empirical instances of media discourse as a means of exploring the use of identity categories, predicates and configurations in accomplishing policy debate in participatory media frameworks. Traditional conceptualizations of the public sphere, accountability, and democracy often gloss over the micro-sociological dimensions of democratic practice, opinion management and democratic accountability. Thus, a central methodological characteristic of this form of analysis is a concern with the categorical and sequential dimensions of talk-in-interaction that is grounded in terms of the normative descriptive apparatus of culture-in-action.
